Robert Lea

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescope, scientists have investigated if nearby exoplanets could support life, or if their stars are blasting them with too much deadly high-energy radiation.

By precisely tracking the orbit of over 156,000 asteroids, the ESA star-surveying satellite Gaia has potentially found over 350 previously undiscovered asteroid-moon binaries.

By examining a distant supermassive black hole, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found a shocking link between jets and dust around these cosmic titans.

Scientists have tracked mysterious, violent blasts of radiation called fast radio bursts to plasma-blowing, highly magnetic dead stars or magnetars.

V889 Herculis is an oddball unlike any other star we've ever seen. The nearby sun-like star rotates in a strange way that defies prediction.

Planets orbiting red dwarf stars may have a harder time hanging on to the conditions needed for life to arise and survive than previously thought, data from NASA's dead space telescope GALEX reveals.

Ten neutron stars found lurking in the Milky Way include cosmic black widows killing stars with "webs" of viscous plasma and a speed demon that spins over 700 times per second.

The sun could collect rogue planets and hold them at the outskirts of the solar system for millions of years, occasionally trading them with neighboring star Alpha Centauri.

New research using Apollo mission samples has determined that the impact of meteorites on the lunar surface is primarily responsible for generating the moon's thin and nebulous atmosphere.

Particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider have failed to turn up potential dark matter candidates, but could galaxy cluster smashes be used as cosmic dark matter colliders?

NASA's Roman Space Telescope will look all the way back to cosmic dawn 400 million years after the Big Bang to discover how the universe fundamentally changed at this crucial point in its history.

Astronomers have discovered that Saturn has thrown a newly found comet on its way out of the solar system. Comet A117uUD is expected to go interstellar at 6,700 mph.

Using data from the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes, scientists have determined that dark matter ghosted through the wreckage of two colliding galaxy clusters over 5 billion light-years away.

Scientists have analyzed images of the twin asteroids Didymos and Dimorphous taken by NASA's DART mission before it impacted the smaller space rock, revealing their age and origins.

Astronomers may have solved the mystery of how the complex building blocks of life first formed, finding dust traps around young stars could make an ideal formation location.

Dark matter could act as a cosmic matchmaker between dark matter and merging supermassive black holes, solving astronomy's "final parsec problem."

Using NASA's Fermi telescope, astronomers have discovered a hidden "annihilation feature" in the gamma-ray burst known as the "BOAT," or the "brightest of all time."

Astronomers have found that Ariel, a moon of Uranus, has some of the most carbon dioxide-rich deposits in the solar system, hinting at a buried water ocean.

Habitability depends on more than just a planet's distance from its host star. New research looks at the impact stellar magnetism has on exoplanets.

Citizen scientists have discovered what may be a brown dwarf racing through the cosmos at around 1.2 million miles per hour. Now astronomers want to know what launched it.

Using data from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, scientists have determined that the solar system's tiniest planet, Mercury, hides a not-so-tiny secret: a 10-mile-thick mantle of diamond.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have investigated a super-Jupiter that is one of the coldest exoplanets ever directly imaged.

"Cosmic lighthouses" comprised of rapidly spinning dead stars that blast out radiowaves could be used to shed new light on dark matter, the universe's most mysterious "stuff."

Astronomers have detected 21 rare systems with widely separated neutron stars and sun-like stars. These binaries are "one in a million" and challenge dead star binary formation models.

A missing link black hole that sits in the mass gap between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes is "parked" right by the Milky Way's central black hole, Sagittarius A*.