The identification of three white dwarf stars zooming at hyper-fast velocities might provide evidence to support an alternative theory explaining the formation of Type 1a supernovae, researchers say. Type 1a supernovae, orthodoxy holds, arise when two white dwarf stars locked in a binary orbit merge with each other, kick-starting a runaway nuclear fusion reaction and consequent massive explosion.

One of the oldest stars in the universe is quietly hiding out in the Milky Way some 2,000 light-years from Earth. According to a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, the tiny, 13.5-billion-year-old red dwarf contains barely any heavy elements at all, suggesting it formed out of a nearly pristine cloud of material leftover from shortly after the Big Bang. Furthermore, because the small star is just one-seventh the mass of the Sun and is made of primordial matter, it’s making astronomers reconsider the demographics of the very first stars.

According to the most widely-accepted cosmological theory, the first stars in our Universe formed roughly 150 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Over time, these stars began to come together to form globular clusters, which slowly coalesced to form the first galaxies – including our very own Milky Way. For some time, astronomers have held that this process began for our galaxy some 13.51 billion years ago.

A first of its kind study uses angular momentum of satellite galaxies to weigh the Milky Way, providing a testing ground for the widely theorized cold dark matter theory.

George Chapline believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that black holes are really dark energy stars.

For one brief shining moment after the 2015 detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, astronomers held out hope that the universe’s mysterious dark matter might consist of a plenitude of black holes sprinkled throughout the universe. UC Berkeley physicists have dashed those hopes.

To be housed in a building 22 stories high, on a plateau of the Atacama Desert of Chile, the Giant Magellan Telescope will be the largest optical telescope ever built.

Scientists agree that the story of the universe began 13.8 billion years ago, when everything — all the matter and energy and even space itself — emerged from the extraordinarily hot, dense cauldron known as the Big Bang. But ask a scientist what came before that first moment, and you’re likely to get a shrug. To many, thinking about a time before the beginning of time makes no sense.

For the first time, astronomers have witnessed a fast-moving jet of material shooting outward from a neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field — one that is some 10 trillion times stronger than the Sun's. The surprising discovery not only caught researchers off guard, but is also forcing them to fundamentally rethink their current theories regarding how jets form throughout the cosmos.

There's a huge amount of matter in the universe that we can't directly see. But scientists can tell it's there. They call it dark matter. They know it's there because its gravity tugs on the stars and galaxies around it, altering their movement. Dark matter also tugs on light as it passes, bending its path, a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. And now, by studying where that lensing appears in the sky, an international team of scientists have released a detailed, 3D map[BI1] of dark matter.

A new measurement of how fast the universe is expanding reveals an odd gap.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a strange kind of galaxy surprisingly close to home. A new study published Monday in Nature reports that Hubble scientists have found a “relic galaxy” called NGC 1277 about 240 million light-years away near the Perseus cluster. The galaxy is only a quarter the size of the Milky Way, but in its early days, scientists think NGC 1277 could crank out stars about 1,000 times faster than our own galaxy.

A final theory explaining how mankind might detect parallel universes was completed by Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, it has emerged.

One of the great theories of modern cosmology is that the universe began in a Big Bang. This is not just an idea but a scientific theory backed up by numerous lines of evidence. For a start, there is the cosmic microwave background, which is a kind of echo of the big bang; then there is the ongoing expansion of the cosmos, which when imagined backwards, hints at a Big Bang-type origin; and the abundance of the primordial elements, such as helium-4, helium-3, deuterium and so on, can all be calculated using the theory.

In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers announced the discovery of the most distant star ever observed. The team detected the blue supergiant star — which shone when the universe was just one-third its current age — with the help of both the Hubble Space Telescope and an observational phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

Researchers from around the globe are on the hunt for elusive dark matter particles by building the world's most sensitive detector.

Stephen Hawking has revealed from beyond the grave his final scientific theory - that the universe is a hologram. The cosmologist, who died on March 14, has challenged previous theories of cosmic "inflation" and the "multiverse" in a new paper published in the Journal Of High Energy Physics. Scientists generally believe that for a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded incredibly rapidly before settling into its present state, filled with stars and galaxies - the inflation theory.

Astronomers using cutting-edge skywatching devices have identified an extremely fast-growing black hole, cataloging it as a ‘monster’ that eats the mass equivalent of our sun every two days.

The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it's positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody?

Astronomers Seppo Mattila and Miguel Pérez-Torres usually study the natural deaths of stars, but they weren’t going to pass up the chance to investigate a stellar murder. A new paper in Science describes how they nabbed photographic evidence that a supermassive black hole in a relatively nearby galaxy tore apart and consumed part of a star in a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event (TDE), spewing jets of material in the process. Scientists have observed these cosmic crime scenes before, but this was the first time anyone managed to get such detailed images of the jets and their changing structure over time.

"Where are they?" famously asked Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s. By "they," he meant space aliens. Fermi figured that if the galaxy contained space-faring civilizations it would only take them a few tens of millions of years to populate it. So why hasn't there been a saucer-landing-take-me-to-your leader moment already? This is the Fermi Paradox.

Since the 1990s, astrophysicists have known that for the past few billion years, the Universe has been experiencing an accelerated rate of expansion. This gave rise to the theory that the Universe is permeated by a mysterious invisible energy known as "dark energy", which acts against gravity and is pushing the cosmos apart. In time, this energy will become the dominant force in the Universe, causing all stars and galaxies to spread beyond the cosmic horizon.

While predictions of the future can never be absolutely certain, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which has revealed how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which predicts how life will evolve over time; and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia.

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the largest member of the Milky Way’s gang of galactic neighbors, known as the Local Group. With around a trillion suns worth of mass, Andromeda’s gravitational influence is a force to be reckoned with. And according to new research, no galaxy in the Local Group knows this better than M32, an oddball satellite galaxy now orbiting Andromeda.

A single star, careening around the monster black hole in the center of the Milky Way, has provided astronomers with new proof that Albert Einstein was right about gravity. More than 100 years ago, Einstein’s general theory of relativity revealed that gravity is the result of matter curving the fabric of spacetime (SN: 10/17/15, p. 16). Now, in a paper published July 26 in Astronomy & Astrophysics, a team of researchers reports the observation of a hallmark of general relativity known as gravitational redshift.

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Canada’s shiny new radio telescope is up and running, and it just heard something very, very odd coming from deep space. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME for short) is located in British Columbia, and it spends its time listening intently for signals beaming through the vacuum of space. Most of the time, radio telescopes like this don’t hear anything out of the ordinary...

A team of astronomers led by George Becker at the University of California, Riverside, has made a surprising discovery: 12.5 billion years ago, the most opaque place in the universe contained relatively little matter. It has long been known that the universe is filled with a web-like network of dark matter and gas. This “cosmic web” accounts for most of the matter in the universe, whereas galaxies like our own Milky Way make up only a small fraction.

In astronomy, cutting-edge technology often begins with a bunch of bulldozers, busted rocks, and dump trucks. So it goes with the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which will the world's largest and most powerful when it sees "first light" in 2024. Astronomers hope to use the huge observatory to study the ancient universe and look for signs of alien life. Construction crews atop a Chilean mountain range broke ground for the $1 billion project on Tuesday.

We all might be anxiously awaiting the eventual launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — which has been stuck in an endless series of delays thanks to the idiots at Northrop Grumman — but the trusty Hubble is still delivering some pretty fantastic views of the heavens. The telescope’s latest snapshot is a real doozy, and it’s going to make you feel like you barely even exist.

A distant galaxy appears filled with dark matter. The outermost stars in the Cosmic Seagull, a galaxy 11.3 billion light-years away, race too fast to be propelled by the gravity of the galaxy’s gas and stars alone. Instead, they move as if urged on by an invisible force, indicating the hidden presence of dark matter, astrophysicist Verónica Motta of the University of Valparaíso in Chile and her colleagues report August 8 at arXiv.org.

Scientists have found that the universe we live in is not the first one to ever exist. A group of leading physicists have found that eons ago, other universes existed and they had black holes, just like the current universe, the Daily Mail reported. They say that cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) – the same thing that causes white noise on TVs – is evidence of the remnants of these blackholes.

A giant ring of black holes has been discovered 300 million light-years away, offering new clues about what happens when galaxies collide. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers detected a very bright source of X-rays that is likely fueled by either a ring of stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars — the small, dense corpses left after stellar explosions, — according to a new study.

A trio of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and Canada has found evidence that suggests nuclear material beneath the surface of neutron stars may be the strongest material in the universe. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, M. E. Caplan, A. S. Schneider, and C. J. Horowitz describe their neutron star simulation and what it showed.

After falling past the event horizon — the point of no return — nothing can escape a black hole. While the depths of black holes may forever remain a mystery, astronomers can observe the regions around them. In a paper published September 3 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers reported, for the first time, spotting a clump of matter falling directly into a distant black hole at nearly one-third the speed of light.