compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan

Did an Alien Life-Form Do a Drive-By of Our Solar System in 2017? On Nov. 12, 2018, Avi Loeb, then the chairman of the astronomy department at Harvard, and a young research associate, Shmuel Bialy, published a paper in the highly prestigious Astrophysical Journal Letters arguing that humans may have discovered the first evidence of alien technology…more

George Carruthers, Whose Telescopes Explored Space, Dies at 81 At a time when there were few other Black astrophysicists, he developed a telescopic device that went to the moon on Apollo 16. George Carruthers built his first telescope from a kit in 1949, when he was 10 and living in rural Ohio…more

Six Stars, Six Eclipses: ‘The Fact That It Exists Blows My Mind’ A handful of other six-star systems have been discovered, but this one is unique. From star-destroying black holes to exploding comets, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has spotted its share of surprises since it began searching the galaxy for exoplanets in 2018…more

Citizen scientists create 3D map of brown dwarfs in our sun’s neighborhood A citizen scientist group has created the most complete map to date of brown dwarfs neighboring our solar system. Celestial bodies known as brown dwarfs, which are essentially failed stars, are too big to be considered planets and too small to be considered stars…more

Missing: One Black Hole With 10 Billion Solar Masses One of the biggest galaxies in the universe seems to lack its dark centerpiece. Astronomers are searching the cosmic lost-and-found for one of the biggest, baddest black holes thought to exist. So far they haven’t found it…more

NASA’s Mega Rocket to the Moon Faces Setback After Test A test firing of the engines of the Space Launch System was halted after only about a minute, meaning NASA astronauts may have to wait longer before setting foot on the moon again. After billions of dollars and a decade of work, NASA’s plans to send astronauts back to the moon had a new setback…more

A Bitter Archaeological Feud Over an Ancient Vision of the Cosmos The Nebra sky disk, which has been called the oldest known depiction of astronomical phenomena, is a “very emotional object.” The disk is small — just 12 inches in diameter — but it has loomed large in the minds of people across millenniums…more

A distant galaxy dies as astronomers watch Galaxies die when the stars that live in them stop forming. Now, for the first time, astronomers have witnessed this phenomenon in a distant galaxy. Scientists were able to glimpse a galaxy as it ejected almost half of the gas it uses to form stars. They captured this rare observation…more

 Meet the First Comet of 2021! On January 3, 2021, an American astronomer Gregory J. Leonard discovered a new comet at the Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona, USA. It was named C/2021 A1 (Leonard) – the letter “C” means “non-periodic comet”, and “2021 A1” indicates that it was the first comet discovered in the first half of January 2021…more