Largest-ever discovery of ‘missing link’ black holes revealed by dark energy camera (video)

a bright white cloud against a background of stars, beside 18 different images of bright white dots surrounded by fuzzy white disks

Astronomers have uncovered a treasure trove of feeding black holes at the heart of dwarf galaxies — small, faint galaxies containing thousands to several billions of stars but very little gas. The discovery, made with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), contains several “missing link” intermediate-mass black holes. This is both the largest sample of … Read more

James Webb Space Telescope finds our Milky Way galaxy’s supermassive black hole blowing bubbles (image, video)

an orange-and-yellow orb on a black-and-blue mottled background

The black hole at the heart of our galaxy is a real party animal, endlessly blowing cosmic bubbles. The findings aren’t frivolous at all and could help us better understand how black holes interact with their environments and help galaxies evolve. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists discovered that the Milky Way’s central … Read more

Venus brightest on Valentine’s Day, 2025. Don’t miss it!

Chart showing an extra-large starred dot, Venus, above the western horizon, along the green ecliptic line.

Venus, named for the Roman goddess of love, reaches its greatest brilliancy on Valentine’s Day, February 14. Venus is currently blazing, low in the west after sunset, with Saturn below. Join EarthSky’s founder and editor-in-chief Deborah Byrd at 12:15 p.m. CT (18:15 UTC) on Wednesday, February 12, to learn how (and why) to love Venus. … Read more

Dramatic changes on Uranus, Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter revealed in 10 years of Hubble Telescope images (video)

The Hubble Space Telescope has spent more than thirty years providing some of the most incredible images of the known universe, but it’s only for the last ten that scientists have pointed its gaze at our solar system’s outer planets to observe them like never before. For the past decade, NASA’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy … Read more