Galaxies

This week on Virtually Speaking Science, I chatted with astrophysicist Katie Freese, author of a new book, The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter.

Citizen-science project identifies particles caught by NASA craft as having likely interstellar origin.

Before they can see Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) must complete an epic to-do list.

A star 890,000 light-years away patrols our galactic frontier

After a ten year journey, NASA’s New Horizons mission is still 420 million kilometers from the Pluto system – but that’s close enough to begin to see the orbital dance of an icy world and its major moon.

A new estimate finds that the Milky Way, once thought to be twice as massive as Andromeda, may actually only have half our neighbor galaxy's mass. Christopher Intagliata reports 

 

In a month’s time, the end result of two-and-a-half years of research, thinking, writing, re-writing, re-re-writing, editing, mulling, puzzling, coffee-drinking, beer-swilling, swearing, and tweaking will hit the shelves in the form of my new book The Copernicus Complex.

Looking for a few good popular math books? In the latest New York Times Book Review, I look at five terrific recent ones: Jordan Ellenberg's How Not to Be Wrong, David J.

Some say its glory days are long gone, but the universe has life in it yet. Brand-new types of celestial phenomena will unfold over the coming billions and trillions of years

By the latest estimate, the observable universe contains 200 billion galaxies. Astronomers wonder: Why so few?

Tipping the scales at less than about a million suns in mass, middleweight black holes may hold clues to how their much larger siblings, and galaxies, first formed

Our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce—an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects