Universe Today
Project Hyperion is Seeking Ideas for Building Humanity's First Generation Ship
How Did Supermassive Black Holes Get So Big, So Early? They Might Have Had a Head Start
A Mission to Triton and Neptune Would Unlock Their Mysteries
Good News, the Ozone Layer Hole is Continuing to Shrink
How Webb Stays in Focus
JWST's primary mirror consists of 18 individual segments, each of which can be moved on 6 different axes of freedom. This allows the telescope to maintain perfect focus, despite changing temperatures and micrometeorite strikes on its optics. The objective was 150 nanometers of wavefront error, but the current error is down to just 65 nanometers. In early October, engineers measured the telescope's jitter and refocused it again, bringing it to its perfect alignment
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A Trash Compactor is Going to the Space Station
Using Light Echoes to Find Black Holes
The speed of light gives astronomers a special trick when examining the tangled-up gravitational well around a black hole. Researchers have proposed that they can measure the spin of a black hole because of the bizarre path that photons take in their vicinity, released by accreting matter. Some photons blast straight out, while others are lensed indirectly, and some travel around the black hole twice before escaping, hinting at the black hole's rotation rate.
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Launching Mass From the Moon Helped by Lunar Gravity Anomalies
A Star Disappeared in Andromeda, Replaced by a Black Hole
eROSITA All-Sky Survey Takes the Local Hot Bubble's Temperature
An Explanation for Rogue Planets. They Were Eroded Down by Hot Stars
WST recently turned up hundreds of free-floating rogue planets in the Orion Nebula, 42 in binary configurations. How two Jupiter-mass objects could end up orbiting one another has puzzled astronomers, but now a team of researchers thinks they know it happens. Large, hot stars in the Orion Nebula blasted the outer layers of smaller stars, eroding them away and preventing them from gaining enough mass to ignite fusion in their cores - even binary stars.
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CODEX Coronagraph Heads to the ISS on Cargo Dragon
A new space-based telescope aims to address a key solar mystery.
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Flowing Martian Water was Protected by Sheets of Carbon Dioxide
Japan Launches the First Wooden Satellite to Space
You Can Build a Home Radio Telescope to Detect Clouds of Hydrogen in the Milky Way
A Space Walking Robot Could Build a Giant Telescope in Space
New Report Details What Happened to the Arecibo Observatory
We Understand Rotating Black Holes Even Less Than We Thought
The theory of black holes has several mathematical oddities. Recent research shows our understanding of rotating black holes might not be as strong as we thought.
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Habitable Worlds are Found in Safe Places
New Glenn Booster Moves to Launch Complex 36
How Many Additional Exoplanets are in Known Systems?
NASA's TESS mission has turned up thousands of exoplanet candidates in almost as many different star systems. But if one or two planets show up in a system, that means it's aligned with Earth, and that means we should be able to see even more in the same system. In a new paper, astronomers calculate which planetary systems have room for more exoplanets, creating a list of priority targets for further study.
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Hubble and Webb are the Dream Team. Don't Break Them Up
Scientists Have Figured out why Martian Soil is so Crusty
Another Way to Extract Energy From Black Holes?
Black holes are incredible powerhouses, but they might generate even more energy thanks to an unusual effect known as frame dragging.
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Plastic Waste on our Beaches Now Visible from Space, Says New Study
Future Space Telescopes Could be Made From Thin Membranes, Unrolled in Space to Enormous Size
As we saw with JWST, it's difficult and expensive to launch large telescope apertures, relying on origami techniques to unfold the full mirror. A new paper proposes that telescope mirrors could be made out of a thin polymer that's only 200 micrometers thick. It could be rolled up inside a rocket fairing and then unrolled once it gets to space. This could allow apertures vastly larger than anything currently in space, with several working together as an interferometer.
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Voyager 1 is Forced to Rely on its Low Power Radio
Webb Confirms a Longstanding Galaxy Model
The spectra of distant galaxies shows that dying sun-like stars, not supernovae, enrich galaxies the most.
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The Aftermath of a Neutron Star Collision Resembles the Conditions in the Early Universe
New View of Venus Reveals Previously Hidden Impact Craters
Multimode Propulsion Could Revolutionize How We Launch Things to Space
China Trains Next Batch of Taikonauts
NASA Focusses in on Artemis III Landing Sites.
The Connection Between Black Holes and Dark Energy is Getting Stronger
Will Advanced Civilizations Build Habitable Planets or Dyson Spheres
Freeman Dyson proposed that advanced civilizations might eventually harvest all the energy coming from their stars by surrounding them with a swarm of solar-collecting satellites. But other astronomers have proposed that we might see all that rock go into the construction of artificial planets instead, surrounding a star with dozens of habitable worlds and captured rogue planets. If we detect a star system with a surprising number of planets, they could be artificial.
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This is What it Sounds Like When the Earth's Poles Flip
Orbital Debris is Getting Out of Control
Webb Reveals a Steam World Planet Orbiting a Red Dwarf
NASA Wants to Move Heavy Cargo on the Moon
Learning More About Supernovae Through Stardust
Dust grains older than the Sun can tell us about how supernovae enriched the cosmos with heavy elements, but the details are subtle and require more study.
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Astronomers Predict the Orbits of Potentially Hazardous Comets From Meteor Showers
Long-period comets can have orbits that can take hundreds of years before they return to the inner Solar System and sometimes come dangerously close to Earth. To search for potentially hazardous comets, astronomers have used meteor showers as a historical record. When the Earth passes through a meteoroid stream left by a comet, we see a meteor shower. From these showers, they can calculate the orbit of the comet and predict when it will come back to our neighborhood.
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Amazing Reader Views of Comet A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS From Around the World
Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS survived perihelion to become a fine dusk object for northern hemisphere observers.
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Astronomer Calculates When van Gogh Painted This
Artemis V Astronauts Will be Driving on the Moon
Tiny Fragments of a 4-Billion Year Old Asteroid Reveal Its History
Astronomers Have Found the Fastest Spinning Neutron Star
In 2005 astronomers found a pulsar rotating at 716 times a second. Now a team studying an X-ray binary has found another neutron star spinning at that rate.
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Astronomers Discover Potential New Building Block of Organic Matter in Interstellar Space
There's Another Ocean Moon Candidate: Uranus' Tiny Moon Miranda
Titan May Have a Methane Crust 10 Km Thick
Death of a Comet: S1 Didn't Survive its Sungrazing Plummet
Sungrazer C/2024 S1 ATLAS breaks apart at perihelion.
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