A line of bright spots representing satellites are seen in the night sky above a home

Starlink satellites’ leaky radio waves obscure the cosmos

While SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are enabling internet access and cell phone communications around the globe, they’re also posing a threat to radio astronomy, a new study suggests. In some wavelength bands, unintended leakage of electromagnetic radiation from the latest generation of the satellites is more than 30 times brighter than emissions from previous versions, Cees […]
Tracy Slatyer is staring at the camera, smiling. There is a black board with equations written on in the background. Slatyer is wearing a black jacket and silver watch. Her light brown (or dark blonde) hair is pulled back in a ponytail.

How did dark matter shape the universe? This physicist has ideas

At age 12, Tracy Slatyer felt sorry for a book. She read a newspaper article about how lots of people were buying A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. “But then … nobody was actually reading it,” she says. “People were just leaving it on their coffee tables.” Determined to rectify this wrong, Slatyer […]
Bright points are scattered in a weblike pattern over a dark background in a computer simulation of the cosmic web.

A neutrino mass mismatch could shake cosmology’s foundations

As the youthful universe congealed under the pull of gravity, matter knotted itself into galaxies, galaxy clusters and filaments, weaving a dazzlingly intricate cosmic web. This web’s structure is thanks, in part, to the handiwork of neutrinos — lightweight, subatomic particles that surge through the cosmos in unimaginable numbers. Because they streak about at high […]
The constellation Orion in the night sky.

Betelgeuse has a tiny companion star hidden in plain sight

Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! The red supergiant that marks Orion’s left shoulder may have a tiny, unseen companion. Two independent studies found evidence of a star about the same mass as the sun, orbiting Betelgeuse about once every 2,100 days. “It was very surprising,” says astrophysicist Morgan MacLeod of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in […]
Swirling, diffuse tendrils of orange, yellow and white gas on a backdrop of stars

Runaway stars could influence the cosmos far past their home galaxies

Dozens of fugitive stars were caught fleeing a dense star cluster in a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The swarm of speeding stars could mean that such runaways had a bigger influence on cosmic evolution than previously thought, astronomers report October 9 in Nature. Massive stars are born in young clusters, packed so close […]
An image of a ring of fire in outer space with a black orb in the center, shown on a diagonal from the side.

A distant quasar may be circling all the galaxies around it

One of the most distant quasars known appears to have shut down the formation of new stars in all galaxies in its vicinity. A quasar is a powerful source of light created by hot gas swirling around a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Intense radiation from a quasar, called VIK J2348-3054, […]
A bright concentration of stars on a dark sky.

The nearest middle-aged black hole could be a crowd of lightweights

Contrary to a previous report, there is no evidence for an intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri, the Milky Way’s most massive and luminous globular star cluster, a new study finds. Instead, a hive of much smaller black holes dipping in and out of the tightly packed star cluster could explain the motion and distribution […]
A piece of paper with strings of numbers and letters printed on it, with one line circled in red pen and "Wow!" written in that same pen in the margin

History ‘Wow!’ the signal may finally have a source. Sorry, it’s not aliens

One of the most compelling possible signs of extraterrestrial communication may have an astrophysical explanation. Called “Wow!” signal, the bright burst of radio waves has challenged our understanding since its discovery in the 1970s. Now, scientists using archived data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico suggest a new possible source for the signal: a […]
Gas and dust swirl, and stars twinkle, in an image of a stellar nursery. Some of the starlike objects captured in this image are baby planets, researchers say.

The Webb Telescope’s look at a stellar nursery also finds minor planets

A distant stellar nursery holds a cluster of newborn worlds the size of Jupiter, the smallest of which is surrounded by a disk of dust that may one day form moons. The detailed discovery, made thanks to the unprecedented sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope, could provide new insights into the formation of stars […]