Although mass is the most important property of stars, it has proved very hard to measure for the lowest mass objects in the universe. Thanks to a powerful new camera, a very rare, low-mass companion ...

China’s Shijian-21 spacecraft, a satellite with the stated purpose of cleaning up space junk, has an orbital companion, but we’re not entirely sure what it is. The Shijian-21 satellite was launched to ...

A team of scientists found a compact object 40,000 light-years from Earth that is either a very massive neutron star or an itsy-bitsy black hole, but they’re not sure which. The so-called mass gap ...

When there is a large difference in mass between two objects, such as between a star and a planet, the more massive object can exert a great deal of force on its companion. If this force is enough to ...

Thanks to the powerful new high-contrast camera installed at the Very Large Telescope, photos have been obtained of a low-mass companion very close to a star. This has allowed astronomers to measure ...

Two strange celestial bodies might have the clingiest friends in the cosmos. If the spinning neutron stars B1859+07 and B0919+06 are orbited by very dense objects once every few minutes – closer than ...

Stars may twinkle, but they don’t just vanish—so when a distant, giant star pulled a disappearing act for about 200 days, it took astronomers by surprise. Now, roughly a decade later, astronomers have ...

It turns out Uranus has a cosmic companion as it circles the sun from nearly 1.8 billion miles away. Scientists have detected a Trojan -- an asteroid-like object that shares a planet's orbit -- moving ...

Although mass is the most important property of stars, it has proved very hard to measure for the lowest mass objects in the universe. Thanks to a powerful new camera, a very rare, low-mass companion ...

Although mass is the most important property of stars, it has proved very hard to measure for the lowest mass objects in the universe. Thanks to a powerful new camera, a very rare, low-mass companion ...