The forgotten 18th century observatory that marked the rise of modern astronomy in India
The Madras Observatory offers little to the visitor’s eye. Stone slabs and broken pillars lie ignored in a fenced-off section of a local weather centre in the southern Indian city of Chennai. Few...
The first pixel of a galactic selfie
We cannot see the Milky Way like we do other galaxies, and that’s because we live inside of it. Although we can peer along its edge while embedded in its disk, we cannot see what it looks like...
Astronomers find half of the missing matter in the universe
It is one of cosmology’s more perplexing problems: that up to 90% of the ordinary matter in the universe appears to have gone missing. Now astronomers have detected about half of this missing...
Astronomers spot one of the brightest novae ever
Novae occur when a dead star flares back to life in the sky. These events signal a white dwarf, the remnant of a star like our Sun, suddenly and briefly reigniting fusion in its thin atmosphere as...
Hubble Displays Blue Compact Dwarf Galaxy
LEDA 17302, also known as IRAS 05249-2043 and ESO 553-46, lies 21.8 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Lepus. This galaxy is a so-called starburst galaxy — a galaxy undergoing...
New research helps solve galactic murders
Our universe is dying. To be specific, an increasing number of galaxies are no longer able to form new stars. Just 10 billion years ago, the universe was burgeoning with plentiful star formation. So...
How a new era of astronomy will ride on gravitational waves
Some 1.3 billion years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, two massive black holes collided violently, setting off ripples in the fabric of spacetime. These ripples, called gravitational waves, passed...
MSU Astronomy Students Look to the Sky to Listen for Good Vibrations
Missouri State University Astronomy professor Mike Reed, likens his and his students research into vibrations of stars, to listening to a full orchestra play one long note, and picking out the...
