News by Subject Space & Planetary

Juna Kollmeier and Sean Raymond kicked off an internet firestorm late last year when they posted a draft of their article about submoons on a preprint server. The online conversation obsessed over the best term to describe such phenomena. But nomenclature was not the point of Kollmeier and Raymond's investigation, who set out to define the physical parameters for moons that would be capable of being stably orbited by other, smaller moons.

An organic molecule detected in the material from which a star forms could shed light on how life emerged on Earth, according to new research led by Queen Mary University of London.

The light released from around the first massive black holes in the universe is so intense that it is able to reach telescopes across the entire expanse of the universe. Incredibly, the light from the most distant black holes (or quasars) has been traveling to us for more than 13 billion light years. However, we do not know how these monster black holes formed.

How fast the universe is expanding has been puzzling astronomers for almost a century. Different studies keep coming up with different answers -- which has some researchers wondering if they've overlooked a key mechanism in the machinery that drives the cosmos. Now, by pioneering a new way to measure how quickly the cosmos is expanding, a team led by UCLA astronomers has taken a step toward resolving the debate.

After slowly forming stars for the first few billion years of their lives, the Magellanic Clouds, near neighbors of our own Milky Way galaxy, have upped their game and are now forming new stars at a fast clip. This new insight into the history of the Clouds comes from the first detailed chemical maps made of galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

A new method to measure the temperature of atoms during the explosive death of a star will help scientists understand the shock wave that occurs as a result of this supernova explosion.

The faint, ephemeral glow emanating from the planetary nebula ESO 577-24 persists for only a short time -- around 10,000 years, a blink of an eye in astronomical terms. ESO's Very Large Telescope captured this shell of glowing ionized gas -- the last breath of the dying star whose simmering remains are visible at the heart of this image. As the gaseous shell of this planetary nebula expands and grows dimmer, it will slowly disappear from sight.