Universe Today
New Research Suggests Io Doesn't Have a Shallow Ocean of Magma
The Mysterious Case of the Resurrected Star
The JWST Looked Over the Hubble's Shoulder and Confirmed that the Universe is Expanding Faster
Astronaut Don Pettit is Serious, He Rigged up Astrophotography Gear on the ISS
Don Pettit is one of the astronauts currently on board the International Space Station. He's also a serious shutterbug and amateur astronomer. To take advantage of his current lofty perspective, he rigged up a special star tracking mount that he could use to take long-exposure astrophotos from the ISS. The homemade orbital sidereal tracker rotates at a 90-minute period to match the pitch rate of the ISS, allowing him to take 30-second exposures.
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Drone Test Flights Are Being Tested for Flights on Alien Worlds
One of the Most Interesting Exoplanets Just Got Even More Interesting!
Zwicky Classifies More Than 10,000 Exploding Stars
What is the Zoo Hypothesis?
A New Study Suggests How we Could Find Advanced Civilizations that Ran Out of Fusion Fuel
We Might Finally Know How Galaxies Grow So Large
Building Concrete on Mars From Local Materials
New Research Indicates the Sun may be More Prone to Flares Than we Thought
NASA's Perseverance Rover Reaches the Top Rim of the Jezero Crater
Antimatter Propulsion Is Still Far Away, But It Could Change Everything
Could Planets Orbiting Two Stars Have Moons?
Webb Weighs an Early Twin of the Milky Way
Astronomers have used JWST to weigh a galaxy in the early Universe, finding that it has roughly the same mass as the Milky Way should have had at the same time in the Universe's history. The galaxy was seen in a gravitational lens and contains a collection of star clusters, so astronomers have nicknamed it the "Firefly Sparkle Galaxy." The galaxy also contains companion dwarf galaxies, similar to the Milky Way's Magellanic Clouds, which probably merged with it.
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Do the Fastest Spinning Pulsars Contain Quark Matter?
When a massive star dies as a supernova, it can leave behind a pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star. The fastest pulsars can spin upwards of 700 times a second, blasting out regular pulses of energy. In a new paper, researchers propose that the fastest-spinning pulsars could contain quark matter in their cores. This would be even denser matter than neutrons and help explain how surprisingly massive neutron stars can spin so rapidly, maybe reaching 1,000 Hz.
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Another Clue About the Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays: Magnetic Turbulence
NASA Thinks it Knows Why Ingenuity Crashed on Mars
New Research may Explain how Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe Grew so Fast
Early Earth's Oceans of Magma Accelerated the Moon's Departure
When the Earth was struck by a Mars-sized planet in its early history, it ejected a debris cloud that led to the formation of the Moon. In the beginning, the Moon was extremely close to the Earth, but then conservation of angular momentum led to the Moon drifting away from the Earth - it's still doing it today. Because the Earth was covered in oceans of magma, researchers think the Moon moved quickly away from the Earth, getting to 25 Earth radii within 100,000 years.
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Could the ESA's PLATO Mission Find Earth 2.0?
Zap! A Black Hole Scores a Direct Hit With its Jet
Does Life Really Need Planets? Maybe Not
Tidal Steams of Interstellar Objects May Flow Through the Milky Way Like Braided Rivers
Interstellar objects visit our solar system all the time. A new study shows they likely come in streams of sibling objects from the same star system.
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An Interstellar Visitor Helped Shape the Orbits of the Planets.
A Commercial Tie-Up Bring High-Energy Nuclear Electric Propulsion Closer to Reality
New Technique for Spotting Dyson Rings Unveiled.
High Velocity Clouds Comprise Less of the Milky Way's Mass Than We Thought
A survey of high velocity clouds in the galactic halo of the Milky Way finds that they make up less of our galaxy's mass than we had previously thought.
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Has the Universe Been Designed to Support Life? Now We Have a Way to Test it!
Webb Sees a Supercluster of Galaxies Coming Together
Hubble Gets its Best Look At the First Quasar
Do We Really Know What Becomes a Type Ia Supernova?
Type Ia supernovae are crucial to our understanding of cosmology. But we still don't fully understand what causes them.
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A Cheap Satellite with Large Fuel Tank Could Scout For Interplanetary Missions
Our Strategy to Catch the 2024 Geminid Meteors
Observations by DESI Open the Door to Modified Gravity Models
Observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument suggest that the rate of cosmic expansion may be changing over the time. While this wouldn't rule out general relativity, it opens the door to modified gravity models, which may better match the data.
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Using Jupiter as a Dark Matter Detector
Space Telescopes Could See a Second Life With a Servicing Mission
Other Liquids Could Be Forming Minerals on Mars
Jared Isaacman is Trump's Choice for NASA Administrator
NASA Pushes Human Moon Landing Back to 2027
Advanced Civilizations Could be Indistinguishable from Nature
Cosmology is at a Crossroads, But New Instruments are Coming to Help
Thanks to Hubble, JWST, and the Planck mission, we're starting to see cracks in the current ideas in cosmology, expressed by the Hubble Tension, the Cosmic Shear Tension, and the role dark energy plays in the expansion of the Universe over time. Good news: powerful new instruments are already surveying the Universe and should measure any deviations from the widely held cosmological models. It's a fun time to be an astronomer.
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A 3U CubeSat Could Collect Data During an Asteroid Flyby
China Plans to Retrieve Mars Samples by 2031
Here's How Interstellar Objects and Rogue Planets Can be Trapped in the Solar System
MeerKAT Confirms the Gravitational Wave Background of the Universe in Record Time
Astronomers are collecting evidence for the gravitational wave background of the Universe, caused by merging supermassive black holes. Now, the MeerKAT radio telescope has confirmed the discovery first made by the NANOGrav experiment, but in a third of the time. For the last five years, MeerKAT has monitored dozens of millisecond pulsars once a week, detecting subtle changes in their radio emissions as gravitational waves flow by.
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Could We Use An Asteroid to Shield Astronauts On Their Way to Mars?
Maybe Venus Was Never Habitable
The planetary science community argues back and forth about when Venus was last habitable. Did it lose its oceans billions of years ago, or more recently? A new paper suggests that Venus has been a hellscape for its entire history. No oceans, ever. This result comes from the ratio of atmospheric chemicals and how quickly they're replenished by volcanic outgassing. On Earth, volcanic eruptions are mostly steam from interior water, but on Venus, they're 6% water at most.
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Astronauts on Long Missions Will Need Personal AI Assistants
