For the 25th anniversary of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA produced ghostly time-lapse videos of two centuries-old stellar explosions. “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once wrote. “It’s not even past.” Nobody knows this better than astronomers. Everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe has left a mark on the…

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the closest massive black hole to Earth ever seen, a cosmic titan “frozen in time.”  As an example of an elusive “intermediate-mass black hole,” the object could serve as a missing link in understanding the connection between stellar mass and supermassive black holes. The black hole appears…

The star cluster Omega Centauri contains millions of stars. The movement of some stars suggests that an intermediate-sized black hole lies at its center. NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to find evidence of an elusive kind of black hole, one that’s about 8,000 times more massive than our sun. What makes…

Every year, the Royal Museums Greenwich conducts its Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest. Hundreds of entries flood in from around the world, and the museum’s panel of judges selects winning images from categories as diverse as Auroras, Galaxies, Our Moon, Our Sun, People and Space, and Skyscapes. While this year’s grand prize winners have…

The warp in the Milky Way’s spiral disk is precessing backward under the influence of the enormous mass of dark matter that forms an invisible halo around our galaxy, Chinese astronomers have discovered. About one-third of all spiral galaxies have a distinct warp to their disk-shaped structure, like a vinyl record that has been bent.…

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 crew members (pictured) spent 199 days in space. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky Only about 600 people have ever traveled to space. The vast majority of astronauts over the past six decades have been middle-aged men on short-duration missions of fewer than 20 days. Today, with private, commercial and multinational spaceflight providers and flyers entering the…

In the next few months, an explosion on a star 3,000 light-years away will grow so bright it should be visible to the naked eye. The star system T Coronae Borealis, also named the Blaze Star, produces an explosion roughly every 80 years that yields a bright nova viewable from Earth. The nova was last…

NASA Images: From the backyard of our solar systems to the galaxies located millions of light years away, the Universe is filled with mysteries waiting to be uncovered by humans. National Aeronautics Space Administration keeps sharing images of rare events in the Universe and of distant celestial bodies. Here are the top 6 mysterious images…