ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

A team of astrophysicists has arrived at a major result regarding star populations beyond the Milky Way. The result could change our understanding of a wide range of astronomical phenomena, including the formation of black holes, supernovae and why galaxies die.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has calibrated more than 40 'milepost markers' of space and time to help scientists precisely measure the expansion rate of the universe -- a quest with a plot twist.

The astronomers' goal: find an artificial intelligence algorithm to interpret microlensing events captured by the upcoming Roman Space Telescope and speed detection of exoplanets around other stars. They achieved that, but the AI told them something unexpected and deep: the theory used to infer stellar and exoplanetary masses and orbits from observations was incomplete. Digging into the mathematics, they uncovered a theory that explains all types of microlensing events and possible ambiguities in interpreting them.

Astronomers have found a previously overlooked treasure trove of massive black holes in dwarf galaxies. The newly discovered black holes offer a glimpse into the life story of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Nearly half of Sun-size stars are binary. According to new research, planetary systems around binary stars may be very different from those around single stars. This points to new targets in the search for extraterrestrial life forms.