“Is space truly black?” Tod Lauer, an astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab, questions. Now, courtesy of research from NASA’s New Horizons team and their spacecraft (which is approximately 4,000,000,000 miles from Earth), we understand that no is quite possibly the answer. The team argues that if you were to remove all sources of visible light from our night sky, there would still be …
At the center of our galaxy is the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. Though it has a history of flickering, it has never glowed like it did in April and May, new research tells us. Twice, both times over the course of four nights, the light around its core glowed at “unprecedented” levels—so much that some astronomers believed they’d discovered a star. Minutes later, the …
A project helmed by an international team of astronomers has resulted in the discovery of some 300,000 “previously unseen light sources” that are believed to be distant galaxies. This new map of the night sky was revealed using the incredibly powerful Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope, with many of the light sources sending radio signals for billions of light years until they reach Earth. (One …
