Universe Today
Could Primordial Black Holes Be Hiding in Plain Sight?
NASA Wants Students' Help Designing Missions to Other Moons
Antarctica Has Gotten 10 Times Greener in 35 Years
White Dwarfs Could Have Habitable Planets, Detectable by JWST
White dwarfs are dead stars like our Sun. Although they're no longer performing fusion in their cores, they're still hot and putting out radiation that could support life. A new paper calculates that a white dwarf could support planets in a new habitable zone for 7 billion years, providing the right temperature and radiation to support a biosphere. They're also small and dim, which makes it easier to study planets in orbit around them for potential biosignatures.
Continue reading
Catch Jupiter at Opposition 2024 This Coming Weekend
Dragonfly is Going to Titan on a Falcon Heavy
A New Reconfigurable Structure Could Be Used to Make Space Habitats
What's Inside Uranus and Neptune? A New Way to Find Out
Uranus and Neptune are "ice giants," containing chemicals like methane and ammonia, but compressed under intense pressure. This is just speculation from a couple of flybys with Voyager 2 and telescope observations. A new paper suggests that Uranus and Neptune have distinct layers, which don't easily mix and could explain their unusual magnetic fields. Below the cloud layers is a deep ocean of water and then a compressed fluid of carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen.
Continue reading
Just Built a Giant, Next Generation Planet Hunting Space Telescope? Here's Where to Point It
NASA Is Seeking Ideas for Rescuing an Astronaut from the Moon
A CubeSat Mission to Phobos Could Map Staging Bases for a Mars Landing
Interstellar Objects Can't Hide From Vera Rubin
When the Vera Rubin Observatory comes online in a few months, it'll be the most effective asteroid and comet hunter ever built. And not just the homegrown variety, Rubin will discover interstellar objects like Oumuamua and Borisov passing through the Solar System. A new paper suggests the kinds of machine learning algorithms that will have the best chance of uncovering these fast-moving objects as they move through the field of view from night to night.
Continue reading
The Early Earth Wasn't Completely Terrible
Globular Clusters Evolve in Interesting Ways Over Time
A Superfast Supercomputer Creates the Biggest Simulation of the Universe Yet
How Much Are Asteroids Really Worth?
Euclid Could Find 170,000 Strong Gravitational Lenses
Uranus's Wobbling Moons Could Point to Oceans Under the Ice
Stem Cells Grown in Space Could Revolutionize Medicine Here on Earth
Magnetic Tornado is Stirring up the Haze at Jupiter's Poles
Is There Seismic Activity on Venus? Here's How We Could Find Out
The Holiday Fireplace Video We Needed
An AI Chemist Made A Catalyst to Make Oxygen On Mars Using Local Materials
Asteroid Samples Returned to Earth Were Immediately Colonized by Bacteria
There is no place you can go on Earth that hasn't been colonized by bacteria, from the bottom of the oceans to the cloud tops. And when Japanese researchers examined samples of Asteroid Ryugu from the Hayabusa2 mission, they realized the little devils had found a new home. Despite containment protocols, with the samples delivered in a hermetically sealed chamber, opened in airtight containers in nitrogen gas, in a negative pressure room, life found a way.
Continue reading
An Insanely High-Resolution Image of the Sun
Scientists Reveal a New Way to Study Near-Earth Asteroids
The Hubble and FU Orionis: a New Look at an Old Mystery
China Tests a Reusable Inflatable Module in Space
OKEANOS - A Mission That Would Have Retrurned Samples From the Trojan Asteroids
Fantastic New Image of the Sombrero Galaxy From Webb
You're looking at a fantastic new image of the Sombrero Galaxy captured by JWST. If you look carefully, you can see the clumpy, cloud-like outer ring made of gas and dust. At the center is an actively feeding supermassive black hole. Thousands of globular star clusters surround the galaxy. In Webb's infrared view, the thick outer ring seen by Hubble disappears, revealing the complex structure underneath that produces surprisingly few stars.
Continue reading
We're Living in an Abnormal Galaxy
Testing the Robots that Might Explore Europa
Einstein Predicted How Gravity Should Work at the Largest Scales. And He Was Right
Researchers working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument have mapped nearly 6 million galaxies across 11 billion years of the Universe's history. In a new study, they explain that gravity at the largest scales behaves exactly as Einstein predicted it would with the general theory of relativity. These observations also limit the possible theories of modified gravity, which have been proposed to explain dark matter observations.
Continue reading
Watch the Crescent Moon Occult Spica for North America Early Wednesday Morning
NASA Releases its Moon Phases Animation for 2025
NASA, SpaceX Illustrate Key Moments of Artemis Lunar Lander Mission
The Last Arecibo Message Celebrates the Observatory and One of its Greatest Accomplishments
A Nearby Supernova Could Finally Reveal Dark Matter
Astronomers Find a 3 Million Year Old Planet
There was Hot Water on Mars 4.45 Billion Years Ago
Mars formed 4.5 billion years ago, roughly the same time as the Earth. We know that water was stable on Earth since about 4.3 billion years ago, but when was it present on Mars? Researchers investigated a meteorite that originated from Mars and found zircon crystals that date back to 4.45 billion years ago. They believe this could be the oldest evidence for water on Mars. And not just water, but hot water welling up from hydrothermal systems beneath the surface.
Continue reading
Axion Dark Matter May Make Spacetime Ring
Earth's Old Trees Keep A Record of Powerful Solar Storms
New Supercomputer Simulation Explains How Mars Got Its Moons
One mystery in planetary science is a satisfying origin story for Mars's moons, Phobos and Deimos. Were they chunks of Mars blasted into space by a meteor impact? Were they captured asteroids from the belt? A new supercomputer simulation found that a reasonable explanation could come from a massive asteroid passing just close enough to Mars that it was torn into pieces. Over time, chunks and debris would have settled into a disk around Mars and clumped into moons.
Continue reading
The Early Universe May Have Had Giant Batteries of Dust
The First Close-Up Picture of Star Outside the Milky Way
Here's What We Know About Earth's Temporary Mini-Moon
New Study Suggests Black Holes Get their "Hair" from their Mothers
Gaze at New Pictures of the Sun from Solar Orbiter
Here's How to Weigh Gigantic Filaments of Dark Matter
How Could Astronauts Call for Help from the Moon?
