FreeFloating

The German band Can, whose former singer Damo Suzuki has died at the age of 74, were innovators in many ways, but particularly because the group harboured two of the most original rock vocalists who ever lived. While their 1969 debut album, Monster Movie, featured the machine-gun poetic stylings of American expat Malcolm Mooney, it was Japanese free spirit Kenji ‘Damo’ Suzuki, who appeared on three stunning studio albums between 1971 and 1973, who most completely embodied their adventurous ethos.A 1971 TV clip from the…

According to them, these objects are too light to have formed alone and are unexpectedly numerous. Free-floating Jupiter-sized “planets” found in space and orbiting only each other have baffled astronomers, forcing them to rethink their theories of star and planet formation.Astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to identify 500 or so previously unseen spots in Orion Nebula in October.The telescope observed about 40 pairs in a detailed new survey of the famous Orion Nebula and found that dozens of…

Festive Hubble Space Telescope image showing a small region of the well-known nebula Westerhout 5, which lies around 7,000 light years away. Credit:ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. SahaiJust in time for Christmas, this new Picture of the Week from the Hubble Space Telescope features a glistening scene in holiday red. This festive image shows a small region of the well-known nebula Westerhout 5, which is located approximately 7,000 light-years from Earth. Suffused with bright red light, this luminous image hosts a variety of…

Rogue planets have baffled astronomers for ages. Unlike regular planets which revolve around stars, these free-floating planets (FFPs) get ejected from star systems to move about in the galaxy on their own. In the latest discovery, astronomers found the largest cluster of rogue planets in a single star-forming region. With an approximate discovery of 100 FFPs, the new sample is said to double the existing sample of known rogue planets. Not more than a decade ago, NASA's Kepler space telescope had discovered a…

Artist’s illustration of a black hole.Gravitational microlensing turns up <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>black hole</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A black hole is a place in space where the pull of gravity is so strong not even light can escape it. Astronomers classify black holes into three categories by size: miniature, stellar, and supermassive black holes. Miniature black holes could have a mass smaller than…