Our Galaxy’s Supermassive Black Hole May Have Had a Companion in the Past
Could there have been two massive black holes in our galaxy’s center at one time? New modeling of fast-moving stars in the Milky Way’s halo suggests the answer is yes.
Hydrocarbons keep turning up in surprising places. This time, they’ve been found near a pair of accreting supermassive black holes 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
What if Mars Were a Stranger (Thing)?
Astrobites reports on whether we’d even know what we were looking at if our familiar red neighbor were a stranger light-years away.
The galaxies FCC 224 and FCC 240 appear to be a rare example of a dark-matter-poor, globular-cluster-rich pair formed via colliding dwarf galaxies.
A recent study used the kinematics, chemical composition, and ages of thousands of stars to determine when the Milky Way settled into the spiral disk we know it as today.
White dwarfs with metals in their spectra preserve a record of planets that once orbited them. New research examines these spectra for signs that the metals underwent technological processing.
Can Arid Planets Keep Their Cool?
Astrobites reports on why dry planets may be missing the critical thermostat of the geologic carbon cycle, which has helped to stabilize Earth’s climate over billions of years.
When a powerful solar flare saturates a detector, the information about the flare is lost — or is it? New research validates a technique for extracting knowledge from saturated images of solar flares.
How do you pick a landing site before you know how you’re going to land? The scientists behind NASA’s latest Moon missions are working on just that.