For the first time, astronomers witnessed a gigantic exoplanet dramatically vanish from view. But the “hot Jupiter” located about 1,000 light-years from Earth didn’t evaporate into the vacuum of space. Instead, the gravitational pull from an uncomfortably close neighbor is causing TOI-2535 b to wobble in its orbit thanks to the same dynamics dictating solar
Despite the name, the universe’s white dwarfs can glow in a wide range of colors—even green. For the first time, astronomers have spotted a star that appears green to the human eye, and the reddest ever recorded. These outlier stars help explain how certain white dwarf stars would shine in green, pink, cyan, yellow, and
It’s true, the moon is shrinking. And astronomers now know how fast it’s contracting. While only satellite observations and the most delicate instruments can detect these shifts, the consequences of this shrinkage means moonquakes can occur anywhere on the lunar surface at a moment’s notice. A team led by Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
The driving force behind our universe’s accelerated expansion remains one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy. While this force, which scientists refer to as dark energy, pervades our universe, we know almost nothing about it. Located on a remote mountain in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has spent the past five
When Soundgarden Wrote “Black Hole Sun,” they may have inadvertently been onto something. In a new paper in Nature, scientists have chronicled a “black hole star” that’s the size of our solar system and glows bright red in the depth of space. The findings are based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, which
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