Since their discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in 2022, small red dots (LRDs) have been the subject of great interest to astronomers. Understanding the nature of these compact and extremely distant red sources has been a perplexing scientific endeavor. One popular theory is that the small red dots are supermassive black holes known
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NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory captured an “orphan” black hole lighting up as it devoured a star on the outskirts of a distant galaxy. For starters, these phenomena are rare and none have ever been seen so far outside the core of a galaxy before. “We were looking for these star destruction events as a
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A new study using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope finds that star formation in the nearby Andromeda galaxy has seen a 500-million-year decline, with an even steeper decline over the past 40 million years. Andromeda, a spiral galaxy comparable in size to our Milky Way, is close enough to be seen with the naked
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The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a spiral galaxy battling titanic forces appearing on galactic scales in space. This is NGC 4654, an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden). It is classified as “intermediate” because its overall shape falls between spiral galaxies that have a bar in their
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Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a giant planet outside our solar system, called an exoplanet, hidden within one of the most intensively studied planetary systems in our Milky Way galaxy. The nearby young star Beta Pictoris was already known to host two giant planets: Beta Pictoris b, one of the first
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Read this press release in Spanish here. How do black holes in the centers of galaxies form and grow over time? To answer this question, scientists need to detect and study supermassive black holes at great distances, which existed much earlier in the history of the universe. New research suggests that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman
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