Our Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, viewable with the naked eye as a horizon-to-horizon hazy band of stars. Now, for the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos—tiny, ghostlike astronomical messengers. In an...

Europe’s Euclid space telescope is scheduled to blast off Saturday on the first-ever mission aiming to shed light on two of the universe’s greatest mysteries: dark energy and dark matter.   The launch is planned from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 11:11 am local time (1511 GMT) on a...

Isaac Newton formulated his theory of gravity as an action at a distance: a planet instantly feels the influence of another celestial body, no matter the distance between them. This characteristic motivated Albert Einstein to develop the famous theory of general relativity, where gravity becomes a...

The Euclid mission will focus on illuminating dark matter and dark energy. The ESA (European Space Agency) and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 11:11 a.m. EDT (8:11 a.m. PDT) Saturday, July 1, to launch the Euclid spacecraft. Euclid is an ESA mission with contributions from NASA that will shed...

Observations by NASA’s NuSTAR X-ray telescope give astronomers new clues about the brightest and most energetic gamma-ray burst ever detected. When scientists detected the gamma-ray burst known as GRB 221009A on Oct. 9, 2022, they dubbed it the brightest of all time, or BOAT. Most gamma-ray bursts...

While searching for the origins of a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB), an international team of astrophysicists may have stumbled upon a new way to destroy a star. Although most GRBs originate from exploding massive stars or neutron-star mergers, the researchers concluded that GRB 191019A instead came...

Using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), astronomers have investigated an ultra-diffuse galaxy known as UGC 9050-Dw1. Results of the study, published June 9 on the pre-print server arXiv, yield important insights into the properties of this galaxy. Ultra-diffuse...

Near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy sits an immense object that astronomers call Sagittarius A*. This “supermassive” black hole may have grown in tandem with our galaxy, and it’s not alone. Scientists suspect that similar behemoths lurk at the heart of almost all large galaxies...

When multiple NASA telescopes observe the same cosmic region, the universe’s true colors are revealed. Four composite images deliver dazzling views from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope of two galaxies, a nebula, and a star cluster. Each image combines Chandra’s X-rays...