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An Adolescent Growth Spurt In Young Stars Helps Giant Planets Form Intermediate mass stars experience periods of rapid growth in their late stages of formation. The growing young star emits more radiation that encourages greater accretion. Rather than depleting their protoplanetary disks and preventing gas giants from forming, the opposite is true. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Ten Versions of Earth’s Future Can Help Us Hunt for ET Searching for technosignatures – signs of technology on a planet that we can see from afr – remains a difficult task. There are so many different factors to consider, and we only have the technological capabilities to detect a relatively small collection of them. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv but also accepted for publication into The Astrophysical Journal Letters, from Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and his co-authors explores some of those capabilities by using a framework they developed known as Project Janus that estimates whatRead More →

Helium Streams Observed on Super-Puff Exoplanet What can an exoplanet leaking helium teach astronomers about the formation and evolution of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated atmospheric escape on a puffy exoplanet. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of gas giant planets, specifically with many gas giant planets observed orbiting extremely close to their stars. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

A Blueprint For Visiting An Interstellar Comet arXiv:2512.00492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe how the ESA Comet Interceptor mission, which is due to launch in 2028/29 to a yet-to-be-discovered target, can provide a conceptual basis for a future mission to visit an Interstellar Object. Comet Interceptor will wait in space until a suitable long period comet is discovered, allowing rapid response to perform a fast flyby of an object that will be in the inner Solar System for only a few years; an enhanced version of this concept … Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The JWST Discovered Another Perplexing Early Galaxy The JWST has made a name for itself by discovering mature galaxies in the Universe’s early times. This time, a pair of Indian astronomers working with the JWST found a fully-formed spiral galaxy much like the Milky Way only 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery, and others like it, are forcing scientists to reconsider their understanding of the cosmic timeline. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

We Are Moving Through The Universe Faster Than We Thought We’ve long known that we move through the Universe relative to the cosmic microwave background, but a new study of radio galaxies finds an even faster result, which could contradict the standard model of cosmology. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

These Two Galaxies Are Tying The Knot And Producing Stars The European Space Agency has release its ESA/Webb Picture of the Month and it features a pair of dwarf galaxies engaged in a tentative dance, like nervous partners at a social. The pair are a staggering 24 million light-years away. But even at that great distance, the pair of galaxies is the closest-known interacting pair of dwarfs, other than the Milky Way’s Magellanic Clouds, where both the stellar populations and the gas bridge linking the galaxies have been observed. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

How to Catch a Comet That Hasn’t Been Discovered Yet There’s been a lot of speculation recently about interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS – much of which is probably caused by low quality data given that we have to observe it from either Earth, or in some case Mars. In either case it’s much further away that what would be the ideal. But that might not be the case for a future interstellar object. The European Space Agency (ESA) is planning a mission that could potentially visit a new interstellar visitor, or a comet that is making its first pass into the inner solar system. But, givenRead More →

To Celebrate 25 Years In Service, The Gemini Observatory Imaged The Butterfly Nebula To celebrate 25 years since the completion of the International Gemini Observatory, students in Chile voted for the Gemini South telescope to image NGC 6302 — a billowing planetary nebula that resembles a cosmic butterfly. The International Gemini Observatory is partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by NSF NOIRLab. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Knotty Problem of Matter Asymmetry Might Be Solved By Extending Physics Why is the Universe filled with matter? Why isn’t it an equal amount of matter and antimatter? We still don’t know the answer, but a new approach looks at the symmetries of extended models of particle physics and finds a possible path forward. It’s a knotty problem that may just have a knotty solution. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →