Listen Now

BoBn 1 is not only a planetary nebula with an odd-to-pronounce name but also one of a very few planetary nebulae that have been found in the Milky Way's halo.

Gas ejected from the center of the quasar 1642+690 looks like it's travelling faster than the speed of light even though it isn't.

Messier 56 is a particularly old globular cluster that attracts a lot of attention from professional astronomers, although amateur astronomers have a tendency to overlook it.

As a large elliptical galaxy with a supermassive black hole and supersized jets of gas emerging from its nucleus, NGC 6251 inspires some astronomers to use thesauruses.

The red dwarf GJ 3470 has a gaseous exoplanet orbiting it in such a way that the planet passes between the star and the Earth, allowing astronomers to examine the atmosphere of the exoplanet.

NGC 3621 is one of a few galaxies where its distance has been measured with high accuracy using Cepheids and other stars with known brightness, thus making it very important for measuring the expansion of the universe.

A project using an interesting combination of methods was able to find a very faint red dwarf in orbit around the bright, nearby star Zeta Virginis.

PGC 43234 was a relatively uninteresting galaxy until its central supermassive black hole shredded a star in an event known as ASASSN-14li.

WR 40 is one of the brightest and best-studied Wolf-Rayet stars, a class of stars that are so hot that they are blowing themselves apart.

The group of galaxies called the IC 1860 Group looks like it was recently disturbed by a spiral galaxy falling into it.

The nearby star DENIS J104814.7-395606 is cool (in the sense that it is awesome) because it is so cool (in the sense that it has a very low surface temperature for a star).

PSR 0820+02 is the second pulsar ever discovered to be in a binary star system.

A number of peculiarities about the lenticular galaxy NGC 5102 indicate that a dwarf galaxy fell into it several hundred million years ago.

NGC 55 has the interesting distinction of being the closest galaxy to Earth that is seen edge-on, and it also contains an ultraminous X-ray source (ULX) uncreatively named NGC 55 ULX.

NGC 281, which is also called the Pacman Nebula, is a place where star formation has been triggered two different ways, although the stars are not chased by any Ghost Nebulae.

Even though it may be rather ordinary from a scientific standpoint, the open cluster Messier 23 is a very popular with amateur astronomers.

Everything about the triple star system V505 Sgr looked normal aside from an abrupt change in the orbits of the stars sometime around the year 2000.

The short gamma ray burst GRB 100206A was found in a luminous infrared galaxy, which is very unusual place to find such gamma ray bursts.

4U 1957+115 is a low mass X-ray binary, a binary star system with a normal star about the size of the Sun and a relatively small black hole three times the mass of the Sun, and it also has an unfortunately confusing name.

The extremely bright, point-like emission from J1955+5131 in visible light and radio waves makes it useful for matching up images from different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum as well as an interesting object in its own right.