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Giant exoplanet around tiny star challenges understanding of how planets form

Astronomers have discovered the first large gas giant orbiting a small star. The planet was found orbiting the nearby red dwarf star GJ 3512. This discovery challenges scientists' very understanding of how planets form: low-mass stars should have less available material to form planets.

Sep 27th, 2019

Life's building blocks may have formed in interstellar clouds

An experiment shows that one of the basic units of life - nucleobases - could have originated within giant gas clouds interspersed between the stars.

Sep 27th, 2019

Eyeballing a black hole's mass

There are no scales for weighing black holes. Yet astrophysicists have devised a new way for indirectly measuring the mass of a black hole, while also confirming its existence. They tested the new method on the Messier 87 active galaxy.

Sep 24th, 2019

Life and death of the stars: Researchers investigate extreme galaxy environments

An international team of 30 scientists is using one of the world's largest telescopes to investigate and map extreme galaxy environments in brilliant detail.

Sep 18th, 2019

New hunt for dark matter: Physicists theorize a novel way to explore the nature of dark matter with lasers

A theory about what dark matter might be suggests that it could be a particle called an axion and that these could be detectable with laser-based experiments that already exist.

Sep 18th, 2019

Standing room only crowd engages in student's warp drive theory speech

An overview of the state of the art of warp drive theory and the feasibility of a future working system.

Sep 16th, 2019

Scientists developing single photon detector to help search for habitable exoplanets

The extremely sensitive detector would allow scientists to see the faintest observable objects in space, such as Earth-like planets around other stars.

Sep 13th, 2019

Black hole at the center of our galaxy appears to be getting hungrier

The enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy is having an unusually large meal, and researchers don't know why.

Sep 11th, 2019

Astronomers find water vapor on habitable-zone exoplanet for first time

With data from the Hubble Space Telescope, water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of a super-Earth with habitable temperatures.

Sep 11th, 2019

Giant balloon-like structures discovered at center of Milky Way

An international team of astronomers has discovered one of the largest structures ever observed in the Milky Way. A newly spotted pair of radio-emitting bubbles reach hundreds of light-years tall, dwarfing all other structures in the central region of the galaxy.