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Astronomers think some of these explosions occur when a massive star — five or 10 times the mass of our sun — detonates, abruptly becoming a black hole. Gamma-ray bursts may also occur when two superdense stellar corpses called neutron stars collide, often forming a black hole. And conveniently, a gamma-ray burst that scientists watched during a few nights in 2019 likely occurred only about 1 billion light-years away from Earth, relatively close by for these dramatic events. Two NASA space-based observatories, Fermi and Swift, first detected the event, which is known as GRB 190829A because it was detected on...

Star Trek’s Spock comes from the planet Vulcan, which of course doesn’t exist. But new research might give us the next best thing—an exoplanet orbiting the real-life star that Vulcan is said to be orbiting in the Star Trek universe. In 1991, Gene Roddenberry wrote a letter to Sky & Telescope about what kind of star the planet Vulcan was likely to orbit. In that letter, he specifically picks out one such star, 40 Eridani. Later, 40 Eridani became the canon Vulcan star system featured in a handful of episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise.

Explanation: Big, beautiful, barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300 lies some 70 million light-years away on the banks of the constellation Eridanus. This Hubble Space Telescope composite view of the gorgeous island universe is one of the largest Hubble images ever made of a complete galaxy. NGC 1300 spans over 100,000 light-years and the Hubble image reveals striking details of the galaxy's dominant central bar and majestic spiral arms. In fact, on close inspection the nucleus of this classic barred spiral itself shows a remarkable region of spiral structure about 3,000 light-years across. Like other spiral galaxies, including our own Milky...

Explanation: Triggered by the impact of a coronal mass ejection on New Year's eve, a moderate geomagnetic storm brought a celebration of sky lights to planet Earth's high latitudes yesterday. In this New Year's nightscape, the shimmering reddish curtains of aurora australis along a southern horizon are captured over Morgiana, SW Victoria, Australia. Of course, more permanent jewels of the southern skies are on the scene. The southern Milky Way, Alpha and Beta Centauri, and bright stars of the Southern Cross are on the left. In silhouette, branches of the large foreground tree stretch across the Milky Way's satellite galaxies,...

The apparent development of a large void of some billion light-years in diameter in the Constellation Eridanus appears to be improbable given current cosmological models. A radical and controversial theory proposes that it is a "universe-in-mass black hole" rather than hypothetical dark matter responsible for the phenomenon described as the expanding-accelerating universe. This radical theory of cosmology suggests that stars at the edge of the Hubble length universe are being consumed by a universe-in-mass black hole. In August of 2007, astronomers at the University of Minnesota located a gigantic hole in the universe. This empty space, stretching nearly a billion...