Nomads of the galaxy
Recently, a study was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society proposing planets simply adrift in space may be something of a common phenomenon. View More (2012-05-24)
Free-floating planets in the Milky Way outnumber stars by factors of thousands
A few hundred thousand billion free-floating life-bearing Earth-sized planets may exist in the space between stars in the Milky Way. View More (2012-05-11)
Queen's scientists discover black hole ripping apart star
Astronomers from Queen's University Belfast have gathered the most direct evidence yet of a supermassive black hole shredding a star that wandered too close. View More (2012-05-04)
Rogue stars ejected from the galaxy are found in intergalactic space
It's very difficult to kick a star out of the galaxy. In fact, the primary mechanism that astronomers have come up with that can give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it takes requires a close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core. View More (2012-05-01)
Serious Blow to Dark Matter Theories?
The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. View More (2012-04-19)
Black Holes Grow Big by Eating Stars
Most galaxies, including the Milky Way, have a supermassive black hole at their center weighing millions to billions of suns. View More (2012-04-03)
Fermi Observations of Dwarf Galaxies Provide New Insights on Dark Matter
There's more to the cosmos than meets the eye. About 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes, yet its gravitational influence is manifest in the orbital speeds of stars around galaxies and in the motions of clusters of galaxies. View More (2012-04-03)
How black holes grow
A study led by a University of Utah astrophysicist found a new explanation for the growth of supermassive black holes in the center of most galaxies: they repeatedly capture and swallow single stars from pairs of stars that wander too close. View More (2012-04-02)
Much faster than a speeding bullet, planets and stars escape the Milky Way
Idan Ginsburg, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy, studies some of the fastest moving objects in the cosmos. View More (2012-03-30)
Milky Way image reveals detail of a billion stars
More than one billion stars in the Milky Way can be seen together in detail for the first time in an image captured by astronomers. View More (2012-03-29)
Many billions of rocky planets in the habitable zones around red dwarfs in the Milky Way
This first direct estimate of the number of light planets around red dwarf stars has just been announced by an international team using observations with the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. View More (2012-03-28)
Glittering jewels of Messier 9
Messier 9, pictured here, is a globular cluster, a roughly spherical swarm of stars that lies around 25 000 light-years from Earth, near the centre of the Milky Way, so close that the gravitational forces from the galactic centre pull it slightly out of shape. View More (2012-03-16)
Important Clue Uncovered for the Origins of a Type of Supernovae Explosion, Thanks to a Research Team at the University of Pittsburgh
The origin of an important type of exploding stars-Type Ia supernovae-have been discovered, thanks to a research team at the University of Pittsburgh. View More (2012-03-05)
Astrophysicists from Clemson and Europe unmask a black hole
A study of X-rays emitted a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away has unmasked a stellar mass black hole in Andromeda, a spiral galaxy about 2.6 million light-years from Earth. View More (2012-02-27)
NASA's Chandra finds Milky Way's black hole grazing on asteroids
The giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way may be vaporizing and devouring asteroids, which could explain the frequent flares observed, according to astronomers using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. View More (2012-02-09)
Scientists Chart High-Precision Map of Milky Way's Magnetic Fields
Scientists at the Naval Research Laboratory are part of an international team that has pooled their radio observations into a database, producing the highest precision map to date of the magnetic field within our own Milky Way galaxy. View More (2012-02-06)
IBEX team, UNH scientist present mission findings today at NASA press conference
Space scientists, including researchers from the University of New Hampshire (UNH), today described the first detailed analyses of samples of captured interstellar neutral atoms - raw material for the formation of new stars, planets, and human beings. View More (2012-02-01)
Planets around stars are the rule rather than the exception
There are more exoplanets further away from their parent stars than originally thought, according to new astrophysics research. View More (2012-01-13)
Planet population is plentiful
An international team, including three astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), has used the technique of gravitational microlensing to measure how common planets are in the Milky Way. View More (2012-01-12)
A wealth of habitable planets in the Milky Way
Six years of observations of millions of stars now show how common it is for stars to have planets in orbits around them. View More (2012-01-12)
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