News

Amateur Astronomer Discovers More Near-Earth Asteroids With Remote Telescopes Three amazing recent asteroid finds show what’s possible in terms of astronomy online. Practical astronomy is increasingly becoming an online affair. In 2023, we wrote about this trend, and highlighted how Russian observer and amateur astronomer Filipp Romanov used time on a remote observatory to successfully discover two asteroids, which he named 623826 Alekseyvarkin and 623827 Nikandrilyich after his great-grandfathers. Now, Filipp has repeated this feat and pushed the limit of what’s possible online with the discovery of a trio of asteroids, including a rare near-Earth asteroid discovery found using a remote system. Universe Today caughtRead More →

BepiColombo’s New Images of Mercury are Cool The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo spacecraft made another flyby of its eventual target, Mercury. This is one of a series of Mercury flybys, as the spacecraft completes a complex set of maneuvers designed to deliver it to the innermost planet’s orbit. Its cameras captured some fantastic images of Mercury. BepiColombo will eventually enter orbit around Mercury in November 2026. However, Mercury is a challenge to visit because of its proximity to the Sun and the Sun’s overwhelming gravity. To eventually orbit Mercury, the spacecraft is performing six gravity-assist flybys of the Solar System’s innermost planet. This is the 4,100 kgRead More →

The True Size of Galaxies is Much Larger Than We Thought Ask most people what a galaxy is made up of, and they’ll say it’s made of stars. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, hosts between about 100 to 300 billion stars, and we can see thousands of them with our unaided eyes. But most of a galaxy’s mass is actually gas, and the extent of the gas has been difficult to measure. Researchers have found a way to see how far that gas extends into the cosmos. One of the foundational questions about galaxies concerns their size. If we limit our observations to stars,Read More →

Using A Space Elevator To Get Resources Off the Queen of the Asteroid Belt Here at UT, we’ve had several stories that describe the concept of a space elevator. They are designed to make it easier to get objects off Earth and into space. That, so far, has proven technically or economically infeasible, as no material is strong enough to support the structure passively, and it’s too energy-intensive to support it actively. However, it could be more viable on other worlds, such as the Moon. But what about worlds farther afield? A student team from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs looked at theRead More →

Iron Winds are Blowing on WASP-76 b Exoplanets have been discovered with a wide range of environmental conditions. WASP-76b is one of the most extreme with a dayside temperature of over 2,000 degrees. A team of researchers have found that it’s even more bizarre than first thought! It’s tidally locked to its host star so intense winds encircle the planet. They contain high quantities of iron atoms that stream from the lower to upper layers around the atmosphere. Exoplanets exist outside of our Solar System and orbit other stars. The first confirmed discovery was back in the 1990’s and since then, over 5,200 have beenRead More →

ALMA Detects Hallmark “Wiggle” of Gravitational Instability in Planet-Forming Disk According to Nebula Theory, stars and their systems of planets form when a massive cloud of gas and dust (a nebula) undergoes gravitational collapse at the center, forming a new star. The remaining material from the nebula then forms a disk around the star from which planets, moons, and other bodies will eventually accrete (a protoplanetary disk). This is how Earth and the many bodies that make up the Solar System came together roughly 4.5 billion years ago, eventually settling into their current orbits (after a few migrations and collisions). However, there is still debateRead More →

Largest Dark Matter Detector is Narrowing Down Dark Matter Candidate In 2012, two previous dark matter detection experiments—the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) and ZonEd Proportional scintillation in Liquid Noble gases (ZEPLIN)—came together to form the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment. Since it commenced operations, this collaboration has conducted the most sensitive search ever mounted for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) – one of the leading Dark Matter candidates. This collaboration includes around 250 scientists from 39 institutions in the U.S., U.K., Portugal, Switzerland, South Korea, and Australia. On Monday, August 26th, the latest results from the LUX-ZEPLIN project were shared at two scientific conferences. These results wereRead More →

Could Comets have Delivered the Building Blocks of Life to “Ocean Worlds” like Europa, Enceladus, and Titan too? Throughout Earth’s history, the planet’s surface has been regularly impacted by comets, meteors, and the occasional large asteroid. While these events were often destructive, sometimes to the point of triggering a mass extinction, they may have also played an important role in the emergence of life on Earth. This is especially true of the Hadean Era (ca. 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago) and the Late Heavy Bombardment, when Earth and other planets in the inner Solar System were impacted by a disproportionately high number of asteroidsRead More →

There’s More Water Inside Planets Than We Thought When you walk across your lawn or down the street, you move on the surface of a surprisingly layered world. Some of those layers are rock, others are molten. A surprising amount of water is mixed into those layers, as well. It turns out that most planets have more of it “deep down” than we imagined. Most of a planet’s water isn’t on the surface, even though we see oceans, lakes, and rivers here on Earth. The heart of our planet is iron, and covered by silicate rock layers. Scientists have long used our planet’s makeup asRead More →

Why Did Copernicus Reject Geocentrism? Popular science history paints a picture of the Greek geocentric model dominating astronomical thought beginning around the 3rd century BCE, and being the favored model for ~1,500 years. Then, suddenly (it suggests), astronomical thought was overhauled at the birth of the Renaissance by brilliant astronomers such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, all of whom rejected placing the Earth at the center of the cosmos. But these sources are generally quiet on why this shift occurred. If mentioned at all, sources generally suggest that it was because the Ptolemaic geocentric model was too complicated – overly burdened with epicycle and equants.Read More →

China Will Launch its Mars Sample Return Mission in 2028 While NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission has experienced a setback, China is still moving forward with their plans to bring home a piece of the Red Planet. This week, officials from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced their sample return mission, called Tianwen-3, will blast off for Mars in 2028. It will land on the surface, retrieve a sample, and then take off again, docking with a return vehicle in orbit. They also announced another mission, Tianwen-4 will head off to Jupiter in 2030 as well as unveiling a conceptual plan for China’s firstRead More →

Artemis III Landing Sites Identified Using Mapping and Algorithm Techniques Where would be the most ideal landing site for the Artemis III crew in SpaceX’s Human Landing System (HLS)? This is what a recent study submitted to Acta Astronautica hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated plausible landing sites within the lunar south pole region, which comes after NASA selected 13 candidate landing regions in August 2022 and holds the potential to enable new methods in determining landing sites for future missions, as well. Here, Universe Today discusses this research with Dr. Juan Miguel Sánchez-Lozano from the Technical University of Cartagena andRead More →

One Step Closer to Solving the Mystery of Mars’ Lost Water Few scientists doubt that Mars was once warm and wet. The evidence for a warm, watery past keeps accumulating, and even healthy skepticism can’t dismiss it. All this evidence begs the next question: what happened to it? Mars bears the marks of a past when water flowed freely across its surface. There are clear river channels, lakes, and even shorelines. NASA’s Perseverance rover is working its way around Jezero Crater, an ancient paleolake, and finding minerals that can only form in water’s presence. MSL Curiosity has found the same in Gale Crater. The waterRead More →

JWST Reveals Star Formation at Cosmic Noon Understanding the star formation rate (SFR) in a galaxy is critical to understanding the galaxy itself. Some galaxies are starburst galaxies with extremely high SFRs, some are quenched or quiescent galaxies with very low SFRs, and some are in the middle. Researchers used the JWST to observe a pair of galaxies at Cosmic Noon that are just beginning to merge to see how SFRs vary in different regions of both galaxies. A rare alignment of massive objects in space allowed astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope to observe a pair of distant, ancient galaxies that are justRead More →