Stars

Planet Earth May Be Far More Special Than We Think

Very few potentially habitable planets meet the conditions necessary to produce an atmosphere suitable for the evolution of complex life as we know it, study says.

BBC Science Focus Magazine

Aliens Wouldn’t Need Warp Drives to Take Over an Entire Galaxy, Simulation Suggests

A new computer simulation shows that a technologically advanced civilization, even when using slow ships, can still colonize an entire galaxy in a modest amount of time.

Gizmodo

Stars That Race Through Space at Nearly the Speed of Light

Excerpt: Some are blasted out of galaxies by interactions with black holes; others, which orbit supermassive black holes, can smash together in titanic explosions.

Scientific American

When Did Life First Emerge in the Universe?

We don’t know, but we could try to find out by searching for it on planets orbiting the very oldest stars.

Scientific American

The First Black Hole Ever Discovered Is More Massive Than We Thought

Cygnus X-1’s black hole was first discovered more than half a century ago. But it continues to teach us new things.

MIT Technology Review

Where Are All the Tiny Black Holes?

The discovery of a celestial “unicorn” that’s just a slim 2.9 solar masses may help unravel a mystery that has long puzzled astronomers.

The Atlantic

Most Distant Quasar May Help Us Solve How Enormous Black Holes Form

Astronomers have discovered the most distant quasar we have ever seen. At about 13 billion light years away from Earth, it is showing us how the first supermassive black holes affected their galaxies.

New Scientist

How Many Alien Civilizations Are Out There? A New Galactic Survey Holds a Clue

The Milky Way is full of habitable real estate, with roughly half of all sunlike stars hosting Earth-size worlds that could be friendly to life.

National Geographic

What 50 Gravitational-Wave Events Reveal About the Universe

Astrophysicists now have enough black-hole mergers to map their frequency over the cosmos’s history.

Nature

Galactic Archaeology

Examining the fossils of the first stars.

Science Node

Two Dozen Exoplanets That Might be More Habitable Than Earth

Do we need to change our search parameters when looking for extraterrestrial life?

Air & Space Magazine

Scientist Calculates the ‘Sad, Lonely’ End of the Universe

Stars will continue to explode long after the universe is cold and “dead,” one scientist determined in diving down the rabbit hole to find the last supernova that will ever happen.

Space.com

Collision of Galaxies May Have Spurred Our Solar System’s Formation

A violent event on a colossal scale — the crash of two galaxies — may have paved the way for our solar system’s birth.

Reuters

Deep in the Cosmic Forest, a Black Hole Goldilocks Might Like

Astronomers found an intermediate black hole — not too big, not too small — that sheds light on how the universe was assembled in the dark.

The New York Times

Star’s Strange Path Around Black Hole Proves Einstein Right — Again

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has aced another test.

Science

‘Radical Change’ Needed After Latest Neutron Star Collision

A recent neutron star merger has defied astronomers’ expectations, leading them to question longstanding ideas about neutron stars and the supernovas that create them.

Quanta Magazine

Harvard, Vanderbilt Scientists Find “Stellar Budget” for Colliding Stars

The study found that roughly 14 percent of stars collide after becoming black holes.

The Harvard Crimson

Oldest Material on Earth Discovered

Scientists analyzing a meteorite have discovered the oldest material known to exist on Earth. They found dust grains within the space rock — which fell to Earth in the 1960s — that are as much as 7.5 billion years old.

BBC News

LIGO and Virgo Probably Spotted the First Black Hole Swallowing Up a Neutron Star

Astronomers may have detected gravitational waves from a new type of event.

Science News

A Star Orbiting in the Extreme Gravity of a Black Hole Validates General Relativity

The star S0-2 gets so close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy that it can be used to test our fundamental understanding of gravity.

Smithsonian

Mystery Of Universe’s Expansion Deepens With New Cosmic Calculation

The question of how fast the universe is expanding just keeps getting more confusing.

New Scientist