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Student Team Finds One of the Oldest Stars in the Universe that Migrated to the Milky Way A class of undergraduate students at University of Chicago has used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to discover one of the oldest stars in the universe, a star that formed in a companion galaxy and migrated to the Milky Way. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
Why Does Jupiter Have More Large Moons than Saturn? The two largest planets in our Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn, have the largest systems of moons. However, Jupiter has more large moons than Saturn, which has only one. Since both planets are gas giants, the reasons for the differences in these satellite systems have long puzzled astronomers. This motivated a collaborative team of researchers from Japan and China to develop a physically consistent model that can explain this. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
It’s Not Supposed To Be Like This: A Giant Planet Orbits A Small Star According to theory and models of planet formation, large gas giants should form around massive stars. That’s because massive stars have more massive protoplanetary disks. But astronomers have the opposite arrangement in some cases. New research highlights a massive gas giant on a close-in orbit around a low-mass M-dwarf, and it poses another challenge to our understanding planet formation. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
ESA Launches 7 New Missions to Supercharge Space Data Transfer Space is getting crowded – and not just with satellites, but with the massive amounts of data they’re generating. The amount of information being generated and passed through orbit is exploding. From high-resolution Earth observation images to global maritime monitoring, it’s also become a critical link in our infrastructure. But there’s another space this growing crowd of satellites is dependent on that is also filling up fast – the radio frequency spectrum. If we want to keep expanding our orbital infrastructure, we need to rethink how we move data around. On March 30, 2026, theRead More →
Scientists Spot a Solar Flare With Surprising Spectral Behavior On August 19, 2022, astronomers using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on the Hawaiian island of Maui caught the fading remnants of a C-class solar flare. Their observations showed something unusual: very strong spectral fingerprints of calcium II H and hydrogen-epsilon lines. It was the first time these two light signatures were seen in great detail during a flare. According to computer models, those lines were stronger than expected and play a not well-understood role in how flares heat the solar atmosphere where they occur. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
NASA Releases Images of Artemis II’s Flight Behind the Moon The first flyby images of the Moon captured by NASA’s Artemis II astronauts during their historic test flight reveal some regions no human has seen, including a rare in-space solar eclipse. Released Tuesday, astronauts captured the images April 6 during the mission’s seven-hour flyby of the lunar far side, showing humanity’s return to the Moon’s […] Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
A Baby Star Blows A Giant Gaseous Ring Observing the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a research team led by Kyushu University has found that during the early growth period of a baby star, the protostellar disk blows magnetic flux 1,000 au in size and creates a giant, relatively warm ring. Describing these phenomena as a baby star’s “sneezes,” these expulsions of energy and gas help the star to properly develop. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
Could We Actually Terraform Mars? A New Scientific Roadmap Lays Out the Blueprint—And the Risks Reading the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson brings the benefits and pitfalls of efforts to terraform the Red Planet into sharp relief. Since the 1970s, when Carl Sagan first suggested the possibility that we could make Mars more Earth-like, that process has been a staple of science fiction. But there’s always been a significant amount of humanity that thinks we shouldn’t. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago and his co-authors skirts around the ethical and moral questions of whetherRead More →
Webb’s Picture of the Month Features Two Planet-Forming Disks and a Possible Planet Two images of protoplanetary disks side-by-side. The left image shows a dark horizontal band covering the star, with broad, colorful, conical outflows above and below it, and a narrow jet pointing directly up and down from the star. The right image shows the star within a yellow dusty disk, with scattered dust creating purple lobes above and below the disk. Each is on a black background with several galaxies or stars around it. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
A Mercury Rover Could Explore the Planet by Sticking to the Terminator A Mercury lander mission would create opportunities to sample unique geological features. However, extreme temperature fluctuations on Mercury’s surface pose challenges for exploration on the planetary surface. In a narrow region near the terminator, temperate conditions would allow a rover to run on solar power and collect data and surface samples without needing to withstand the extreme heat. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
A New Class of Star: Merger Remnant In the vastness of the Universe, any new object with interesting properties can spur the search for similar objects, potentially establishing a new class of stars. In a paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics and an arXiv preprint, researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) describe two stellar remnants that share five properties, including X-ray emission, despite being isolated objects. According to the team, these two remnants are sufficient to define a new class of stars. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
Meet Orpheus – A Hopper Mission Built To Hunt For Life In Martian Volcanoes We’ve spent decades scratching the surface of Mars trying to uncover life there. But we’ve been searching a barren wasteland bombarded by radiation and bathed in toxic perchlorates. The entire time, it’s likely that it’s been too hostile to harbor extant life. So if we want a better shot at finding currently living life on Mars, we need to go underground. That is exactly the purpose of Orpheus, a proposed Mars vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) hopper mission put forth by Connor Bunn and Pascal Lee of the SETI Institute atRead More →
SuperCDM Experiment Reaches Critical Temperature, Bringing it One Step Closer to Detecting Dark Matter The Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment has reached its coldest operating temperature, hundreds of times colder than outer space. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
The Outer Solar System Contributed Nothing To Earth New research shows that Earth formed from inner Solar System material. Isotopic geochemistry analysis found no evidence that material from beyond Jupiter contributed to Earth’s bulk composition. The results also support the idea that Earth’s water wasn’t delivered by comets. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
If Life Exists in Venus’ Atmosphere, It Could Have Come From Space A new study presented at the 2026 LPSC suggests that if life does exist in Venus’ clouds, there’s a chance it came from Earth. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
An Aerobot With ISRU Capabilities Could Explore Venus’ Atmosphere for Years In a new proposal, a team of scientists explores how aerial robotic platforms (areobots) with in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) capability could operate for years in Venus’ atmosphere. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
