Theoreticians in two different fields defied the common knowledge that planets orbit stars like the Sun. They proposed the possibility of thousands of planets around a supermassive black hole.

Scientists proved for the first time that the galaxy NGC 6240 contains three supermassive black holes. The unique observations show the black holes close to each other in the core of the galaxy. The study points to simultaneous merging processes during the formation of the largest galaxies in the universe.

A radio telescope in the Western Australian outback has captured a spectacular new view of the center of the galaxy in which we live, the Milky Way. The image from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope shows what our galaxy would look like if human eyes could see radio waves.

The direction in which a galaxy spins depends on its mass, researchers have found.

Two peacock-shaped gaseous clouds were revealed in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). A team of astronomers found several massive baby stars in the complex filamentary clouds, which agrees well with computer simulations of giant collisions of gaseous clouds. The researchers interpret this to mean that the filaments and young stars are telltale evidence of violent interactions between the LMC and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) 200 million years ago.

NASA satellites, no matter the destination, have to communicate their data to mission control and scientists on Earth. These missions capture extraordinary data that make communications an essential part of each mission: pictures of galaxies, critical information on solar flares and much more. An interactive online tool now shows live data transmissions from each of NASA's three space communications networks and the missions supported by those data.

Some of the most dramatic events in the universe occur when certain stars die—and explode catastrophically in the process.

Astronomers have conducted high-resolution spectroscopic observations of IRAS 18379–1707 (or LS 5112), a candidate post-asymptotic giant branch (post-AGB) star in the Milky Way galaxy. Results of the observations provide more details about the properties of this object, revealing that it is a metal-poor, high-velocity star. The findings are detailed in a paper published November 28 on arXiv.org.

Black holes in the early universe pose a bit of a problem. Based on observations from telescopes on Earth and in space, we know that some black holes grew to be a billion times the mass of the sun just one billion years after the Big Bang. Our current models of black hole growth, however, can't explain this speed of growth. So how did these supermassive black holes come about?

A Cornell senior has come up with a way to discern life on exoplanets loitering in other cosmic neighborhoods: a spectral field guide.