Astronomers may have discovered a new way that stars can die. A mysteriously brief and bright burst whimsically called the “Cow” reveals an entirely new type of stellar death. The details of that stellar doom, however, remain hazy. Scientists are still debating whether the flare-up, spotted on June 16, 2018, was from an unusual type of star that was eaten by a black hole, or from an old, massive star exploding in a weird sort of supernova.

Back in the 1980s, astronomers were caught up in a debate so huge, you could drive a universe through it. The point of contention was a number called the Hubble constant, which describes the rate at which the cosmos is expanding and, by extension, how much time has passed since the Big Bang: the slower the expansion rate, the older the universe.

Astronomers have revealed details of mysterious signals emanating from a distant galaxy, picked up by a telescope in Canada. The precise nature and origin of the blasts of radio waves is unknown. Among the 13 fast radio bursts, known as FRBs, was a very unusual repeating signal, coming from the same source about 1.5 billion light years away.

The universe is far from homogenous. Rather, stars, and the galaxies that contain them, clump together in some places, brought together by their shared gravitational attraction. Astronomers have historically found clusters of galaxies in the sky to be relatively easy to spot, as they’re extremely large and bright. But one new study suggests that a third of all galaxy clusters have been hiding undiscovered out in the cosmos.

It shines with a brightness equivalent to 600 trillion suns. “We don’t expect to find many quasars brighter than that in the whole observable universe,” said the astronomers. Researchers announced this week (January 9, 2019) at the 233rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, that they’ve discovered the brightest quasar yet known, detected from the period when the universe was just beginning to make luminous objects, such as stars and galaxies.

A radio telescope in Canada has proved its mettle in finding many new examples of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — giving astronomers one of their best shots yet at unraveling the mystery of these cosmic flashes. “Look! We see FRBs,” Deborah Good, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, on 7 January.

The Hubble Space Telescope's mind-blowing new image of the Triangulum Galaxy is almost as gigantic as the galaxy itself. Triangulum, also called Messier 33, can be spotted by lucky skywatchers without an assist from a telescope, but it looks like a smudge. Hubble's vivid view combines 54 images into one image showing the central part of the galaxy and some of its spiral arms.

As if battered post-Christmas finances, a looming disorderly Brexit and the prospect of a fresh nuclear arms race were not enough to dampen spirits, astronomers have declared that a nearby galaxy will slam into the Milky Way and could knock our solar system far into the cosmic void. The unfortunate discovery was made after scientists ran computer simulations on the movement of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the many satellite galaxies that orbits the Milky Way.

Dark matter, it seems, has been clinging to galaxies for a very long time. Most galaxies that existed 10 billion years ago had about as much dark matter as galaxies do today, contradicting earlier studies that suggested less dark matter lurked around galaxies in the early universe.

Scientists have found evidence that dark matter can be heated up and moved around, as a result of star formation in galaxies. The findings provide the first observational evidence for the effect known as 'dark matter heating', and give new clues as to what makes up dark matter. The research is published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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.

A faraway star in the southern sky is flickering in an odd manner that suggests a bizarre cloud of material—or something even stranger—is in orbit around it. Discovered by astronomers using a telescope in Chile, the star is reminiscent of two other enigmatic astrophysical objects, one thought to harbor a planet with rings 200 times larger than those of Saturn, the other most famous for the remote possibility it is encircled by “alien megastructures.” The newfound star may help shed some light on one or both of these puzzling objects.

As a child growing up in Turkey, astrophysicist Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil used to enjoy looking up at the stars in the night sky. Little did she know that thanks to her scientific skills, a galaxy sitting 359 million light-years from Earth would one day bear her name. Mutlu-Pakdil’s lifelong passion for astrophysics was born when she had to prepare an assignment in middle school on an interesting person. “I asked my sister for suggestions on who I should choose for my assignment, and she suggested Einstein, because he’s the cleverest man in the world,” Mutlu-Pakdil says.

We need to talk about the dark ages. No, not those dark ages after the fall of the western Roman Empire. The cosmological dark ages. The time in our universe, billions of years ago, before the formation of the first stars. And we need to talk about the cosmic dawn: the birth of those first stars, a tumultuous epoch that completely reshaped the face the cosmos into its modern form.

An international research team including The Australian National University (ANU) has used the Kepler space telescope in coordination with ground-based telescopes to witness the first moments of a star dying in unprecedented detail. The astronomers witnessed the star dying a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, as part of a project that aims to solve the mystery of how stars explode.

In one of those exercises that you think should be impossible or perhaps a punishment for some infraction, a team of astronomers has now measured the total amount of light that has ever been produced by all the stars in our universe. The answer, expressed in terms of quantum particles of light known as photons, is 4 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. In scientific notation that is 4 x 10⁸⁴, or, if you like, a 4 followed by 84 zeros...

Astrophysicists have devised a clever way to count up the photons in space, stretching back to the cosmos’ adolescence. Until the 20th century, astronomers were stuck on a question that seems as if it should have an easy answer: Why is the night sky dark? If the infinite universe has an infinite numbers of stars, as they assumed, our evening view should be awash in their glow.

In 1977, the sound of extraterrestrials was heard by human ears for the first time — or so people at the time thought. The Wow! Signal was detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman using Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. It is a radio signal detector that, at the time, was pointed at a group of stars called Chi Sagittarii in the constellation Sagittarius.

A team of scientists have detected the gravitational waves that resulted from the largest collision of black holes ever observed and that formed a new black hole about eighty times larger than the sun. This and 3 other black hole fusions were detected by an international team of scientists formed by the Advanced laser interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S. and the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Efe news reported on Tuesday.

Andromeda is the closest large galaxy to us. At 140,000 light years across, it’s 40% bigger than our 100,000 light year diameter Milky Way. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away from us, or about 25 Milky Way diameters. Light takes 2.5 million years to pass between the two galaxies, so if a fancy Andromeda alien is viewing us with a telescope right now, it’s seeing a bunch of Australopithecus walking around being unappealing.

Uppsala University researchers have devised a new model for the universe – one that may solve the enigma of dark energy. Their new article, published in Physical Review Letters, proposes a new structural concept, including dark energy, for a universe that rides on an expanding bubble in an additional dimension.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.