ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

Researchers have theorized that in addition to the gravitational waves originating from vacuum fluctuations during inflation, a large amount of gravitational waves can be sourced by the quantum vacuum fluctuations of additional fields during inflation.

The Earth sits in a 1,000-light-year-wide void surrounded by thousands of young stars -- but how did those stars form? For the first time, astronomers have retraced the history of our galactic neighborhood, showing exactly how the young stars nearest to our solar system formed.

With the help of the CHEOPS space telescope, an international team was able to detect the deformation of an exoplanet for the first time. Due to strong tidal forces, the appearance of the planet WASP-103b resembles a rugby ball rather than a sphere.

The results of a comprehensive search for a background of ultra-low frequency gravitational waves has been announced by an international team of astronomers.

Researchers have found that the black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, not only flares irregularly from day to day but also in the long term.

Using observations of Centaurus A, a nearby elliptical galaxy, obtained with the Gaia space telescope and ground-based instruments under the PISCeS survey, a team of astronomers presents an unprecedented number of globular cluster candidates in the outer regions of the galaxy. The findings provide astronomers with an even more detailed picture of galactic architecture and history of collisions and mergers.

Astronomers are one step closer to revealing the properties of dark matter enveloping our Milky Way galaxy, thanks to a new map of twelve streams of stars orbiting within our galactic halo.