Astronomy | SpaceRef

Astronomy TOP STORY

Milky Way's Supermassive Black Hole May Have Unseen Siblings

Black Holes

Astronomers are beginning to understand what happens when black holes get the urge to roam the Milky Way.

Hubble View Of The Lagoon Nebula

Lagoon Nebula

This colourful cloud of glowing interstellar gas is just a tiny part of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery.

Telling Black Holes Apart

One of the most fundamental predictions of Einstein's theory of relativity is the existence of black holes.

350,000 Stars' DNA Interrogated In Search For Sun's Lost Siblings

An Australian-led group of astronomers working with European collaborators has revealed the "DNA" of more than 340,000 stars in the Milky Way, which should help them find the siblings of the Sun, now scattered across the sky.

Hubble Catches A Colossal Cluster

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows a massive galaxy cluster glowing brightly in the darkness. Despite its beauty, this cluster bears the distinctly unpoetic name of PLCK G308.3-20.2.

Strands In A Cosmic Web

Scientists have decoded faint distortions in the patterns of the universe's earliest light to map huge tubelike structures invisible to our eyes - known as filaments - that serve as superhighways for delivering matter to dense hubs such as galaxy clusters.

Largest Catalog Ever Published Of Very High Energy Gamma Ray Sources In The Galaxy

The HESS international collaboration, to which CNRS and CEA contribute, has published the results of fifteen years of gamma ray observations of the Milky Way.

A Dead Star, Circled By Light

Spectacular new pictures, created from images from both ground- and space-based telescopes, tell the story of the hunt for an elusive missing object hidden amid a complex tangle of gaseous filaments in the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200 000 light-years from Earth.

Deep inside Perseus A

An international team of researchers has imaged newly forming jets of plasma from a massive black hole with unprecedented accuracy.

Hubble Makes First Precise Distance Measurement to Ancient Globular Star Cluster

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have for the first time precisely measured the distance to one of the oldest objects in the universe, a collection of stars born shortly after the Big Bang.

A Relentless Cosmic Cold Front In Perseus

This winter has brought many intense and powerful storms, with cold fronts sweeping across much of the United States. On a much grander scale, astronomers have discovered enormous "weather systems" that are millions of light-years in extent and older than the solar system.

Mapping The Infant Universe in 3D

Astronomers have announced one of the largest 3D maps of the infant universe, in a presentation at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool.

Is That A Cat Or A Fox In Orion?

What is the first creature that comes to mind when you look at the dark cloud in this image?

The Most Distant Star Ever Seen

Thanks to a rare cosmic alignment, astronomers have captured the most distant normal star ever observed, some 9 billion light years from Earth.

Supernova May Have Burped Before Exploding

The slow fade of radioactive elements following a supernova allows astrophysicists to study them at length.

A Galaxy Without Dark Matter

A Yale-led research team has discovered a galaxy that contains no dark matter -- a finding that confirms the possibility of dark matter as a separate material elsewhere in the universe.

Hubble's Exquisite View of a Stellar Nursery

This image from Hubble has plucked out an underlying population of infant stars embedded in the nebula NGC 346 that are still forming from gravitationally collapsing gas clouds.