Galaxies

It's summer in the northern hemisphere of a small, damp, planet orbiting a middle-aged star in a spiral galaxy of matter enjoying a brief heyday before colliding with another galaxy in some 4 billion orbits of the same small, damp, planet.

You don’t need your nose to know what something smells like. Perfumers and astronomers can detect and recreate scents based on the chemical signatures of the molecules in the air, even if that air is very very far away.

Cosmic dust is crucial to the birth of stars and planets, but how so much of it came to be present in the young universe has been a mystery

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, one of the creators of loop quantum gravity, and his collaborator Hal Haggard have just come out with a new paper on black holes.

A galaxy four billion light-years from us was has three supermassive black holes at its center, with two in a tight formation. Clara Moskowitz reports

Newly discovered lobes stretch tens of thousands of light-years above and below the Milky Way's disk. Where they come from remains a mystery

Mysterious light at the center of the milky way could be our first look at dark particles

Recommendations from Scientific American

Over the coming month the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission will fire its main engines no less than eight times to tweak its interplanetary intercept course with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko; eventually sidling up to the 4 kilometer wide cometary nucleus at about 7.9 meters per second in early August.

The smallest galaxies in the universe gave rise to an unexpectedly large proportion of stars. Karen Hopkin reports 

 

The European Southern Observatory broke ground June 19th to build the world's largest telescope atop the Cerro Armazones mountain in Chile. Clara Moskowitz reports