Astronomy
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Conversation
Looking for lithium? Look to the stars
They start producing it in their old age.
By Simon Campbell, Monash University and Yerra Bharat Kumar, Chinese Academy of Sciences Lithium is used in everyt...
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Why we love black holes
Big discoveries ramp up excitement and expectations.
In the pantheon of astronomical objects, black holes are among the most amazing. Not only do they swallow large am...
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Moon may be much more metallic
NASA radar suggests there are sub-surface riches.
The Moon might be more metallic than researchers thought. And that comes from no less a source than NASA. The scie...
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A chance to see a planet’s interior
Astronomers find surviving core of a gas giant.
Astronomers have discovered the surviving core of a gas giant orbiting a distant star, offering, they say, an unprece...
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Missing: a large and unstable blue star
Even the Very Large Telescope can’t find it now.
A massive and unstable star is missing from a dwarf galaxy, and astronomers are intrigued. It may just have become...
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SOHO keeps on doing the business
It’s watching the Sun and finding comets. Lots of comets.
SOHO – the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory – doesn’t have quite the profile of the likes of Hubble and Spitzer, bu...
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History
Nancy Grace Roman had her eyes on the sky
NASA has honoured the ‘mother of the Hubble’.
Given her background, Nancy Grace Roman’s life could have gone a couple of ways. She was born on 16 May 1925 in Nashv...
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New super-Earths found close to home
Astronomers detect them orbiting a bright red dwarf.
Astronomers report detecting two, maybe even three, super-Earth exoplanets orbiting the brightest red dwarf star in t...
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Mystery object sits in astronomy’s ‘mass gap’
Cosmic collision involves an intriguing participant.
Astronomers have found either the lightest ever black hole or the heaviest neutron star. Either way, it’s an exciting...
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Plate tectonics and the search for life
Simulations suggest early exoplanets may be the best bet.
If there is life out there, it may have been around for quite a while. New computer simulations suggest that rocky...
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Focus
Planet or not, Pluto started out hot
That’s when its ocean began forming, scientists suggest.
Pluto appears to have formed quickly and with such heat that from birth it had a large ocean beneath a layer of insul...
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Capturing the chaos in nearby nebulae
Hubble’s new images of the butterfly and the bug.
Astronomers have maxed out the Hubble Space Telescope’s imaging capability – using it across its full wavelength rang...