Astronomers have finally found an asteroid that keeps pace with Saturn in its orbit around the sun. Such objects, called Trojan asteroids, are already known for the other three giant planets. “Saturn was kind of the odd man out, if I can call it that, because even though it’s the second most massive planet in … Read more
Planetary astronomer Bonnie Buratti remembers exactly where she was the first time she heard that Jupiter’s icy moon Europa might host life. It was the 1980s, and Buratti was a graduate student at Cornell University studying images of the planet’s moons taken during the Voyager 1 and 2 flybys in 1979. Even in those first … Read more
Historians working with an artificial intelligence assistant have begun to trace the spread of astronomical thinking across Europe in the early 1500s. The analysis contributes to challenging the idea of the “lone genius” of scientific revolutions. Instead, it shows that knowledge of star positions was widespread and used in a variety of disciplines, researchers report … Read more
The first glimpse of starlight from a galaxy hosting one of the most distant quasars known has revealed an astronomical wonder. Quasars – extremely bright galactic nuclei – owe their brightness to the intense heat that results when gas swirls around a supermassive black hole. The black hole powering a quasar 13 billion light-years from … Read more
About 6,500 light-years from Earth lurks a zombie star cloaked in long tentacles of hot sulfur. No one knows how those tents were formed. But astronomers now know where they are going. New observations, reported on November 1 Astrophysical Journal Letterscaptures the 3-D structure and motion of the debris left behind by a supernova that … Read more