New discoveries

If you see a woman with a big baby bump, you know she’s pregnant. Pretty soon, she will give birth to her child. But much earlier in her pregnancy, it’s not so easy to tell. Yes, there is a baby growing inside her belly, but you can’t see it....

Every child on the planet knows the moon: a ball of rock orbiting the Earth. Most of the other planets in our solar system have moons, too. The giant planet Jupiter even has a whopping amount of 79 satellites – four large ones and dozens of tiny moonlets. So,...

How are stars born? This is a fascinating phenomenon that the scientific community has been studying for many years. We know that atoms come together, creating molecular clouds with high-density cores that then turn into a star. To understand how particles attract each other, try to picture a lot...

For the first time ever, astronomers have taken a photo of a black hole. Black holes are regions in space where gravity is extreme. Everything that comes too close is sucked in. And nothing can ever get out again. Even light, traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second, cannot escape...

Astronomers have obtained new images of the rings of Uranus, a distant planet in our own solar system. The new images were made by two big observatories: ALMA, and the European Very Large Telescope (VLT). The astronomers were also able to take the temperature of the rings for the...

Suppose you use a telescope to study a village on a distant mountain slope. In the village, you only see young children. Apparently, the village has only recently become inhabited. But there’s a mystery. The graveyard of the village if pretty full! Now you start to wonder: maybe people...

Thirteen billion years ago, two small galaxies crashed into each other. The ALMA observatory has now witnessed this collision. Never before have astronomers seen a galaxy smashup so early in the history of the universe.  The cosmic traffic accident happened when the universe was less than one billion years...

All people look different from each other. Except identical twins. They have the same eyes, the same nose, the same mouth and the same hair. Very often, they even wear the same clothes. When two people are so much alike, you can be sure they were born as twins....

ALMA has discovered a new planet, orbiting a distant star. But not by actually seeing it – the planet is too small to detect from Earth. Instead, ALMA saw the planet’s tracks in the dusty disk that whirls around the star. It’s like finding the Invisible Man through his...

Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the Universe. Their gravity is dangerously strong. They suck in everything that comes too close. Moreover, they don’t emit any light. As a result, they’re completely invisible. Still, there are ways to detect black holes. That’s because they exert a tell-tale...

There’s a big black hole in the core of the Milky Way. A huge region in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. This monster black hole is four million times more massive than our Sun. Luckily, it’s also very far away: 26,000...

If you topple a bottle of water, the liquid flows out very fast. But turn over a container of treacle, and it takes ages to empty. So what could be going on if you see a fast and a slow flow at the same time? Astronomers faced a similar...