Astrophysics

A research team has shed more light on how Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine could orbit two stars, which are themselves bound together in an orbital dance

Exoplanet Kepler 413 b's tilt can vary by as much as 30 degrees over 11 years, leading to extremely erratic seasons. Clara Moskowitz reports 

 

The notion of an "event horizon," from which nothing can escape, is incompatible with quantum theory, Hawking says

The sun's closest stellar neighbor will soon reveal its mass—and possibly its planets—when it passes in front of a distant star

A Saturn-size star just 40 light-years away will outlive nearly all of its peers

Astronomers have measured a distance scale in the universe to unprecedented accuracy, opening the door to better tests of dark energy models than ever before

Astronomers have spotted their best candidate ever for a Thorne-Zytkow object, a hybrid star proposed almost 40 years ago

The sun's gravitational pull on dark matter particles may cause seasonal patterns not previously expected

As observations fail to pin down the so-far undetectable stuff, explanations once considered fringe are now getting another look

Moons orbiting distant planets might be visible in existing spacecraft data

Two recently found supernovae are much farther away and brighter than almost any star explosion ever seen, perhaps because they wound up as rapidly spinning magnetars. Clara Moskowitz reports

The editors of Nature picked these feature stories as the best among the magazine's longer journalistic reports of the year