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JAXA Plans To Bring Back Pristine Early Solar System Samples From A Comet Japan’s space agency, JAXA, has been knocking it out of the park with small-body exploration missions for decades. They had historic successes with both Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, and they are going to visit the Martian Moons soon with the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. But after that, they are aiming for something much more pristine and arguably more difficult – a comet. The Next Generation Small-Body Return (NGSR) was recently described in a paper at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), and is under assessment as a large-class mission for theRead More →

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Blue Origin Plans A Pair Of Low-Flying Prospectors Around The Lunar South Pole The water locked up in the Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) of the Moon’s south pole is a critical resource if we are ever going to get a permanent lunar presence off the ground. But while we know the water ice there exists, we don’t really know how much. We have to move from general estimates to mineable-scale prospecting data. That is what Oasis-1, the newly proposed lunar prospecting mission from Blue Origin that was recently introduced at the 2026 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) is meant to do. Universe Today GoRead More →

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Astronomers thought the early universe was full of hydrogen: Now they’ve found it The Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) has discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. Known as Cosmic Noon, this is an epoch in the early universe when galaxies were growing their fastest. To spur this growth, they would have needed access to vast reservoirs of hydrogen gas, a key building block for stars. However, until recently, astronomers had only found a handful of these essential structures. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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‘Hot Jupiter’ orbiting a metal-poor star discovered Using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new “hot Jupiter” exoplanet. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-7169 b, orbits a metal-poor star, which is rare among exoplanets. The finding was detailed in a paper published March 26 on the arXiv pre-print server. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Looking up? How to photograph the moon with your phone Eyes are on the sky this week as four astronauts get the closest humans have been to the moon for more than 50 years on NASA’s Artemis II mission. Join the millions of people looking up while it’s on its way and we’ll show you how to get the best photo of the moon using your phone. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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JWST Spies Once-hidden Treasures in the W51 Starbirth Crèche Star formation is a dramatic and complex process that erupts throughout the Universe. Yet, a lot of the action gets hidden by clouds of gas and dust. That’s where observatories such as the James Webb Telescope JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) come in handy. They use infrared light and radio waves, respectively, to pierce the veil surrounding the process of starbirth. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Artemis II Mission Shares First Photo of Earth NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window after completing the translunar injection burn. There are two auroras (top right and bottom left) and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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TESS spots the rise of a black hole X-ray binary system Designed to hunt for new alien worlds, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has serendipitously observed the rising outburst of a black hole X-ray binary known as AT 2019wey. The observations, which may help us better understand the nature of this system, were presented March 25 on the arXiv pre-print server. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Two’s company: Scientists identify new class of star remnants In about 5 to 8 billion years, our sun is expected to evolve into a white dwarf—an extremely dense, Earth-sized stellar remnant that has exhausted its fuel and shed its outer layer. But while our sun is a solitary star, research over the past 15 years has demonstrated that binary or multi-star systems are far more common than astronomers once thought. When a dense and compact remnant like a white dwarf is involved in a binary system, it often “snatches away” material from its companion star. This process, called accretion, usually emits X-rays in what isRead More →

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Two’s company: Scientists identify new class of star remnants In about 5 to 8 billion years, our sun is expected to evolve into a white dwarf—an extremely dense, Earth-sized stellar remnant that has exhausted its fuel and shed its outer layer. But while our sun is a solitary star, research over the past 15 years has demonstrated that binary or multi-star systems are far more common than astronomers once thought. When a dense and compact remnant like a white dwarf is involved in a binary system, it often “snatches away” material from its companion star. This process, called accretion, usually emits X-rays in what isRead More →

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The Habitable Worlds Observatory Will Need Astrometry To Find Life We’re getting closer and closer to finding a real Earth-like exoplanet. But finding one is only half the battle. To truly know if we’re looking at an Earth analog somewhere else in the galaxy, we have to directly image it too. That’s a job for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a planned space-based telescope whose primary job is to do precisely that. But even capturing a picture and a planet and getting spectral readings of its atmospheric chemistry still isn’t enough, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv by Kaz Gary ofRead More →

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The Artemis Generation Begins! Artemis II Launches for the Moon At 06:25 p.m. EDT (03:25 p.m. PDT) on April 1st, the Artemis II mission lifted off from the historic Launch Pad-39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This mission will send astronauts on a ten-day journey around the Moon and will be the first crewed mission to venture beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since the Apollo Era. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Ghostly particles: Dark radiation may have masqueraded as neutrinos New research suggests that neutrinos in the early universe may have transformed into a previously unknown form of radiation. A study from Washington University in St. Louis offers a new way to explain certain puzzling observations about how the universe evolved. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Why Are Supermassive Black Holes Growing So Slowly? About 10 billion years ago, the growth rate of supermassive black holes began to slow dramatically. To this day, the SMBH growth rate still appears to be low. There are three potential explanations for this, and researchers think they’ve figured out which explanation fits best. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Astronomers Find a Third Galaxy Missing Its Dark Matter, Validating a Violent Cosmic Collision Theory Astronomers have long argued that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding that holds galaxies together. Without its immense gravitational pull, the rotational spins of galaxies would force them to simply fly apart. But now, scientists have found a string of galaxies that seem to be missing their dark matter entirely. The latest in this string, known as NGC 1052-DF9, is described in a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Michael Keim, Pieter van Dokkum and their team from Yale. It lends credence to a radical theory of galaxyRead More →

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The Largest Survey of Exoplanet Spins Confirms a Long-held Theory For some time, astronomers have theorized that there is a connection between planetary mass and rotation. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai’i, a team of astronomers confirmed this relationship by studying dozens of gas giants and brown dwarfs in distant star systems. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Gravitational waves suggest a ‘forbidden zone’ for stellar-origin black holes An international team led by Monash University has uncovered evidence of a rare form of exploding star, helping to shed light on one of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. At the end of their lives, most massive stars collapse into black holes—objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →