Category Astronomy/Space

For decades, astronomers have been watching WOH G64, an enormous heavyweight star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. This star is more than 1,500 times larger than the sun and emitting over 100,000 times more energy. For a long time, red supergiant WOH G64 looked like a star steadily reaching the end of its life, shedding material and swelling in size as it began to run out of fuel.

Astronomers didn’t think its final demise would happen anytime soon, because no one has ever seen a known red supergiant die. But in recent years, astronomers—including our team working with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT)—discovered that this star has started to change, growing dimmer than before and seemingly warmer...

Our Milky Way galaxy may not have a supermassive black hole at its center but rather an enormous clump of mysterious dark matter exerting the same gravitational influence, astronomers say...

Scientists have produced the most detailed map ever created of dark matter that runs throughout the Universe, revealing how it has influenced the formation of stars, galaxies, and planets.

The research, which includes astronomers from Durham University in the UK, provides new insight into how this unseen substance helped draw ordinary matt...

Gigantic black holes lurk at the center of virtually every galaxy, including ours, but we’ve lacked a precise picture of what impact they have on their surroundings...