At the heart of our galaxy lies a cosmic puzzle: although the Galactic Center is packed with star-making material, massive stars form there surprisingly slowly. Using NASA's retired SOFIA observatory, ...

A star’s destruction exposed something astronomers normally could not see: a dormant supermassive black hole about 30,000 light-years from the center of its apparent host galaxy. An ...

Understanding the formation and evolution of the centers of galaxies is one of the most intriguing challenges in astrophysics ...

An extremely deep Chandra X–ray Observatory image of a region near the center of our galaxy has resolved a long-standing mystery about an X-ray glow along the plane of the galaxy. The glow in the ...

All motion is relative. That simple fact makes tracking the motion of distant objects outside our galaxy particularly challenging. For example, there has been a debate among astronomers for decades ...

The XRISM collaboration has discovered flows of hot gas in the core of the Centaurus Cluster. By comparing state-of-the-art X-ray measurements from the XRISM satellite with numerical simulations, they ...

Astronomers have numerous technical terms and numbering systems for describing the universe, but one type of mysterious object has yet to be classified. For now, these oddities are named for their ...

New research suggests that dark matter may once again hold the key to one of astronomy’s enduring mysteries: the excess of gamma rays shining from the Milky Way’s center. By modeling the galaxy’s ...

For a star, its initial mass is everything. It determines how quickly it burns through its hydrogen and how it will evolve once it starts fusing heavier elements. It’s so well understood that ...

Artist’s impression of the center of the Centaurus Cluster. Blue shows a vast flow of hot gas, white shows galaxies, and reddish brown shows cool gas. Tokyo, Japan – The XRISM collaboration have ...