Universe Today

Astronomers Use Rare Ultra-Magnetic Star to Crack a Quantum Mystery An international team observed a magnetar known as 1E 1547.0–5408 using NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), leading to what could be the first detection of vacuum birefringence taking place in the magnetar’s ultra-strong magnetic field. These findings could potentially resolve a long-standing mystery quantum mechanics. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

NASA Highlights Next-Gen Cargo Landers Paving the Way for a Moon Base NASA and its commercial partners are making progress on their way to a permanent human presence on the Moon. As part of that, a recent press release and accompanying YouTube video hints they may be looking to provide regular updates to the progress of those efforts – and, at least for this first one, that progress looks pretty good. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Synchronized Stars Power Cosmic Radio Laser Researchers have helped unravel the mystery of why certain pairs of stars pulse with regular, long-period bursts of radio waves. The particular class of objects they observed come in pairs that always include a compact dead star, called a white dwarf, locked in orbit with an M dwarf, a red star smaller than our Sun. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Dry Martian Meteorite Reveals Early Water in Mars’s Crust Billions of years ago, Mars was hypothesized to have been a habitable world with flowing liquid water and the potential for life. But directly studying its ancient past is currently limited to orbiters and rovers, as scientists have yet to obtain direct samples from Mars. However, meteorites have been found on Earth to have potentially originated from Mars during large impacts that flung chunks of the Red Planet into space, eventually being grabbed by Earth’s gravity and crashing into the Earth’s surface. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The CosmoQuest Satellite Will Listen to the Early Universe From the Far Side of the Moon A tiny UK-developed satellite, roughly the size of a small carry-on suitcase, could help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology: what happened in the roughly 150 million years of cosmic dark ages, before the universe’s first stars appeared? Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Strange Signals Called Long-period Radio Transits Come From Cataclysmic Variables Long-period Radio Transients are sources that emit repeating radio and x-ray signals. The signals are polarized and coherent, and are similar to pulsars in some respects. But the type of astrophysical object responsible for them has been vigorously debated. New research says that at least one of them comes from a cataclysmic variable, a binary star where a white dwarf and a red dwarf orbit closely. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

New Solar System Models Show Earth Is No Fluke Astrobiologists use new starting points to produce ‘organic’ models of our solar system’s formation. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, With Some Help From a Korean Spacecraft A SpaceX Falcon upper stage crashed into the Moon on August 5th. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of the crash site from different viewing angles and with different sunlight angles. The images showed that the crater is about 18 meters wide and about 3 meters deep. SpaceX says the crash was an accident. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Mars’s Funky Moon Deimos was Shaped by an Impact Mars’ moon Deimos has a large crater on its southern pole. It’s also covered by a layer of regolith so deep it buries many other, smaller craters. New research shows that an impact is responsible for both, and that the moon is rather fragile and porous, like a rubble pile asteroid. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

How Gas Filaments and Interfilaments Feed Star Formation in Monoceros R2 Researchers studied gas flows in the Monoceros R2 star forming region to understand how gas is channeled into star forming hubs. By tracing the flow of carbon monoxide, they found that a system of hub-filaments and interfilaments are responsible for feeding gas into star-forming locations. The filaments move most of the gas, but the interfilaments play a role too, especially by feeding more gas into the main filaments. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Catching An ‘Almost Total’ Lunar Eclipse on August 28th So, did you miss the August 12th total solar eclipse? Like lots of humanity, we sat out the celestial drama of this month’s solar eclipse, both total and partial. But the good news is, a large swath of the world can still catch the eclipse season spirit, with a deep, nearly total partial lunar eclipse next week. The event is the last eclipse of four (two lunar and two solar) for 2026. This also marks the current end of the second eclipse season for 2026, which began with the total solar eclipse on August 12th. UniverseRead More →

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 4: Looking For Us Some signs of an alien civilization are easier to spot than signs of life itself. On technosignatures, from CFCs and industrial gases to the pandemic dip in pollution, and why Earth’s most detectable moment might be right now. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Webb Captures the Treasure Chest at the Heart of the Carina Nebula This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month takes us to a fantastical realm within our home galaxy, where piercing starlight and billowing winds sculpt dust clouds into inventive shapes. This scene is from the Carina Nebula, which lies just 7500 light-years away in the constellation Carina (the Keel). Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Pluto Planetary Science is the Gift that Keeps on Giving Something’s wetting the surface of dwarf planet Pluto along the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, and planetary scientists have found a good explanation for it. A recent study of new Horizons images taken during the 2015 flyby revealed evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising up through cracks in Sputnik Planitia. That’s the giant heart-shaped glacial basin we see in all the Pluto images taken by the spacecraft. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Fastest Star in the Milky Way Will Test Relativity Astronomers have discovered another S star, the population of stars that orbits the Milky Way’s SMBH. This one is the fastest of them all, and also comes closest to the SMBH. It will let astronomers test relativity, especially the Lense-Thirring effect. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Interstellar Travel IV: Solar, Magnetic, & Directed-Energy Sails In our fourth installment in the Interstellar Travel series, we’ll examine solar sails, magnetosails, and directed-energy propulsion (DEP), which are currently the most plausible methods for reaching another star system within a human lifetime. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Are Mega-Constellations Sleepwalking Low Earth Orbit into Runaway Chaos? It seems the overwhelming majority of the time when we write about satellite megaconstellations, it’s as a warning. That’s not because they aren’t useful, but because they hold the potential to completely destroy our access to space if not managed properly, and possibly cause a whole bunch of Earth-based devastation as well. So it probably won’t come as a surprise when there is yet another paper from a leading expert on space debris pointing out the potential hazards of the latest crop of satellite megaconstellations – which is exactly what a new paper, available in pre-printRead More →

Racing to Build a Radio Telescope on the Moon Remember the “Wow!” signal? That high energy radio signature happened in 1977, when the Earth was much “quieter” in the radio band. If it were to happen today, it probably wouldn’t even move the needle on the background noise of human radio chatter. Signals from satellites, radar, and other human technology have crowded out extraterrestrial radio signals, limiting our ability to monitor the heavens for signals like the still unexplained one received in 1977. What’s more, the ionosphere partially blocks lower frequency radio signals, making them even harder to see from the ground. So, for aRead More →

Whoa! The JWST’s Ancient Galaxies Are Much More Massive Than Thought When the JWST peered into the ancient Universe, it found surprisingly massive galaxies. These galaxies were so massive they challenged our understanding of how quickly galaxies can assemble. But new research says that multitudes of low-mass stars are hiding in these galaxies, and they’re actually even more massive than we thought. When will it end? Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 3: Reading the Face of a Planet A single pixel of light holds astonishing detail. How ocean glint, rotational mapping, and the vegetation red edge let us read a distant planet’s oceans, continents, and even forests, all without ever resolving it as more than a point. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →