Universe Today (Page 2)

The Final Journey of Van Allen Probe A A NASA spacecraft that spent seven years mapping Earth’s invisible radiation shields has made its final journey home and it came back years ahead of schedule. Van Allen Probe A, launched in 2012 to study the powerful belts of charged particles that wrap around our planet, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in March 2026, most of it burning up in a blaze of friction and heat. What brought it down early wasn’t a malfunction or a mission decision. It was the Sun and that twist in the story tells us something important. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Reading the Sun’s Mind Weeks Before It Erupts When a powerful solar storm erupts, the warning system we currently rely on gives us just hours to respond, barely enough time to protect the satellites, power grids, and communication networks that modern life depends on. But a new tool developed by scientists at the Southwest Research Institute and the National Science Foundation could change that entirely, pushing advance warnings of dangerous space weather from hours to weeks. The secret lies not at the Sun’s surface, but deep in its hidden interior and unlocking it has required a remarkable fusion of physics and artificial intelligence. Universe TodayRead More →

AI Could Make Alien Contact More Likely for SETI’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ A new movie called “Project Hail Mary” tells the story of an unlikely astronaut who teams up with an alien to deal with a common cosmic threat. In the latest Fiction Science podcast, SETI astronomer Seth Shostak provides a status report on the real-world quest for alien contact. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Sun Has a Heartbeat For forty years, a network of telescopes has been listening to the Sun hum and scientists have finally decoded what those sounds reveal about our star’s hidden interior. A new study from the University of Birmingham and Yale University has found that the Sun’s internal structure quietly shifts between solar cycles, leaving measurable fingerprints deep beneath its surface. It’s a discovery that could transform how we forecast space weather and its impact here on Earth. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Sunday Morning’s European Fireball Was Probably Only a Few Meters in Diameter Multiple mobile phones, dashcams, and dedicated meteor cameras capture a fireball over part of Europe on Sunday night. Thousands of people witnessed it, and the ESA’s Planetary Defence Team is analyzing it. So far, it looks like it was a few meters in diameter. It lit up the sky, and some debris even struck some buildings in Koblenz, Germany. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Rubin Observatory’s LSST Will Detect Imminent Impactors Before They Crash Into Earth One of the Vera Rubin Observatory’s objectives is to detect incoming objects. It’s decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time will detect one-meter class objects about to impact Earth and allow more detailed observations of them. That will help determine their impact sites with greater accuracy, allowing for more recovery. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Why Are Interstellar Comets So Weird? Part 1: The Strangers Blowing Through Town Imagine you live in a small town. Maybe it’s easy for you to imagine because you actually do. You’ve spent your whole life there. You know all the people, and all the people know you. Years go by. Decades. The same faces at the same corner store, the same routes to the same places, the same sky overhead. It’s comfortable. Predictable. You could walk the whole thing blindfolded and never trip. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Answer is Written in the Stars Astronomers have turned to some of the oldest stars in our Galaxy to tackle one of cosmology’s most stubborn puzzles and their answer might surprise you. By analysing precise age data for more than 200,000 Milky Way stars, researchers have placed the age of the universe at around 13.6 billion years. It’s a deceptively simple idea that the universe cannot be younger than the stars it contains. What they found doesn’t just give us a number, it adds a compelling new dimension to a decades long argument that has divided the scientific world. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Aliens Might Have Their Radio Signals Blurred By Their Star’s Solar Wind Back in the early 2000s, my computer screen, like that of many other space enthusiasts, was typically covered in a series of rainbow-colored spectral signals. As my computer crunched through thousands of data points of radio signals collected by the SETI@Home initiative, I was hoping I was in some small way contributing to one of humanity’s greatest scientific endeavours – the search for extraterrestrial life. But, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Vishal Gajjar and Grayce Brown of the SETI Institute, it seems unlikely that the signals SETI@HomeRead More →

Scientists Find the First Direct Evidence of Binary Asteroids Sharing Material Scientists occasionally have a hard time figuring out whether data they are seeing is an actual physical phenomenon or just a trick of their instrumentation. A new paper in The Planetary Science Journal from Jessica Sunshine and their colleagues at the University of Maryland describes one such confusing scenario. In this case, the researchers noted some fan-like patterns across the surface of Dimorphos, the asteroid hit by NASA’s DART mission, and thought it might be a trick of their camera. But after some image correction, computation, and physical experimentation, they determined the patterns wereRead More →

How Jagged Moon Dust Could Support Future Astronauts Lunar dust can be a pain – but it’s also literally the ground we will have to traverse if we are ever to have a permanent human settlement on the Moon. In that specific use case, it’s clingy, jagged, staticky properties can actually be an advantage, according to a new paper, recently published in Research from researchers at Beihang University, who analyzed the mechanical properties of samples returned by Chang’e 6 mission to the far side of the Moon. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Terraforming Mars Isn’t a Climate Problem—It’s an Industrial Nightmare Even when the idea of terraforming Mars was originally put forward, the idea was daunting. Changing the environment of an entire planet is not something to do easily. Over the following decades, plenty of scientists and engineers have looked at the problem, and most have come to the same conclusion – we’re not going to be able to make Mars anything like Earth anytime soon. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is a good explainer as to why. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Starshade concept could reveal Earth-like exoplanets Finding Earth-like exoplanets with the composition and ingredients for life as we know it is the Holy Grail of exoplanet hunting. Since the first exoplanets were identified in the 1990s, scientists have pushed the boundaries of finding exoplanets through new and exciting methods. One of these methods is the direct imaging method, which involves carefully blocking out the host star within the observing telescope, thus revealing the orbiting exoplanets that were initially hiding within the star’s immense glare. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Astronomers Produce the Largest Image Ever Taken of the Heart of the Milky Way Astronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way in a striking new image, unveiling a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprecedented detail. Obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), this rich dataset—the largest ALMA image to date—will allow astronomers to probe the lives of stars in the most extreme region of our galaxy, next to the supermassive black hole at its center. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Astronauts Use Bacteria and Fungi to Harvest Metals in Space If humankind is to explore deep space, one small passenger should not be left behind: microbes. In fact, it would be impossible to leave them behind, since they live on and in our bodies, surfaces and food. Learning how they react to space conditions is critical, but they could also be invaluable fellows in our endeavor to explore space. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

VLT Image Captures a “Cosmic Hawk” Spanning its Wings. Today’s Picture of the Week, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), seems to have captured a cosmic hawk as it spans its wings. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Making New Solar Activity Connections From Old Data It’s tough sometimes, living with a tempestuous star. Modern human civilization and technology lives at the whim of the Sun, as it sends solar storms and punishing coronal mass ejections our way. And while we understand the overall pitch of the 11 year solar cycle, it’s hard to predict exactly what the Sun is going to do next. Now, a recent study has reached back and examined over a century of solar observations, in an effort to make more accurate near-term predictions of solar activity. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The 4.6-Billion-Year-Old Tape Recorder Hidden Inside Asteroid Dust Asteroids are critical to unlock our understanding of the early solar system. These chunks of rock and dust were around at the very beginning, and they haven’t been as modified by planetary formation processes as, say, Earth has been. So scientists were really excited to get ahold of samples from Ryugu when they were returned by Hayabusa-2 a few years ago. However, when they started analyzing the magnetic properties of those samples, different research groups came up with different answers. Theorizing those conflicting results came from small sample sizes, a new paper recently published in JGR PlanetsRead More →

Mars Express Images Reveal Mars’ Pockmarked Surface Craters, craters, and yet more craters: this snapshot from ESA’s Mars Express is packed full of them, each as fascinating as the last. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Astronomers Using MeerKAT Spot a Cosmic Laser Halfway Across the Universe Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected. It is located in a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away, opening a new radio astronomy frontier. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →