Hubble Sees a Star About to Ignite We know how stars form. Clouds of interstellar gas and dust gravitationally collapse to form a burst of star formation we call a stellar nursery. Eventually, the cores of these protostars become dense enough to ignite their nuclear furnace and shine as true stars. But catching stars in that birth-moment act is difficult. Young stars are often hidden deep within their dense progenitor cloud, so we don’t see their light until they’ve already started shining. But new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have given us our earliest glimpse of a shiny new star. You can see thisRead More →

This Black Hole is a Total Underachiever Anyone can be an underachiever, even if you’re an astronomical singularity weighing over four billion times the mass of the Sun. At least the quasar H1821+643 doesn’t have parents to be disappointed in it. But its underachievement could shed light on how quasars, a potent type of black hole, can come to influence entire clusters of galaxies, as described in a new paper from researchers at the University of Nottingham and Harvard. Using X-ray data from the Chandra observatory, the researchers looked closely at H1821+643 and decided it influenced its local environment much less than expected. Granted, aRead More →

Someone Just Found SOHO’s 5,000th Comet The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was designed to examine the Sun, but as a side benefit, it has been the most successful comet hunter ever built. Since early in the mission, citizen scientists have been scanning through the telescope’s data, searching for icy objects passing close to the Sun. An astronomy student in Czechia has identified 200 comets in SOHO data since he started in 2009 at the age of 13. He recently spotted the observatory’s 5,000th comet. “Prior to the launch of the SOHO mission and the Sungrazer Project, there were only a couple dozen sungrazing cometsRead More →

Astronomers Only Knew of a Single Binary Cepheid System. Now They Just Found Nine More Measuring the distance to far away objects in space can be tricky. We don’t even know the precise distance to even our closest neighbors in the Universe – the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. But, we’re starting to get to the tools to measure it. One type of tool is a Cepheid Variable – a type of star that varies its luminosity in a well-defined pattern. However, we don’t know much about their physical properties, making utilizing them as distance markers harder. Finding their physical properties would be easier ifRead More →

DART Changed the Shape of Asteroid Dimorphos, not Just its Orbit On September 26th, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) collided with the asteroid Dimorphos, a moonlet that orbits the larger asteroid Didymos. The purpose of this test was to evaluate a potential strategy for planetary defense. The demonstration showed that a kinetic impactor could alter the orbit of an asteroid that could potentially impact Earth someday – aka. Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA). According to a new NASA-led study, the DART mission’s impact not only altered the orbit of the asteroid but also its shape! The study was led by Shantanu P. Naidu, aRead More →

Cosmochemistry: Why study it? What can it teach us about finding life beyond Earth? Universe Today has had some fantastic discussions with researchers on the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, and planetary geophysics, and how these diverse scientific fields can help researchers and the public better understand the search for life beyond Earth. Here, we will investigate the unique field of cosmochemistry and how it provides researchers with the knowledge pertaining to both our solar system and beyond, including the benefits and challenges, finding life beyond Earth, and suggestive paths for upcoming students who wish toRead More →

Webb Finds Deep Space Alcohol and Chemicals in Newly Forming Planetary  Since its launch in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made some amazing discoveries. Recent observations have found a number of key ingredients required for life in young proto-stars where planetary formation is imminent. Chemicals like methane, acetic acid and ethanol have been detected in interstellar ice. Previous telescopic observations have only hinted at their presence as a warm gas. Not only have they been detected but a team of scientists have synthesised some of them in a lab. These molecules found in the solid stage phase in young protostars are anRead More →

Mercury is the Perfect Destination for a Solar Sail Solar sails rely upon pressure exerted by sunlight on large surfaces. Get the sail closer to the Sun and not surprisingly efficiency increases. A proposed new mission called Mercury Scout aims to take advantage of this to explore Mercury. The mission will map the Mercurian surface down to a resolution of 1 meter and, using the highly reflective sail surface to illuminate shadowed craters, could hunt for water deposits.  Unlike conventional rocket engines that require fuel which itself adds weight and subsequently requires more fuel, solar sails are far more efficient. Light falling upon the sailRead More →

Phew, De-Icing Euclid’s Instruments Worked. It’s Seeing Better Now From its vantage point at the Sun-Earth L2 point, the ESA’s Euclid spacecraft is measuring the redshift of galaxies with its sensitive instruments. Its first science images showed us what we can expect from the spacecraft. But the ESA noticed a problem. Over time, less light was reaching the spacecraft’s instruments. Euclid launched on July 1st, 2023 and made its way to the Sun-Earth Lagrange 2 point, the same spot where the JWST resides. Euclid is basically a wide-angle telescope with a 600 MB camera. Using its suite of scientific instruments, it measures the redshift ofRead More →

New View Reveals Magnetic Fields Around Our Galaxy’s Giant Black Hole Fresh imagery from the Event Horizon Telescope traces the lines of powerful magnetic fields spiraling out from the edge of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and suggests that strong magnetism may be common to all supermassive black holes. The newly released image showing the surroundings of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* — which is about 27,000 light-years from Earth — is the subject of two studies published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. This picture follows up on an initial picture issued in 2022. BothRead More →

A Single Grain of Ice Could Hold Evidence of Life on Europa and Enceladus The Solar System’s icy ocean moons are primary targets in our search for life. Missions to Europa and Enceladus will explore these moons from orbit, improving our understanding of them and their potential to support life. Both worlds emit plumes of water from their internal oceans, and the spacecraft sent to both worlds will examine those plumes and even sample them. New research suggests that evidence of life in the moons’ oceans could be present in just a single grain of ice, and our spacecraft can detect it. It’s all becauseRead More →

NASA Reveals its Planetary Science Goals for Artemis III If all goes well, NASA’s Artemis III mission will bring humans back to the Moon as early as 2026, the first time since the Apollo 17 crew departed in 1972. It won’t be a vacation, though, as astronauts have an enormous amount of science to do, especially in lunar geology. A team from NASA recently presented their planetary science goals and objectives for Artemis III surface activities, which will guide the fieldwork the astronauts will carry out on the lunar surface. The Artemis III Geology Team presented their priorities at the Lunar and Planetary Science ConferenceRead More →

Watch a Real-Time Map of Starlinks Orbiting Earth In an effort to enhance the educational outreach of their Starlink constellation, SpaceX has an interactive global map of their Starlink internet satellites, which provides live coverage of every satellite in orbit around the Earth. This interactive map comes as SpaceX continues to launch Starlink satellites into orbit on a near-weekly basis with the goal of providing customers around the world with high-speed internet while specifically targeting rural regions of the globe. In 2022, Starlink officially reached all seven continents after Starlink service became available in Antarctica. Additionally, SpaceX announced in 2023 a partnership with T-Mobiel forRead More →

In a Distant Solar System, the JWST Sees the End of Planet Formation Every time a star forms, it represents an explosion of possibilities. Not for the star itself; its fate is governed by its mass. The possibilities it signifies are in the planets that form around it. Will some be rocky? Will they be in the habitable zone? Will there be life on any of the planets one day? There’s a point in every solar system’s development when it can no longer form planets. No more planets can form because there’s no more gas and dust available, and the expanding planetary possibilities are truncated.Read More →

Mars’ Gale Crater was Filled with Water for Much Longer Than Anyone Thought Even with all we’ve learned about Mars in recent years, it doesn’t stack up against all we still don’t know and all we hope to find out. We know that Mars was once warm and wet, a conclusion that was less certain a couple of decades ago. Now, scientists are working on uncovering the details of Mars’s ancient water. New research shows that the Gale Crater, the landing spot for NASA’s MSL Curiosity, held water for a longer time than scientists thought. Life needs water, and it needs stability. So, if GaleRead More →

Merging Stars Can Lead to Blue Supergiants In the constellation of Orion, there is a brilliant bluish-white star. It marks the right foot of the starry hunter. It’s known as Rigel, and it is the most famous example of a blue supergiant star. Blue supergiants are more than 10,000 times brighter than the Sun, with masses 16 – 40 times greater. They are unstable and short-lived, so they should be rare in the galaxy. While they are rare, blue supergiants aren’t as rare as we would expect. A new study may have figured out why. We aren’t entirely sure how these massive stars form, thoughRead More →

Gaia Finds Ancient Streams of Stars That Formed the Milky Way Using ESA’s Gaia spacecraft, astronomers have tracked down two streams of stars that likely formed the foundation of the Milky Way. Named “Shakti and Shiva,” the two streams contain about 10 million stars, all of which are 12 to 13 billion years old and likely came together even before the spiral arms and disk were formed. These star streams are all moving in roughly similar orbits and have similar compositions. Astronomers think they were probably separate galaxies that merged into the Milky Way shortly after the Big Bang., “What’s truly amazing is that weRead More →

NASA’s VERITAS Mission Breathes New Life In a win for planetary scientists, and planetary geologists in particular, it was announced at the recent 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas earlier this month that NASA’s VERITAS mission to the planet Venus has been reinstated into NASA’s Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) budget with a scheduled launch date of 2031, with the unofficial announcement coming on the first day of the conference, March 11, 2024, and being officially announced just a few days later. This comes after VERITAS experienced a “soft cancellation” in March of last year when NASA revealed its FY24 budget, providing VERITASRead More →

Life Might Be Difficult to Find on a Single Planet But Obvious Across Many Worlds If we could detect a clear, unambiguous biosignature on just one of the thousands of exoplanets we know of, it would be a huge, game-changing moment for humanity. But it’s extremely difficult. We simply aren’t in a place where we can be certain that what we’re detecting means what we think or even hope it does. But what if we looked at many potential worlds at once? It’s assumptions that plague us. Every chemical we detect in an exoplanet atmosphere, even with the powerful JWST, is accompanied by a setRead More →

Brown Dwarf Pairs Drift Apart in Old Age The only thing worse than drifting through space for an eternity is doing it alone. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope show that brown dwarfs that once had companions suffer that fate. Binary brown dwarfs that were once bound to each other tend to drift apart as time passes. Brown dwarfs are one of Nature’s genre-busters. They refuse to be pigeonholed into our definitions. They’re neither stars nor planets and are sometimes referred to as failed stars. They gathered too much mass to be called planets but not enough to be called stars. They live in aRead More →