Astronomers have learned that the pull of gravity can sometimes overcome the strong magnetic fields found in great star-forming clouds in space. The resulting weakly magnetized gas flow can feed the growth of new stars.
A group of citizen scientists working with a NASA citizen science project called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 has discovered 95 new brown dwarfs in the sun's nearby neighborhood.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said this week that it has now been officially informed that its Hayabusa2 space capsule - carrying precious dust captured from the surface of near-Earth asteroid Ryugu - is approved for landing in Australia.
NASA has posted a sampling of some of the most awe-inspiring photos of Mars, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the launch of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They are proof that Mars is a very photogenic world.
Asteroid ZTF0DxQ - now officially labeled 2020 QG - now holds the record for the closest flyby of Earth. It swept just 2,000 miles (3,000 km) from Earth's surface, or about a quarter of the diameter of Earth itself.
Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope revealed a large amount of dense hot gas moving outwards through Betelgeuse’s extended atmosphere. This gas might have cooled and formed a dust cloud that partially blocked the star's light as seen from Earth, earlier this year.
NASA's 2nd planet-hunter, TESS, has spent 2 years surveying the sky for exoplanets orbiting distant stars. It has found over 2,000 exoplanets so far. TESS now moves into its extended mission phase.
The mysterious bright spots on Ceres caused a sensation when the Dawn spacecraft first spied them in 2015. Now, they're known to be salt deposits from a recent or ongoing percolation of briny water from a large reservoir in Ceres' interior.
This distant galaxy - SPT0418-47 - surprised astronomers by being organized enough to have a spinning disk and a galactic bulge, early in the history of our universe.