Hundreds of millions of light-years away in a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a supermassive black hole is being violently ripped apart under the black hole’s immense gravitational pull. As the star is shredded, its remnants are transformed into a stream of debris that rains back down onto the black hole to form a very Read more about A team of physicists devise a model that maps a star’s surprising orbit about a supermassive black hole[…]

You may not realize it in your day-to-day life, but we are all enveloped by a giant “superbubble” that was blown into space by the explosive deaths of a dozen-odd stars. Known as the Local Bubble, this structure extends for about 1,000 light years around the solar system, and is one of countless similar bubbles Read more about We Exist Inside a Giant Space Bubble, And Scientists Have Finally Mapped the magnetic field around it[…]

(Andromeda Galaxy) In the quest to find the outer limits of our galaxy, astronomers have discovered over 200 stars that form the Milky Way’s edge, the most distant of which is over one million light-years away—nearly halfway to the Andromeda galaxy. The 208 stars the researchers identified are known as RR Lyrae stars, which are Read more about Astronomers Find the Edge of Our Galaxy, 1.04m light years away[…]

While using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the masers around oddball star MWC 349A scientists discovered something unexpected: a previously unseen jet of material launching from the star’s gas disk at impossibly high speeds. What’s more, they believe the jet is caused by strong magnetic forces surrounding the star. The discovery could Read more about Hydrogen masers (jets at 500 km/s) reveal new secrets of a massive star[…]