There may be an entire class of black holes that we didn’t know about. Astronomers have spotted a black hole that is smaller than the smallest known black holes in the universe. It is just 19 kilometers wide and has a mass of about 3.3 solar...
NASA shares a ‘pumpkin Sun’ image that was captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory in 2014. The image is colorized in yellow and gold tones to create a Halloween-themed appearance. Like other stars, our Sun is a ball of gas. In terms...
Planet X is a hypothetical planet that is located about 400 astronomical units (AU) away. It may take up to 20,000 Earth years to complete one full orbit around our Sun. The planet has not yet been observed but mathematical calculations suggest it...
Astronomers discover a massive planet orbiting a small star. The mass of the planet is way more than what current theoretical models predict. It lies 30 light-years away from Earth and has a mass nearly half as big as Jupiter. Like our solar...
The new simulation shows how gravity distorts light around the black hole. This is the most accurate computer-generation visualization of a black hole to date. It clearly shows all crucial components of a black hole, including accretion disk and...
A large number of specific types of particles (known as scalars) were created during cosmic inflation. If dark matter has any connection with these scalar particles, it may predate the Big Bang. About 85 percent of the mass of the universe is made...
Although space mining sounds pretty sci-fi, it will be a reality in the future. Researchers are investigating the performance of the particular bacterium to extract metals from asteroids. The bacterium named Shewanella oneidensis has been known to...
Astrophysicists study 41 nearby galaxy clusters to reveal connections between hot gas, dark matter, and stars. The sum of stars and gas across the clusters is a fixed fraction of the dark matter mass. According to the Standard Model of particle...
The largest type of black holes — called supermassive black holes — have masses of the order of hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the Sun. The mass of our Sun is 1.989 x 1030 kilograms, approximately 333,000 times...
Since the establishment of space travel, only three countries have been able to launch humans into space. The first person to travel into space was a Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961, who orbited the earth in the Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961...