With their extremely low surface brightness, ultra-diffuse galaxies are very difficult to detect, but a recent study has spotted one by searching for its globular clusters.

Messier 87 jet

The massive nearby elliptical galaxy Messier 87 hosts one of the most-studied supermassive black holes in the universe. What have researchers recently learned about this black hole’s spin, jets, and flares?

quasar pair J0749+2255

Astrobites reports on JWST observations of a mysterious binary quasar system from cosmic noon.

Illustration of a planet around a red dwarf star

The troubles continue for planets around the smallest and coolest stars: new research suggests that it’s even harder than previously suspected for these planets to hold on to their atmospheres.

multi-wavelength image of the Bullet Cluster

Astrobites reports on the famous Bullet Cluster — what JWST observations reveal about its complex merger history and the constraints these observations place on self-interacting dark matter.

Messier 81

Recent observations of a well-studied but confounding galaxy provide new insights into the structure of low-luminosity active galactic nuclei.

photograph of water ice plumes on Enceladus
Astrobites

Seeding Life in the Oceans of Moons

Astrobites reports on research that explores the possibility of impacts delivering organics to the ocean worlds in our solar system.

A new fast and flexible ray-tracing algorithm aims to make the complex world of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics simulations more approachable.