Featured Articles

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HYan Image
Just Wonderful Space Telescope News

JWST launches the first day of astronomy’s big meeting with news about science, technology, and galaxies!

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Artist impression of the debris disk surrounding star HD53143.

Artist impression of the debris disk surrounding star HD53143. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); M. Weiss (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Disks and Planet Formation

The connection between disks and planet formation continues to expand as astronomers view them in new detail.

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Artists rendering of a "hot Jupiter"

An artist’s rendering of a “hot Jupiter,” a type of gas giant planet that orbits very close to its star.

Hot Jupiters and Engulfed Planets

Screwball giant planets and ravenous stars kick off this week’s gathering of professional astronomers.

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brown dwarf

This artist’s concept shows a brown dwarf with clouds, much like you might expect to find on a giant planet. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (IPAC)

Star or Planet? Both or Neither?

I can’t help imagining brown dwarfs as having an identity crisis. And two announcements today did not help them.

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Credit: Figure 2 of Barr & Bruck Syal (2017)

Hydrocode simulation of an impact of a Venus-sized rock/iron planet colliding with a six Earth-mass planet. The collision creates a disk of rock fragments, liquid, and vapor massive enough to create a moon of 0.1 Earth masses, large enough to be detected by Kepler. Colors indicate the density of material, with solids depicted by orange/red hues, and liquid/vapor depicted by green/blue hues.

Can We Find Exomoons?

Could exomoons be large enough for Kepler to detect?

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Artist Impression of Supernova
Youngest Supernova Ever Observed

Astronomers reveal a rare view of a dying, supermassive star.

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Image by tonynetone/Flickr
The Season of Eclipses

This week's penumbral lunar eclipse is one of two eclipse occurring this month.

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Red dwarf with its powerful white dwarf pulsar companion
White Dwarf Pulsar!

A new type of pulsar is discovered sending powerful beams to its binary partner.

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Ahuna Mons, NASA
Lone Volcano

Is Ceres’s lone volcano, Ahuna Mons, truly alone?

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Combined X-ray and infrared image of W44 from Herschel SPIRE/PACS/ESA and ESA/XMM-Newton
Finding a Stray

Stray black holes in our galaxy may be getting a little easier to find.

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Stellarium
Comet 45P at Its Brightest

Lucky hunting for a faint comet…

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Jessie Eastland, Wikipedia
A Bit of Earth—on the Moon!

Mysterious emanations from the Moon may offer clues to Earth’s deep past.

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SA/NASA/JPL-Caltech
The Great Repeller

A cosmic void is pushing us around!

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NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Reviewing Ridges on the Red Planet

Scientists are examining ridges on Mars to discover their diverse origins, and they need your help!

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