WASHINGTON—Most galaxies are built around humongous black holes. While many of these are comparatively docile, like the one at our Milky Way’s center, some are fierce—guzzling surrounding material and unleashing huge and blazingly bright jets of high-energy particles far into space. Using data from the recently deployed Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) orbiting observatory, researchers…

SANTIAGO—An airplane-borne telescope has flown high above Chile at night this month to observe a sliver of the universe as scientists aim to gain a better understanding of how stars are born. The U.S. space agency NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a state-of-the-art Boeing 747 fitted with a telescope able to observe the…

A unique observatory in the Australian outback is using FM radio waves to track the thousands of satellites orbiting above the country. A world-first, the passive radar space observatory is tracking space debris as far as 10,000 kilometers (6214 miles) away. “We’re seeing increasing traffic in the space domain, so what we’re doing with sensors…

NASA has released a stunning new picture of our galaxy’s violent, super-energized “downtown.” It’s a composite of 370 observations over the past two decades by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, depicting billions of stars and countless black holes in the center, or heart, of the Milky Way. A radio telescope in South Africa also contributed…