NASA’s New Horizons probe, racing toward a 1 January flyby of the Kuiper Belt body known as Ultima Thule, has given scientists their first major surprise: the oblong, or binary body shows no signs of a discernible light curve suggesting rotation.
Radar images reveal a 1.6-kilometre-long (1-mile-long) splinter-like asteroid tumbling as it races along a trajectory carrying it within 3 million kilometres (1.8 million miles) of Earth.
By studying the faint glow produced by freely floating stars in mammoth galaxy clusters, astronomers may be able to map the distribution of dark matter in a more efficient manner.
In a holiday Hubble image, the Cepheid variable star RS Puppis, 10 times more massive than the sun and 200 times larger, shines in a wreath-like “gossamer cocoon” of dust, brightening and dimming over a 41.5-day cycle.
A middle-age star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud is populated by countless stars, but galaxies in the far distance peak through, giving viewers at least a sense of the overwhelming scale of the cosmos.
After a careful analysis of the path ahead, no rings or moons have been found that could threaten the New Horizons probe on its approach to Ultima Thule.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array has spotted a young binary star system in which two very different size suns are in the process of forming in a swirling cloud of gas and dust.
A newly released “deep field” image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures galaxies during the epoch of massive star formation three billion years after the Big Bang.
New computer simulations show tangled magnetic fields in jets streaming away from supermassive black holes may be creating powerful electric fields and currents accelerating particles to enormous energies