From stellar birth to death, from the Milky Way to the large-scale structure of the universe.
24 articles
Cosmic dust is the raw material of planets and our own bodies. In Sextans A, a primitive dwarf galaxy with just 3-7% of the Sun's heavy elements, JWST spotted stars making dust out of almost nothing but iron. SORABUMI unpacks the surprising answer to how the early universe managed to make dust at all.
FRB 220529A is a repeating fast radio burst flashing from 2.5 billion light-years away. After 17 months of watching with China's giant FAST telescope, researchers caught a moment when the radio wave's 'twist' spiked a hundredfold -- evidence, they believe, of a solar storm from a companion star. SORABUMI explains.
About 200,000 light-years away, in a corner of the Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 602 is a star cluster where the death of massive stars and the birth of new ones play out in the same place, at the same time. What JWST and Chandra captured together looks like a cosmic wreath — and it doubles as a window into what the early universe was like.
Erythrulose, a 4-carbon sugar, has been detected for the first time in the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027 near the galactic center. It could be the raw material for TNA, a simpler genetic molecule than DNA. Even more surprising: the sugar wasn't built one carbon at a time — it formed by snapping two 2-carbon fragments together.
In June 2026, the SPHERE instrument at ESO's VLT captured four years of observations that reveal, for the first time, a protoplanetary disk actually rotating. The AB Aurigae system is messier than theory predicted — and that's exciting.
The spiral galaxy M88, 63 million light-years away, is losing its gas as it plows through the Virgo Cluster. Hubble's observations of this "ram pressure stripping" reveal the mechanism that decides a galaxy's fate — explained clearly.
TIC 295741342 is a triple-star system discovered by NASA's TESS satellite in which three stars orbit on nearly the same plane. The result is a remarkable 'head and shoulders' eclipse pattern that lets astronomers measure all three stars at once — a find with almost no precedent.
Red dwarfs — small, dim, and utterly unremarkable — have been quietly swallowing their own planets. A May 2026 discovery used lithium as the smoking gun. The same thing may have happened in our own solar system.
Captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in the constellation Scorpius, globular cluster NGC 6441 packs stars at densities more than 5,000 times greater than our solar neighborhood. In that crush, stellar collisions are just another Tuesday. Here's a look at the remarkable structure of this cluster — and what it tells us about the age of the universe.
Galaxies don't float around randomly. They line up along thread-like structures called filaments, tied together at knots called galaxy clusters. JWST's COSMOS-Web survey has now produced the highest-resolution map of this cosmic web ever made, reaching back to just one billion years after the Big Bang.
Researchers melted 300 kilograms of Antarctic ice core spanning 80,000 years and found iron-60 — a radioactive element that can only be born in a supernova explosion. It turns out the region of space the solar system is currently passing through is the remnant of a star that once exploded.
A massive galaxy with barely any rotation has been discovered just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. JWST's observations are quietly dismantling the assumption that young galaxies always spin.
Just 300 million years after the Big Bang, a galaxy rivaling the Milky Way in 'maturity' already existed. JADES-GS-z14-0, discovered by JWST, is challenging the foundations of cosmology.
More than 650 new sensors have been added to IceCube, the massive detector buried in Antarctic ice. Here's the story of how humanity dares to 'catch' neutrinos — particles that pass through everything — and what secrets we're hoping to uncover.
Galaxy clusters — the most massive objects in the universe — may contain roughly twice the baryonic mass astronomers have long assumed. The culprit is something no one bothered counting seriously: the accumulated remains of dead stars.
Starting in 2026, Rubin Observatory photographs the entire southern sky every 3–4 days and fires off around 100,000 change alerts each night. For the first time, astronomers have a systematic record of everything that flickers, explodes, or moves when no one is watching. Here's what that means for astronomy.
When you look at a star's color, you're reading its temperature directly. Blue stars burn hot and die young; red stars simmer slowly for trillions of years. Here's how a star's color encodes its entire life story.
The hot gas envelope surrounding the Milky Way is roughly 12% warmer on the southern side. The culprit is a neighboring satellite galaxy whose gravity has been compressing our galaxy's outer halo for the past 100 million years.
In 2015, humanity detected a ripple in spacetime for the first time. What are gravitational waves, how do we measure them, and what have we learned? A guide to the universe light couldn't show us.
Finding two quasars close together in the sky is a smoking gun for a massive galaxy merger. These discoveries let us look back to just 900 million years after the Big Bang — and they're rewriting how we understand the growth of galaxies.
The Sun rises every morning without fail, but it's just another star — and like every star, it has a lifespan. In about 5 billion years, it will swell into a red giant and almost certainly consume Earth. Here's the full story of the Sun's life.
Ten billion years ago, galaxies were churning out stars at a furious pace. Where did all that fuel come from? HETDEX has found 33,000 hydrogen halos, and they're beginning to answer one of astronomy's oldest questions.
A spiral galaxy nearly identical to the Milky Way was found just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Here's what JWST's stunning discovery means for galaxy formation — and why the old theories are struggling to keep up.
When a galaxy plunges into a cluster, superheated gas blasts it into something that looks eerily like a jellyfish. Here's how ram pressure stripping works — and what JWST found 8.5 billion years back.