What can binary stars comprised of two different types of stars teach astronomers about stellar evolution? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers from the United States and Canada investigated a binary star system comprised of white dwarfs and main sequence stars that…

An early conceptual image of SpaceX’s lunar cargo lander, which NASA will need to deliver 26,000 to 33,000 pounds of payload to the Moon. Credit: NASA NASA has picked SpaceX and Blue Origin to deliver a lunar rover and habitat to the moon within the next decade. The space agency last week announced it will assign two…

For the first time, astronomers have taken a high-quality, zoomed-in photo of a star outside our galaxy — and it’s right on the brink of exploding in a violent supernova. The new close-up image, captured by the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in Chile, shows the red supergiant WOH G64, commonly…

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have captured an amazing new photo of the spiral galaxy NGC 2090. This Hubble image shows NGC 2090, a spiral galaxy some 40 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Columba. The color image was made from separate exposures taken in the ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared regions…

First-year UTM student Riyam Ojaimi launches Space Point, an astronomy publication At the age of five, Riyam Ojaimi first experienced curiosity for space 一 planning a mass migration to Saturn, which later developed into a lifelong fascination with quantum physics and astrophysics.  Ojaimi 一 now a first-year life sciences student at UTM 一 recalls discovering…

Precious data from space missions, going back decades, is being carefully restored and archived by scientists at NASA’s Space Science Date Coordinated Archive, allowing researchers today to make new discoveries by delving into the history books. “What’s surprising is how much of this information is either lost or at least not in a condition that…

Using one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth, astronomers have witnessed an intimidating 2-million-mile-per-hour (3.2-million-kilometer-per-hour) smash-up between galaxies at a dangerous “cosmic crossroads,” the site of multiple previous collisions. The collision occurred when the galaxy NGC 7318b ripped through the site of previous galactic smash-ups, a galactic grouping called “Stephan’s Quintet.” The impact created…

Astronomers have stumbled upon a pair of massive black holes in a distant galaxy that are triggering unusual bursts of light. These bright emissions, which appear to peak on a regular cycle, may be caused by the black hole duo disrupting a massive gas cloud — a phenomenon researchers say is the first of its…

Astronomers zoomed in on a stellar behemoth in the Larger Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy that orbits about 160,000 light-years from the Milky Way. In a stunning scientific and technological feat, a group of astronomers said Thursday that it had managed to take the first close-up picture of a star in another galaxy. Not only was…