From stellar birth to death, from the Milky Way to the large-scale structure of the universe.
37 articles
21,000 light-years away, the neutron star PSR J1101-6101 drags a tail of light nine times longer than the distance to the nearest star. NASA's IXPE X-ray satellite has directly measured the magnetic field of this 'cosmic lighthouse' for the first time. SORABUMI explains.
JWST has spotted the 'JWST Quintet' -- at least five galaxies merging just 800 million years after the Big Bang. Gas torn loose in the collision carried oxygen out beyond the galaxies themselves, catching the young universe in the act of distributing heavy elements.
Just 0.55 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, an aging giant star called IRS 3 keeps producing water and silicate dust in one of the galaxy's harshest radiation zones. JWST caught the moment. A story of the universe quietly making things, from SORABUMI.
We weigh galaxies by their light, but light comes almost entirely from a handful of massive stars. More than 70% of all stars, by number, are dim and smaller than the Sun. JWST observations now suggest early-universe galaxies could be 3 to 4 times heavier than we thought. SORABUMI explains.
Big galaxies didn't start out big. Hubble and Gaia teamed up to precisely measure 39 star clusters buried deep in the Milky Way, revealing the fossil remains of a small galaxy called LKH that our galaxy swallowed roughly 11.8 billion years ago. SORABUMI explains the evidence that galaxies grow by eating their neighbors.
Hubble stared at a patch of darkness one-tenth the size of the full moon for eleven straight days and dug up about 10,000 galaxies. TESS, meanwhile, sweeps the entire sky in one pass. Why does studying the cosmos require such opposite telescopes? SORABUMI breaks down the trade-off between field of view, resolution, and exposure time.
Sunlight left the Sun about eight minutes ago. Light from Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is about 4.2 years old. The Andromeda Galaxy's light is roughly 2.5 million years old. Because light speed is finite, looking farther always means looking further back in time. SORABUMI translates this into everyday scale to explain why a single glance at the night sky holds hundreds of millions of years at once.
A galaxy in a photograph looks like a cluster of stars, but the real thing extends far beyond that: a diffuse cloud of gas, wider than the visible galaxy, that supplies the raw material for future stars. NASA's small satellite ASPERA is designed to catch this invisible gas in ultraviolet light, and SORABUMI explains how galaxies grow by inhaling and exhaling it.
How do you find a black hole you can't see? At the center of Omega Centauri, seven stars are moving fast enough to escape the cluster — yet they never leave. That contradiction points to an intermediate-mass black hole with at least 8,200 times the Sun's mass. SORABUMI breaks down how two decades of Hubble images uncovered it.
Newborn star clusters are wrapped in gas cocoons and invisible in optical light. A team led by Stockholm University combed through thousands of clusters with Hubble and JWST and found that massive clusters break free in about 5 million years, while lighter ones take 7 to 8 million — and the heavier ones are the first to light up their galaxy. SORABUMI explains.
About 25 light-years from Earth, the Sun's ninth-closest white dwarf -- the burnt-out core of a dead star -- went unnoticed for 27 years, drowned in the glare of a red dwarf next door. Hubble's ultraviolet vision finally exposed four hidden dead stars within 65 light-years of home. SORABUMI explains how.
JWST found a bar structure roughly 4.5 kpc (about 15,000 light-years) long in a galaxy at redshift z=5.102, seen just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. A well-formed bar is a sign of a mature galaxy — and this one grew up faster than expected. SORABUMI explains.
In 2026, JWST confirmed that the galaxy cluster XLSSC 122, some 10.4 billion light-years away, is producing powerful gravitational lensing. SORABUMI explains how a foreground cluster's gravity bends and magnifies light from behind it, and why this densely packed cluster shouldn't have existed so soon.
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.