NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has discovered that a system of asteroids in the distant Kuiper Belt may be triplets, not twins as previously suspected. If so, the stable trio of icy space rocks would be just the second example of three gravitationally bound space rocks found in the Kuiper Belt, the doughnut-shaped region of icy … Read more
Dozens of dwarf galaxies swarming around the Andromeda Galaxy like bees have been caught on camera by the Hubble Space Telescope, which took more than a thousand orbits of the Earth to take enough images to get a full family portrait of Andromeda’s brightest satellites. The 36 dwarf galaxies are varied in their properties, and … Read more
A new study has revealed that temperamental stars that brighten and dim over the course of just a few hours could be distorting astronomers’ views of thousands of planets beyond the solar system. The team behind this research reached this conclusion by studying 20 extrasolar planets or “exoplanets” as they crossed, or “transited,” the faces … Read more
New research suggests that a troubling disparity in the rate of expansion of the universe, known as the Hubble constant, may arise from the fact Earth sits in a vast underdense region of the cosmos. The issue has come to be known as the “Hubble tension.” It arises from the fact that there are two … Read more