Universe Today

So, did you miss the August 12th total solar eclipse? Like lots of humanity, we sat out the celestial drama of this month's solar eclipse, both total and partial. But the good news is, a large swath of the world can still catch the eclipse season spirit, with a deep, nearly total partial lunar eclipse next week. The event is the last eclipse of four (two lunar and two solar) for 2026. This also m…

Something's wetting the surface of dwarf planet Pluto along the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, and planetary scientists have found a good explanation for it. A recent study of new Horizons images taken during the 2015 flyby revealed evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising up through cracks in Sputnik Planitia. That's the giant heart-shaped glacial basin we see in all the Pluto images taken by…

Astronomers have discovered another S star, the population of stars that orbits the Milky Way's SMBH. This one is the fastest of them all, and also comes closest to the SMBH. It will let astronomers test relativity, especially the Lense-Thirring effect.

In our fourth installment in the Interstellar Travel series, we'll examine solar sails, magnetosails, and directed-energy propulsion (DEP), which are currently the most plausible methods for reaching another star system within a human lifetime.

It seems the overwhelming majority of the time when we write about satellite megaconstellations, it’s as a warning. That’s not because they aren’t useful, but because they hold the potential to completely destroy our access to space if not managed properly, and possibly cause a whole bunch of Earth-based devastation as well. So it probably won’t come as a surprise when there is yet another paper …

Remember the “Wow!” signal? That high energy radio signature happened in 1977, when the Earth was much “quieter” in the radio band. If it were to happen today, it probably wouldn’t even move the needle on the background noise of human radio chatter. Signals from satellites, radar, and other human technology have crowded out extraterrestrial radio signals, limiting our ability to monitor the heave…

When the JWST peered into the ancient Universe, it found surprisingly massive galaxies. These galaxies were so massive they challenged our understanding of how quickly galaxies can assemble. But new research says that multitudes of low-mass stars are hiding in these galaxies, and they're actually even more massive than we thought. When will it end?

A single pixel of light holds astonishing detail. How ocean glint, rotational mapping, and the vegetation red edge let us read a distant planet's oceans, continents, and even forests, all without ever resolving it as more than a point.

Nitrous oxide (otherwise known as laughing gas) is likely a key atmospheric component of life in the cosmos.

Astronomers know that evolved AGB stars shed their outer layers, contributing to the makeup of the interstellar medium. But new JWST observations show this can happen even near a supermassive black hole, where powerful radiation could obliterate molecules.

For decades, scientists have theorized that young protostar jets are shaped and driven by complex, twisted magnetic fields. But they couldn't detect them. Now, thanks to ALMA, they've found them around a young binary protostar.

Of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, Callisto is the one that gets the least attention. Io is constantly being resurfaced by volcanoes. Europa has a giant liquid water ocean. And Ganymede has its own magnetic field that interacts with its parent planet in weird ways. Callisto, by comparison, seems sedate, with its ancient, crater-saturated surface seemingly frozen in time. But new data from the Jame…

Gravitational wave astronomy has seen plenty of improvements since the original signal was captured in 2015. Despite that, it remains an engineering challenge to actually create the detectors needed for the precise measurements that gravitational waves require. A new NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant is funding a concept from a team led by Paul Stankus at Brookhaven National Labor…

The Habitable Worlds Observatory is being built for one purpose: to directly image another living Earth. Inside the coronagraph that must block ten billion times the planet's light, the picometer-stable mirror we don't yet know how to build, and the messy problem of reading an atmosphere.

The surface of Mars is home to some of the most breathtaking and awe-inspiring landscapes in the solar system. This is primarily due to the Red Planet lacking several re-surfacing processes that Earth possesses, including plate tectonics, volcanism, and flowing water. While Mars does have dust storms, this has done little to reshape the planet’s surface, which has remained largely undisturbed for…

Astronomers used new MOTHRA telescope in Chile to image the famous Helix Nebula. They found 22 glowing shock waves where stellar debris from a dying star collided with interstellar gas. After colliding with gas, stellar fragments remain intact for just 10,000 years, the team estimates. The observations show how dying stars are recycled and return material to the interstellar medium to form new st…

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of NGC 2392 (also known as the Lion Nebula), which Hubble previously imaged in 2000.

Black holes aren't just engines of inexorable destruction. They're complex regions of space and time, and under the right conditions, giant planets can form in their AGN disks.

Engineers developed a unique fabric-based design for a ground-penetrating radar that will be a key instrument on NASA’s SkyFall Mars helicopters. The hardware will enable the SkyFall mission’s trio of planetary rotorcraft to use ground-penetrating radar to study the Martian subsurface.

Little red dots have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in JWST data from the Universe’s deep past. Their ‘powering engines’ might resemble a newly discovered phenomenon dubbed a “black hole star”—an early, rapidly growing black hole wrapped in dense gas. This object, described in a study published today in Nature by researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and…