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astrophysics

Latest Articles

Painting of a planet and a star.
exoplanets

New Exoplanet Search Strategy Claims First Discovery

By Nola Taylor Redd
February 18, 2020
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By watching for a special kind of flare, astronomers have identified the fingerprints of an Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star.

Illustration of interstellar objects entering our solar system
Quantized Columns

The Age of Interstellar Visitors

By Michele Bannister
January 29, 2020
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As astronomers get better at finding the comets and asteroids of other stars, they’ll learn more about the universe and our place in it.

Art for "Quanta’s Year in Physics (2019)"
2019 in Review

The Year in Physics

By Michael Moyer
December 23, 2019
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Physicists saw a black hole for the first time, debated the expansion rate of the universe, pondered the origin of time and modeled the end of clouds.

Video simulation of gas around a black hole.
astrophysics

Astronomers Find Black Holes Stirring Up the Biggest Galaxies

By Charlie Wood
December 12, 2019
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After a space telescope disintegrated, astrophysicists had little hope of understanding how supermassive black holes agitate giant galaxies. Then they invented a hack.

Virginia Trimble at UC Irvine.
Q&A

Virginia Trimble Has Seen the Stars

By Elizabeth Landau
November 11, 2019
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How a young celebrity became one of the first female astronomers at Caltech, befriended Richard Feynman, and ended up the world’s foremost chronicler of the science of the night sky.

Illustration of three flat sheets, connoting a flat universe, and three balls, connoting a closed universe.
Abstractions blog

What Shape Is the Universe? A New Study Suggests We’ve Got It All Wrong

By Natalie Wolchover
November 4, 2019
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Most every cosmologist believes the universe is flat. A new analysis argues that it’s closed.

Illustration of a magnetar with blue magnetic field lines.
Abstractions blog

The Most-Magnetic Objects in the Universe Attract New Controversy

By Erika K. Carlson
October 28, 2019
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How do magnetars get so magnetic? A study of stellar explosions shows that the long-accepted theory might be wrong.

An illustration of a planet in front of a star.
Abstractions blog

Physics Nobel Honors Early Universe and Exoplanet Discoveries

By Michael Moyer +1 authors
Natalie Wolchover
October 8, 2019
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The astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz won half of the prize for their 1995 discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The cosmologist James Peebles won the other half for work exploring the structure of the universe.

Thumbnail: stylized illustration of a supernova
astrophysics

Long-Lived Stellar Blast Kindles Hope of a Supernova We’ve Never Seen Before

By Robin George Andrews
September 12, 2019
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A giant star’s death throes may offer the first evidence of a pair-instability supernova, and a glimpse of the first stars in the universe.


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