SpaceX signed a new agreement with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to prevent Starlink satellites from interfering with astronomy. SpaceX has long been criticized by astronomers for the brightness of its Starlink satellites. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, said in 2019 that SpaceX would ensure that Starlink has no material effect on discoveries in astronomy. “We care a great deal about science,” he said in a tweet.

Stars are typically very "social" things. Thanks to gravity, they're often found bound together in full-blown galaxies like our own Milky Way or much smaller star clusters.

Jupiter is flinging dangerous comets and asteroids at Earth rather than acting as its shield, a scientist has revealed. A popular theory suggests that Jupiter acts like a gigantic protector in the solar system, sucking or deflecting dangerous debris with its tremendous mass.

So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbours we thought we knew. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Artificial light pollution from Earth is contaminating the skies over most major astronomical observatories, requiring immediate action to remedy, a team of international scientists has determined.

Just one year after launch, the James Webb Space Telescope is exceeding all expectations, and astronomers are thrilled. Launched on Dec. 25, 2021, the $10 billion infrared observatory was designed to learn how galaxies form and grow, to peer far back into the universe to the era of the first galaxies, to watch stars be born inside their nebulous embryos in unprecedented detail, and to probe the atmospheres of exoplanets and characterize some of the closest rocky worlds.

For the first time, astronomers have spotted an exoplanet whose orbit is decaying around an evolved, or older, host star. The stricken world appears destined to spiral closer and closer to its maturing star until collision and ultimate obliteration. The discovery offers new insights into the long-winded process of planetary orbital decay by providing the first look at a system at this late stage of evolution.

Io Volcano Observer mission said that the moon is "a true volcanic wonderland with hundreds of erupting volcanoes gushing tons of molten lava."

One of James Webb’s first sublime images showed the Carina Nebula. Astronomers have dived into the depths of its cosmic cliffs and made a great discovery. Something amazing was hidden in one of James Webb’s first spectacular images. A “treasure” was “buried” in the Carina Nebula, located 8,500 light years from us, immortalized by the JWST space observatory. NASA announced on December 15, 2022. _ _ form.

Two planets found by NASA's retired Kepler Space Telescope may be made mostly of water, according to new research. The two exoplanets, dubbed Kepler-138c and Kepler-138d, orbit a star located about 218 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Lyra. Scientists intrigued by 2014 data from the Kepler Space Telescope decided to revisit the two planets using the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's retired Spitzer Space Telescope in hopes of better understanding the distant worlds and what they're made of. And surprisingly, the answer might be mostly water.

On a clear dark Queensland night in 1997, Brendan Downs was staring up into the cosmos alongside a band of other amateur astronomers. He trained his telescope on a galaxy called NGC 6769, floating more than 169m light years away, and took a picture. “I had a reference image that I had in a book at the time, and I visually compared the object on the screen to the object in the book,” he says. “I counted the number of stars I was looking at.”

You thought Venus was hot? While the planet does have an average surface temperature of nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius), there's an exoplanet just 40 light-years away from Earth that has a surface temperature a scorching three times hotter: 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Now, new data has led scientists to develop a theory of how this "hell planet" came to be.

The area between Venus and Earth is hard to observe because of the Sun's glare. This newly-observed space rock took astronomers by surprise

A black hole engulfing a star has been identified as 8.5 billion light-years from Earth. This is the most distant detection of this type of cataclysmic event. Stars that roam too close to black holes are very reckless. They usually end up torn apart by the extreme gravity of black holes, which readily gobble up this material. We have just detected the most distant of these events, announces the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on November 30, 2022. The detection is detailed in the journal Nature.

Few things encapsulate the wonders of space like the epic Pillars of Creation, a set of gorgeous finger-like tendrils of gas and dust where stars are formed. On Wednesday, NASA and the European Space Agency revealed another fresh look at the pillars from the sharp eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope.

There’s a growing body of evidence that galaxies grow large by merging with other galaxies. Telescopes like the Hubble have captured dozens of interacting galaxies, including well-known ones like Arp 248. The Andromeda galaxy is the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, and a new study shows that our neighbour has consumed other galaxies in two distinct epochs.

An “overweight” neutron star has been observed by astronomers, who say the mysterious object confounds astronomical theories. The hypermassive star was produced by the merger of two smaller neutron stars. Normally such collisions result in neutron stars so massive that they collapse into a black hole almost instantaneously under their own gravity. But the latest observations revealed the monster star hovering in view for more than a day before it faded out of sight.

A hitherto undiscovered black hole announced its presence to astronomers when it ripped apart and devoured a star that wandered too close to it. The intermediate-mass black hole located in a dwarf galaxy a million light-years from Earth shredded the star in an occurrence that astronomers call a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). The TDE made itself visible when it blasted out a flare of radiation so powerful that it briefly outshone every star in its dwarf galaxy home combined.

On New Year’s Day three years ago, a small spacecraft zoomed by a chunk of ice billions of miles away, and scientists on Earth cheered. That was the second time the New Horizons probe got up close and personal with an object in the far-away Kuiper Belt—after capturing images of Pluto, its first target, in unprecedented detail.

This galaxy is located 300 million light-years away, but the star to the right is much closer to Earth.