Latest articles by Robert Lea
Some stars encounter supermassive black holes and live to tell the tale. New research shows why the flares these encounters cause dim over repeated episodes.
Astronomers are closer than ever to confirming the discovery of the first starless or "failed" galaxy, packed with dark matter and gas but with virtually no stars.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have studied 72 young sun-like stars to discover that forming planets is a real race against time.
A newly discovered water dominated exoplanet is in hot-water literally and figuratively, it orbits so close to its parent star it is headed to a fatal collision that will see it devoured.
Betelgeuse may be a well-known and often-studied stellar object, but that doesn't mean astronomers aren't capable of capturing this doomed star in a completely new light.
Unpopular opinion time, Pluto being reclassified as a dwarf planet was a great thing for our understanding of the solar system and for the former planet, too.
The earliest example of the Milky Way cannibalising a smaller galaxy for its growth involved a cosmic meal that left a scar at the heart of our galaxy.
Astronomers have discovered a hitherto unseen population of galaxies with fading radio lobes, revealing what happens to these vast outflows when their black hole engines stall.
A mysterious hum of gravitational waves that fills the cosmos may be the echo of long-dead "dark stars" that served as the seeds of the first supermassive black holes.
New research suggests that if dark matter is composed of "dark photons," it would not have heated the early cosmos like scientists thought.
James Webb Space Telescope is finding that between the brightest stars, the cosmic skyscrapers, there are much fainter stars, meaning early galaxies are more massive than we believed.
"We are very happy to have discovered as-yet-undetected phenomena in the jet."
Astronomers have discovered that the feeding frenzy of a distant black hole ended with a windy outburst.
Astronomers have spotted the blisteringly hot exhaust fumes of the earliest quasars, intensely bright cosmic titans powered by feeding supermassive black holes.
"These are among the best moments in science: seeing something new, unexpected."
Using the Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have seen a jet from a feeding supermassive black hole churning gas surrounding a galaxy nicknamed the "red potato."
Using Hubble, astronomers have discovered that the only known "helium nova" in the Milky Way is riddling our galaxy with cosmic bullets travelling at 20 million mph.
Just as the dinosaurs didn't disappear but rather evolved into birds, cosmic dinosaurs in the form of the JWST's Little Red Dots may fade away completely.
NASA's next super telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, may leave nowhere to hide for black holes that violently murder and devour stars, not even cosmic noon.
Have astronomers observed the first exomoon, or have they spotted a weird object that could challenge the very concept of planets and moons?
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the secrets of early galaxies that pumped the infant cosmos full of dust, but by studying a much closer and modern galaxy.
"We believe that the mechanism that 'turns on' these gigantic radio emissions is linked to the formation process of galaxy clusters."
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have gotten a glimpse at the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves.
