asteroid belt

In a dense cloud of gas and dust where massive stars are born, two young stars recently passed very close to each other. Their dance has lasted only about sixty years, and astronomers have now seen it in detail for the first time.

Pulsar PSR J0614-3329 spins 318 times per second. A point on its equator moves at about 10% of the speed of light. From a distance, the star looks like a lighthouse spinning so fast that its beam blurs into a continuous ring.

The family album of this stellar pair has been filling up for 45 years, but the pictures were blurry and the captions contradictory. Now astronomers have pulled out the old photographs, taken new sharp shots, and put everyone back in their proper places. Gamma Cephei is a bright star visible to the naked eye, and it has an invisible companion that orbits it every 70 years.

Astronomers catch distant planets by the trembling of their stars: an invisible companion tugs the star toward us and away, and its light subtly shifts in color. But that trembling tells only half the truth. If the planet's orbit is tilted to our line of sight, only part of its weight rocks the star, so telescopes reveal not the true mass but its shadow.

A million orbits: the same score. Nine dark matter halos: nine orchestras without a conductor. All musicians play from the same notes, but in each hall the music sounds different: sometimes in tune, sometimes out of sync. Likewise, satellite galaxies falling into a host halo follow orbits that depend not only on mass but also on the shape of the invisible stage.

On a sunny street, there's a house with a big family: a giant father who always sits by the window and a small child running around the yard. That's the TOI-4468 system: a gas giant hot Jupiter hugs the star, while a bit farther out circles a sub-Neptune — a planet smaller than Neptune but larger than Earth.

The night sky is full of rings and bubbles, but in the radio band they look different. In data from the Australian radio telescope ASKAP, a structure has surfaced that resembles two soap bubbles blown from the same straw.

Faint galaxies scattered across the Perseus cluster are like ghosts among their bright neighbors. They are so diffuse that distant objects shine through them, and they contain hundreds of times fewer stars than our Milky Way.

A stone thrown into water quickly loses speed. A meteor entering the atmosphere should behave the same way: air slows it down, and friction burns up its material. But cameras of the Global Fireball Observatory network have captured hundreds of bright fireballs over ten years that streak across the sky with almost no deceleration.

In the dark kitchen of the Taurus molecular cloud, 450 light-years away, dozens of planetary systems are being prepared. Each young star is a chef, and its protoplanetary disk is a counter piled with flour-like dust and steam-like gas.

The birth of a moon is a cosmic car crash. Two young planets collide, and a cloud of scorching debris swirls around the surviving world. From this disk, like clay on a potter's wheel, a satellite gradually takes shape. That's probably how our Moon came to be.

Jupiter's atmosphere resembles a layered cake, where each layer plays its role. Scientists took data from four instruments at once (VLT/MUSE, Cassini/VIMS, IRTF/SpeX, and Juno/JIRAM) and built a model of clouds and ammonia in the planet's equatorial zone, from 0.1 to 10 bar (pressure equivalent to hundreds of kilometers below Earth's…

On September 26, 2022, the DART probe slammed into the natural satellite at a speed of 6,6 km/s. A fountain of debris burst into space. Rocks, dust, sand grains — everything erupted in a silent flash. Two years later, a numerical simulation of 20 million trajectories revealed the fate of each particle.

Seventy-two protoplanetary disks, swirling cocoons of cosmic dust and gas, came under the gaze of the MIRI instrument on JWST. Most of them shoot outflows into space: dense conical structures and narrow, high-speed jets. They blast like fountains. This process is not accidental.

Tabby's Star, a beacon in the cosmic sea, has baffled astronomers since 2015. Its light flickered not in the rhythm of planets, but as if scattered by a storm — deep dips, sharp spikes. But amid this chaos, a smooth, nearly perfect dip was found. The eye of the storm.

The star AB Aur is young, about 4 million years old. Around it swirls a dense disk of gas and dust. Recently, a long gas stream, a flow of material from the surrounding cloud, crashed into it.

It takes the stellar pair J05+50 nearly two months to complete one orbit around their common center. From Earth, it appears as a faint point in the constellation Hercules — 4625 parsecs away. Photometry of the binary star only captures a steady flicker of brightness, like the pulse of a giant heart.

Dark matter remains the inaudible bass line of the cosmic symphony — it emits no light, but its gravitational pull shapes galaxies. Vera Rubin first caught this rhythm in the 1970s by observing the rotation of stars.

When a distant planet passes in front of its star, it briefly blocks part of the light. Astronomers call this a transit and judge the planet's size by the depth of the dip. But light has a property: a massive body acts like a lens. Even a giant planet can slightly bend the star's rays, and the dip becomes a bit shallower than you might expect.

A quarter-century ago, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the first hot Jupiter, and shattered all the rules of planet formation. A gas giant on a days-long orbit couldn't have formed next to the star: it's far too hot and lacks building material. So, it must have been born far away and then migrated.

Around some young stars where star formation has recently ended, there swirl not just dust rings but actual planetary battlefields — extreme debris disks.

Forget the familiar images of planetary cores — a sharp boundary between rock and gas is a thing of the past. The Juno probe, diving into Jupiter’s gravitational field, and Cassini, into the embrace of Saturn, discovered that heavy elements are not gathered at the center but smeared over a vast region, as if someone carelessly shook a cocktail.

The cosmic spectacle unfolds on the stage of Galaxy галактики Centaurus A. In the lead role: a supermassive сверхмассивная чёрная дыра with a powerful jet that pierces space for hundreds of thousands of light-years.

The gravitational dances of celestial bodies long remained silent to astronomers. We learned to catch the shadows of planets against stars with the transit method — a breakthrough that delivered thousands of worlds thanks to William Borucki and his Kepler telescope.

Ever since Voyager 2 raced past Uranus in 1986, the planet's icy moons have kept a mystery: where does the carbon dioxide on their surfaces come from? The spectrometers of that era only hinted at the presence of CO₂, but couldn't say anything about its origin.

Remember the sensational comet 1I/‘Oumuamua — the first object to come to us from another star? Its hyperbolic trajectory left no doubt: it was a wanderer from the interstellar void. But astronomers wondered: could some of these visitors not be strangers at all, but our own, escaped from the Solar System millions of years ago?

When a giant planet grows, it pulls in gas. Some of that gas swirls around it into a small disk — called a circumplanetary disk. It is in such disks that moons are thought to form. For the planet PDS 70 c, located 370 light-years away, such a disk was directly observed using the ALMA antenna array in the millimeter range.

The light of a distant star is no perfect beacon. Passing through the gravitational field of another star, it bends, splits, and magnifies, creating a fleeting Einstein ring in the sky. This is how gravitational microlensing manifests, predicted by Fritz Zwicky back in the 1930s.

In deep space, 95 parsecs from Earth, nature is assembling a planetary clock. The model HD 114082 is a prototype, only 15 million years old. Two massive pendulums — exoplanets b and c — are already swinging with periods of 225 and 314 days, but the whole mechanism is still covered in the construction dust of a debris disk.

At the center of the Milky Way, where the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* reigns supreme (its metric first derived by Karl Schwarzschild), star S4714 makes a dizzying voyage.

A pebble drops into a night lake, and ripples spread across the water. You can't see the pebble itself, but the ripples give it away. Astronomers use a similar trick when hunting for dark bodies in space: these objects betray themselves by the way they warp the light of distant stars.

In 2019, an unusual visitor, comet 3I/ATLAS, zoomed into the Solar System. It came from another star, and for the first time, astronomers were able to see what its dusty tail is made of.

Neutron stars are the final chord in the evolution of massive suns. Born in the cataclysm of a supernova, they pack a mass comparable to the Sun's into a sphere the size of an earthly metropolis.

Using James Webb, astronomers 'fished out' a third giant planet from the murky dust disk of the star β Pictoris. Two others were already known, but this one was hiding in the bright light, like a fish in muddy water.

Young Earth was a boiling sphere of liquid rock, while Theia, which crashed into it, had had time to cool and solidify. It’s like dropping a chunk of cold butter into a pot of soup: the soup splashes out, but the butter barely moves. Similarly, Earth’s interior spewed into space, forming a cloud of cosmic dust and debris.

At the center of a distant galaxy, a supermassive black hole is surrounded by a flat, rotating disk of gas and dust — a giant cosmic funnel of matter. A small compact object, such as another stellar-mass black hole, may find itself in this disk.

For 23 years, Hubble and James Webb have peered into the heart of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster where millions of stars crowd into a space just 150 light-years across. In this stellar beehive, the motion of the stars betrayed an invisible partner: a main-sequence star (one that has not yet left the main evolutionary branch) seemed to be tugged in a dance with an unseen weight.

A cosmic sprinter on a short track: that's how you might describe planet GJ 367 b. It whips around its star in just 7.7 hours. This world is slightly smaller than Earth but has a personality: it was once thought to be nearly a solid ball of iron.

In the catalogs of exoplanets, there are many worlds with sizes between Earth and Neptune. They are divided into two groups: rocky super-Earths and gaseous mini-Neptunes. The Solar System has none of these, and scientists debate where they come from. The authors of the study looked into each planet's 'passport'—its orbit.

The atmosphere of Titan, discovered by Christiaan Huygens, is opaque to ordinary telescopes. But spectral analysis finds 'windows' of transparency — narrow regions where the haze parts.