Supermassive black holes that have escaped their host galaxies may be wandering the universe alone. Intriguing new observations i by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope have | revealed what appears to be a supermassive | black hole being “kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed,” Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Space.com. Astronomers observed two distinct light […]
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Earth may owe its existence to the planet Jupiter. New research shows that the giant planet played a key role in the formation of the solar system by barreling through it like a cosmic wrecking ball, destroying existing planets and creating debris that coalesced into new ones, including ours. Astronomers began examining this theory after finding that virtually all of […]
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Saturn’s moon Titan may be light-years away from Earth, but the two bodies have many characteristics in common: Wind, rain, volcanoes, tectonics and other Earth-like conditions all sculpt features on Titan, but act in an environment many times colder than Antarctica. “It is really surprising how closely Titan’s surface resembles Earth’s,” said Rosaly Lopes, a planetary geologist at NASA’s Jet […]
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Earth got off relatively easy last week after being hit by the biggest blast of solar radiation since 2005—but we may not be so lucky next time. Last week’s coronal mass ejection, in which a solar flare whipped an arc of magnetic particles toward Earth at 4 million mph, led some airlines to reroute flights away from the poles, where […]
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The Milky Way and its closest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, are on course for “ a head-on collision,” says astronomer Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute. But no need for precautions because the crash won’t happen for another 4 billion years. Researchers have long known that Andromeda, currently some 2.5 million light-years away, is moving toward […]
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The most common Visitors from outer space… COMETS!! Near misses by comets and asteroids are rare events, but in 2013, predictions were made that earthlings would experience at least three. A menacing, 1,000-foot-wide asteroid named Apophis which passed within 9 million miles of our planet—close by astronomical standards. Dubbed “the doomsday asteroid,” Apophis has an elliptical orbit around the sun […]
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People always wonder how the moon was made. The birth of the planets 4.5 billion years ago was extremely violent. They grew to full size by absorbing rival planet embryos in a series of titanic collisions—one of which probably gave Earth its moon (below). The moon’s large size, low density, and other features suggest that it emerged from an explosion […]
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Stars are not born alone. Rather, they emerge from clouds of gas and dust in groups of up to 10,000, then slowly scatter through space. For the first time, astronomers have identified a star that came from the same solar nursery as our sun, some 4.5 billion years ago. This stellar relative—located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules—is hotter […]
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Scientists have been looking into Pluto’s possibility of having an ocean under its icy (a minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit) surface according to NASA’s New Horizon mission. This finding may shed some light on the internal world of Pluto. It has always been thought that Pluto was a frigid planet totally frozen over. They have discovered that Pluto may have an […]
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Scientists have made an astronomical declaration, stating that there is likely ten times the amount of galaxies in our universe than originally expected. The previous amount was believed to be about 200 billion, but now it is believed to be much more. According to astronomers from the University of Nottingham, we are just beginning to learn exactly how vast our […]
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