One of the most remarkable discoveries about exoplanets—planets that exist outside of our solar system—is that some of them appear to be flying through interstellar space on their own. They’re not orbiting a star, nor are they tied to any other obvious companion. The precise number of these planets—alternately called “free-floating,” “Steppenwolf,” “unbound,” or “rogue”…
SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 kelvins (about 1.08 million F). In this wavelength it is easy to…
The red supergiant star Betelgeuse in the famed constellation Orion is on a collision course with a strange wall of interstellar dust, with the clock ticking down to a cataclysmic cosmic smashup in 5,000 years, scientists say. A new image of Betelgeuse suggests the star will crash headlong into a trail of space dust while…
Scientists have long puzzled over why the surface of the sun is cooler than its corona, the outer hazy atmosphere visible during a solar eclipse. Now thanks to a five-minute observation by a small, but very high-resolution ultraviolet telescope they have some answers. Even before the July 2012 launch of the High-resolution Coronal Imager, nicknamed…
Researchers from the Laboratoire Leprince-Ringuet have carried out the first measurement of the intensity of the diffuse extragalactic background light in the nearby Universe, a fog of photons that has filled the Universe ever since its formation. Using some of the brightest gamma-ray sources in the southern hemisphere, the study was carried out using measurements…
Near the crowded center of a mysteriously dense galactic cloud, where billowing clouds of gas and dust cloak a supermassive black hole three million times as massive as the sun — a black hole whose gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second — one…
An international team of astronomers says analysis of NASA data on a distant stellar system has led them to crown it the largest-known spiral galaxy. The spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872, long ranked among the biggest observed stellar systems, spans more than 522,000 light-years, making it more than five times the size of our…
The unbalanced orbit of a so-called “zombie planet” in a dusty star system has astronomers struggling to explain the exoplanet’s behavior. New observations of the planet Fomalhaut b by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the oddball orbit, which has wild extremes between its closest and farthest points from the parent star and appears to cross…
Four years ago, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in an attempt to learn just how common Earth-sized worlds are in the Milky Way galaxy. Now, scientists have unveiled part of the answer: About 17 percent – one in six – of Kepler’s target stars have Earth-sized worlds orbiting closer to their parent stars than…
Our Milky Way galaxy is home to at least 100 billion alien planets, and possibly many more, a new study suggests. “It’s a staggering number, if you think about it,” lead author Jonathan Swift, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. “Basically there’s one of these planets per star.” Swift and his colleagues arrived…