News (Page 5)

Artificial Intelligence is Easily Fooled in the Search for Life AI is a powerful tool in scientific research. It can be used to find patterns in vast quantities of data. But it also generates false positives, as most of us know. This is an “Achilles Heel” according to researchers who tested a neural network’s ability to detect life. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

To Measure a Black Hole’s Ultimate Spin, We Have to Go to Space Despite their depiction as massive monsters that simply suck in everything, including light, astronomers know black holes actually spin. And they spin really, really quickly at that. Determining just how quickly is key to understanding how they impact their immediate vicinity, but also the galaxies that surround them. A new paper by Tegan Thomas of the University of Virginia and her colleagues, available in pre-print on arXiv, has some good news and bad news on that front. The bad news is we currently can’t determine how fast black holes are actually spinning.Read More →

Astronomers Find New Features Hiding in the Orion Nebula A team of researchers used the world’s largest single-dish telescope and an interferometer to uncover previously hidden structures within the Orion Nebula. The project produced the sharpest maps ever made of neutral hydrogen in Orion, the closest region of massive star formation. The findings expose the complex relationship of star-forming regions with their environment and suggest that the Orion Nebula has been shaped by multiple episodes of stellar feedback rather than a single expanding bubble. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Astronomers are Hunting Down the Elusive Population III Stars It’s hard hunting down the oldest stars in the universe. These behemoths, known as Population (or Pop) III stars, are a missing link in cosmology between the primordial soup that was the early universe and the complex, “metal”-rich cosmos we’re familiar with today. But we’re slowly getting a better idea of where to look for them, and a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Alessandra Venditti of the University of Texas at Austin and her co-authors, highlights some of the recent advances and potential new surveying techniques that could eventually help us definitively findRead More →

An Ancient Stellar Passage Altered the Orbits of Comets We See Today A recent study out of the Planetary Science Institute notes that the close passage of the star HD 7977 may have triggered a cascade, sending long-period comets sunward. What’s more, the same uptick in long-period comets may still be underway today. The study was recently presented at the American Astronomical Society Division on Dynamical Astronomy. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Researchers Prove Black Theory in a Laboratory Setting Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center have demonstrated a new approach to wave amplification through interaction with rotating bodies. Rather than mechanically rotating matter, however, the team engineered a radio-frequency device with properties modulated in space and time to mimic spinning. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Rebooting a Spacecraft, 140 Million Kilometres From Home. Engineers have just upgraded the software running a spacecraft 140 million kilometres away, then held their breath through two full reboots with an eight minute delay on every command. The prize for getting it right is a close up look at an asteroid humanity has already changed forever, and the answer to a question nobody has been able to answer since 2022, what did we actually do to it? Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Chemistry Reveals the Origins of an Interstellar Comet Somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy is an old star that has lost one of its comets. By some quirk of orbital mechanics, that frozen nucleus of ice and dust got kicked out of its home system and into a long and winding trajectory across space. It entered our Solar System sometime in the distant past and traveled somewhat near to Earth on October 30, 2025, on its way through the system. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

How the SKA Will Use Fast Radio Bursts to Decode the Universe There are parts of the universe that are extremely hard to see, even for our most advanced telescopes. Gas and dust don’t emit any light, and are only visible by the light that they happen to block from stars and galaxies. Magnetic fields are even harder since regular light typically passes right through them. However, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv, by Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney and their co-authors, we’re currently commissioning a potentially game-changing new tool that could use a particularly violent astronomical phenomenon toRead More →

Are We Missing the Universe’s “Noosignatures”? Astrobiology has long been split into two camps: a search for “biosignatures” and a search for “intelligence.” These look for very different things, but they also leave a huge gap in between. It took 3.5 billion years for us to go from the first microbe to a civilization that sent radio waves out into the cosmos. Detecting life in between those stages is a relatively untouched aspect of astrobiology—which is also the focal point of a new paper, “Signs and Signatures of Intelligence”, available in pre-print on arXiv, by astrobiologist Julia DeMarines. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Watching Dawn and Dusk on a Distant Hot Jupiter Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have caught an extreme, tidally locked exoplanet in the act of showing two very different faces at once, a fierce, wind battered hemisphere and a comparatively gentler half. The discovery not only reveals a planet with a genuine weather system violent enough to tear water apart, it hints at a missing ingredient in how scientists model alien atmospheres altogether. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Listening for the Universe’s Faintest Whispers, a Billion Supernovae at Once Buried a kilometre underground in Japan, one of the world’s most sensitive detectors may have caught its first faint trace of a sound scientists have been straining to hear for decades, the combined whisper of every supernova that has ever exploded across the universe. It is not yet a confirmed discovery, but if it holds up, it could rewrite how we trace the life and death of stars. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Most Of Moon’s Water Likely Remains Chemically Bound In Its Deep Interior Aside from an unknown quantity of water in the Moon’s permanently shaded polar craters, the lion’s share of what water the Moon may have is likely chemically bound in its deep interior. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

China Successfully Tests Reusable Long March-10B On Friday, July 10th, China achieved a major milestone as its Long March-10B completed a its maiden test flight, which included the retrieval of its first stage booster. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

China Successfully Tests Reusable Long March-10B On Friday, July 10th, China achieved a major milestone as its Long March-10B completed a its maiden test flight, which included the retrieval of its first stage booster. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →