Astronomers have detected a powerful molecular wind being blasted away from a starburst galaxy in the early universe, the earliest example yet of a mechanism thought to prevent galaxies from growing too large too fast.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been awarded a £2.3 million Breakthrough Prize for her discovery of periodic radio pulses that signaled the discovery of pulsars. She plans to donate the money to help women and minority astronomy students.
An influential panel of senior U.S. scientists and administrators recommends that NASA build a large exoplanet imaging telescope to answer fundamental questions how common Earth-like planets – and life – might be across the galaxy.
A new database lists the chemical compositions of more than 6,000 nearby stars and the abundances of elements from hydrogen to lead, giving astronomers a guide to stars that may host potentially habitable planets.
New observations of a starburst galaxy using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array resolve vast, unstable clouds thousands of light years apart that are thought to be sites for rapid-fire star formation.
Computer simulations show an intermediate-mass black hole pulling in a white dwarf could trigger a brief burst of fusion, seeding space with heavy elements.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s imaging spectrograph captured Saturn’s spectacular aurora flickering over the ringed planets north polar region over a period of seven months in 2017.