The big picture: Quasars are the brightest objects known to exist in the universe, consisting of supermassive black holes that eat enormous amounts of matter. Astronomers recently revealed that ...

A completely dark, invisible object weighing 1 million times the mass of the Sun has been detected through its gravitational ...

Astronomers have detected one of the darkest objects ever seen at a record cosmic distance—only with the assistance of gravity. The discovery is an important step toward the observation of dark matter ...

When a star is young, it is often still surrounded by a primordial rotating disk of gas and dust, from which planets can form. Astronomers like to find such disks because they might be able to catch ...

Planets usually stay close to their host stars, tracing steady paths shaped by gravity. Yet some planets break free and drift alone through the Milky Way. Astronomers call these objects free-floating ...

This one-million-year-old star-forming region contains thousands of new stars and hundreds of planetary mass objects floating freely in the nebula, not orbiting stars. A groundbreaking study published ...

How do rogue planetary-mass objects -- celestial bodies with masses between stars and planets -- form? An international team of astronomers has used advanced simulations to show that these enigmatic ...