Universe Today
There Was a 15 Minute Warning Before Tonga Volcano Exploded
Main Sequence and White Dwarf Binaries are Hiding in Plain Sight
What a Misplaced Meteorite Told Us About Mars
Uranus is Getting Colder and Now We Know Why
How Scientists Repurposed a Camera on ESA's Mars Express Mission
SpIRIT CubeSat Demonstrates a Operational Gamma and X-Ray Detector
Sun-Like Stars Around Black Holes: What Gives?
Starship's Booster (and Donald Trump) Make a Splash With Sixth Flight Test
The Strange Pulsar at the Center of the Crab Nebula
The Biggest Black Holes May Start From The Tiniest Seeds
China's Proposed Cargo Shuttle, the Haolong, Has Entered Development
Up to a Third of Stars Ate Some of their Planets
The Large Magellanic Cloud Survived its Closest Approach to the Milky Way
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the closest, brightest dwarf galaxy to the Milky Way—20 times bigger than the full Moon in the sky. Astronomers think that the LMC just completed its closest approach to the Milky Way, blowing away the spherical halo of gas surrounding it. Smaller galaxies would have shut down star formation, but the LMC has enough material to keep forming stars. New observations from Hubble have helped astronomers measure its halo structure.
Continue reading
The New Mars Landing Approach: How We'll Land Large Payloads on the Red Planet
Three More "Galactic Monster" Ultra-Massive Galaxies Found
James Webb Confirms Hubble's Calculation of Hubble's Constant
What Should Light Sails Be Made Out Of?
A Giant Meteorite Impact 3.26 Billion Years Ago Helped Push Life Forward
America's Particle Physics Plan Spans the Globe — and the Cosmos
Millions of Phones Could Map the Earth's Ionosphere
Detecting Primordial Black Hole Mergers Might be Within Our Grasp
One explanation for dark matter is that it's made out of primordial black holes, formed in the earliest moments of the universe. Although they've never been seen directly, asteroid-mass black holes could account for all the dark matter influence. It's believed that these low-mass black holes would be undetectable as they merged, releasing gravitational waves. But according to a new paper, if the conditions are ideal, there are instruments that might detect these mergers.
Continue reading
What's Behind the Martian Methane Mystery?
Scientists Develop Technique to Create 3D Models of Cosmic Structures
The Best Way to Find Planet Nine Might Be Hundreds of Tiny Telescopes
Although the outer Solar System is mostly empty, there are icy objects drifting within the very limits of detection by our largest telescopes. But maybe small telescopes can be more successful. A new paper suggests that an array of 200 automated 40-cm telescopes spread across 1,000 km could be the best way to find them. They would watch for changes in brightness as objects pass in front of stars and could even find the hypothetical Planet Nine.
Continue reading
It Takes Very Special Conditions to Create This Bizarre Stellar Spectacle
A New Look a the Most Ancient Light in the Universe
About 370,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe had cooled down so light could escape, traveling for billions of years to reach our telescopes. This is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, and the very last light released is known as "last scattering," when reflected, polarized light was released. New observations from the South Pole Telescope have completed a comprehensive survey of this polarized light, revealing more about the Universe's earliest history.
Continue reading
Space Tourism: The Good, The Bad, The Meh
New Study Examines Cosmic Expansion, Leading to a New Drake Equation
Pentagon's Latest UFO Report Identifies Hotspots for Sightings
A New Way to Detect Daisy Worlds
Two Supermassive Black Holes on the Verge of a Merger
Researchers have been keeping an eye on the center of a galaxy located about a billion light-years away. Every few months, the galaxy center releases a flash of X-rays, which appears to be coming from a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting one another. They're only about a light-day apart and contain a combined 40 million solar masses. They take 130 days to orbit and are expected to collide in about 70,000 years.
Continue reading
Interferometry Will Be the Key to Resolving Exoplanets
A New Mission To Pluto Could Answer the Questions Raised by New Horizons
Astronomers Map the Shape of a Black Hole's Corona for the First Time
The Sun is surrounded by the corona, a region of superheated gas above the surface that can be millions of degrees. Black holes have them too, but they can be billions of degrees. Astronomers have used NASA's IPXE mission to map the shape of a black hole corona for the first time. They found the corona matches the shape of the accretion disk feeding material into the black hole, and not a giant sphere that surrounds the region.
Continue reading
Yes, Virginia, The Universe is Still Making Galaxies
Our Breathtaking Cosmos: New Zealand Astrophotography Winners Announced
Why are Some Quasars So Lonely?
Congressional Hearing Fuels Fresh Debate About UFOs
New Study Examines How Extraterrestrial Civilizations Could Become "Stellivores."
A Screw-Driven Robot Could Autonomously Mine Rocky Worlds
How Life Could Live Under the Ice on Mars
NASA's JPL Lays Off Another 325 People
Lessons From Ancient Earth's Atmosphere: From Hostile to Hospitable
Astronomers Defy the Zone of Avoidance to Find Hundreds of New Galaxies
The Zone of Avoidance is a region of the sky that's obscured by the disk of the Milky Way. The gas and dust block our view in visible telescopes, but other wavelengths like radio and infrared can pierce it to see what's on the other side. Astronomers used the MeerKAT radio telescope to survey beyond the Zone, observing hundreds of galaxies, of which only 29% were already known. This is helping to map the Great Attractor galaxy cluster on the far side of the Milky Way.
Continue reading
An Otherworldly Cloud Over New Zealand
Early Black Holes Fed 40x Faster than Should Be Possible
A Spider Stellar Engine Could Move Binary Stars Halfway Across a Galaxy
Scaling Propellant Production on Mars is Hard
Is an 'Off-Year' Leonid Outburst in the Cards For November?
There are good reasons to keep an eye on the Leonid meteors this year.
Continue reading
Reaction Engines Goes Into Bankruptcy, Taking the Hypersonic SABRE Engine With it
