News (Page 2)

Introducing the ‘Interplanetary Habitable Zone’ Anyone familiar with the search for alien life will have heard of the “Goldilocks Zone” around a star. This is defined as the orbital band where the temperature is just right for liquid water to pool on a rocky planet’s surface – a good approximation for what we thought of as the early conditions for life on Earth. But what happens if that life doesn’t stay on an Earth analog? If they, like we, start to move towards their neighboring planets, the idea of a habitable zone becomes much more complicated. A new paper from Dr. Caleb Scharf of theRead More →

Cosmic Collaboration: Euclid and Hubble Team Up to Capture the Cat’s Eye Nebula It’s hard to turn away from a picture of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, even if you’ve seen it dozens of times. It may be the most visually compelling planetary nebula out there, with its billowing, layered shrouds and its intricate structure. NASA and the ESA have combined images of the Cat’s Eye from the Euclid and Hubble space telescopes for a fresh look at a favourite and historical cosmic object. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Red Dwarf Stars Might Starve Alien Plants of the “Quality” Light They Need to Breathe Red dwarfs make up the vast majority of stars in the galaxy. Such ubiquity means they host the majority of rocky exoplanets we’ve found so far – which in turn makes them interesting for astrobiological surveys. However, there’s a catch – astrobiologists aren’t sure the light from these stars can actually support oxygen-producing life. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Giovanni Covone and Amedeo Balbi, suggests that they might not – when it comes to stellar light, quality is just as important as quantity. And according toRead More →

Some Extremophiles Could Survive an Asteroid Impact on Mars, and the Dangerous Journey to Earth Panspermia is the idea that life was spread from world to world somehow. New research shows that one type of Earthly extremophile can survive the extremely high pressure from asteroid impacts on Mars, be blasted into space, and maybe even survive the journey to Earth. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

NASA Tests Prototype 3D Printed Titanium Antenna in Space With a simple motion, a jack-in-the-box-like spring designed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed the potential of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, to cut costs and complexity for futuristic space antennas. Called JPL Additive Compliant Canister (JACC), the spring deployed on the small commercial spacecraft Proteus Space’s Mercury One on Feb. 3, 2026. An onboard camera captured a video of the spring popping out of its container as the spacecraft passed over the Pacific Ocean in low-Earth orbit. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Adolescence Is Tumultuous, Even For Exoplanets Planetary systems such as our solar system take hundreds of millions of years to evolve. But we see most exoplanet systems either very early in their development, or long after the systems have settled down. There’s an information gap about what happens in the middle, and a rarely observed “adolescent” system is a valuable opportunity to learn more and to test models of planetary evolution. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Coldest “Stars” in the Galaxy Might Actually Be Alien Megastructures Ever since physicist Freeman Dyson first proposed the concept in 1960, the “Dyson sphere” has been the holy grail of techno-signature hunters. A highly advanced civilization could build a “sphere” (or, in our more modern understanding, a “swarm” of smaller components) around their host star to harvest its entire energy output. We know, in theory at least, that such a swarm could exist – but what would it actually look like if we were able to observe one? A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv, and soon to be published in Universe fromRead More →

Astronomers Devise a New Way to Measure Cosmic Expansion with Lensed Supernovae Researchers in Munich have used the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona to capture five images of one and the same supernova in a single picture. The gravity of two foreground galaxies has deflected the light from a supernova far in the background along different paths to Earth. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

How Saving Earth Could Ruin Orbit Satellite imaging is increasingly important to every field from crop monitoring to poverty reduction. So it’s no surprise that there have been more and more satellites launched to try to meet that growing demand. But with more satellites comes more risk for collision – and the debris field that comes after the collision. A new paper in Advanced in Space Research from John Mackintosh and his co-authors at the University of Manchester looks at how we might use mission design to mitigate some of the hazards of increasing the number of satellites even more Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Tiny Dust Grains From Massive Stars: How the Smallest and Largest Are Linked Star dust is at the root of everything that exists, and is produced in large quantities around Wolf-Rayet binaries. But there are some puzzling observations of dust grain sizes that require explanations. New research shows why different observations have found different dust grain sizes. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

How to Weigh a Killer Asteroid at 22 Kilometers per Second Estimating a mass for a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is perhaps the single most important thing to understand about it, after its trajectory. Actually doing so isn’t easy though, as the mass for objects in the tens to hundreds of kilometers in size are too small to have their mass calculated by traditional radio-frequency tracking techniques. A new paper from Justin Atchison of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors proposes a method that could find the mass of asteroids even on the smaller end of that range, but will requireRead More →

Predicting the Sun’s Most Violent Outbursts In the first four days of February this year the Sun unleashed six powerful X-class flares in rapid succession including an X8.1 that was the strongest in several years. And now, scientists have announced a new forecasting system that could give us up to a year’s warning before the most dangerous solar storms arrive. The extraordinary thing is that the system has already been proved right by eruptions nobody knew about until after the forecast was made. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →