Universe Today (Page 3)

The Brightened Night Sky Nobody Actually Wanted A new study modelling Reflect Orbital’s proposed constellation of giant orbital mirrors finds their light pollution would be severe. A single 54 metre satellite would appear four magnitudes brighter than the full moon to anyone in its beam, and its scattered glow would outshine moonlight across the sky from 14 kilometres away, remaining visible from over 30 kilometres out. With the pilot satellite already approved by the FCC despite astronomer objections, and up to 50,000 mirrors planned by the mid-2030s, the research puts hard numbers on a fight over who controls the night sky, and who answers forRead More →

Hubble Reveals that Star Formation is Slowing Down in the Andromeda Galaxy A team of scientists led by the University of Washington has studied how star formation is declining in the Andromeda galaxy using highly detailed Hubble surveys. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Tarantula That Lost Its Fire A new composite image combining data from Chandra, Hubble, Webb and the retired Spitzer telescope has helped astronomers solve a long standing puzzle in the Tarantula Nebula, a star forming region 160,000 light years away. Young, massive stars there should be heating enough gas to emit X-rays, but observations showed far less X-ray emission than predicted. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Upgraded Sardinia Radio Telescope To Continue Probing Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts Largest Italian radio telescope located on an out of the way mountain plateau in southern Sardinia sheds light on the cosmos’ still misunderstood Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Another First for the JWST: It Detects Three Supermassive Black Holes in the Same Galaxy Astronomers working with the JWST have found a galaxy only 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang that contains three black holes. Two are close to the galaxy’s center and will merge soon. The third is more distant, and is expected to merge much later. The discovery shows that black hole mergers were an important contributor to the masses of the SMBH we find in galaxies today. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Earth’s Magnetosphere Might Not Protect Us From Superstorms After All Science seems like a straightforward endeavour. You come up with a hypothesis, collect data to prove or disprove it, and analyze that data to see if the hypothesis is right. But anyone who actually does science will tell you many times it’s not that straightforward. And one of the most common complexities is in data analysis. A new paper suggests that one such complexity, known as regression to the mean, might be causing us to massively underestimate how severe solar storms can truly be. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

A Rare Extragalactic Stellar Stream Reveals Hidden Dark Matter Scientists have discovered a rare star formation hidden in a distant galaxy, unlike anything seen before beyond the Milky Way. What’s more, the discovery offers a brand new way to measure the distribution of dark matter in distant galaxies. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

The Rooms We Build To Survive In, And The Ones We Build To Live In What does a home actually need to do for us, beyond keeping the weather out? Engineers at MIT have started mapping the answer for astronauts heading to the Moon and Mars, tracing exactly how the walls, layouts and lighting around a person shape their stress, their loneliness and their sense of belonging. It turns out the science of surviving a place and the science of living in one are not the same thing at all, and I have spent enough of the last year thinking about that difference to knowRead More →

The Ingredients For Planets Turned Up Astonishingly Early Planet building was supposed to be one of the universe’s slow projects, something that only got going billions of years after the Big Bang. New research suggests otherwise. The raw materials for rocky worlds, and perhaps even the water needed for life, may have been ready to go just 100 million years after the Big Bang, long before the first galaxies had even taken shape. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

A Massive Stream of Gas Tilted This Planet-Forming Disk Astronomers found evidence that a giant stream of gas flowing into the GW Orionis young triple-star system may have tilted its planet-forming disk, offering a new explanation for why some planetary systems are misaligned. The next step is to search for shock fronts in the system, and to search for more of these massive streams of gas in other systems. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Amazing Views of Wednesday’s Total Solar Eclipse It was an eclipse for the ages. This past week, many an eclipse chaser and the ‘eclipse curious’ made the journey to stand in the shadow of the Moon, for the only total solar eclipse of 2026. Viewers across northeastern Spain had thrilling views of a low to the horizon eclipse at sunset, while viewers to the north and across Iceland had dicier, cloudy skies to contend with. Here are amazing reader views of the eclipse, along with a few special ones from space. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

NASA Wants to Float Microscopic ‘Tracers’ on Sunlight to Map the Edge of Space The atmospheric is a dynamic place, and just how well we understand that dynamism depends on what part of the atmosphere it is. Low altitudes can be reached by traditional balloons, with full suites of sensing equipment. Higher reaches are the domain of satellites, with their zippy orbits allowing them to travel through the less dense regions. But there a section scientists call the “ignorosphere”, between 30-100 kilometers up that still plays a major role in global climate dynamics, but which are only able to reach with temporary sounding rockets thatRead More →

Nine Hundred Telescopes and One Chance a Year Reading the atmosphere of another world means catching starlight as it filters through that planet’s air during a transit. The signal is about one part in a million and a true Earth twin transits only once a year, so you cannot simply repeat the measurement until the noise averages away. Each attempt has to work on its own. A team led from Shanghai has proposed the alternative to building an impossibly large mirror in space – nine hundred, one metre telescopes, flying together, watching the same transit and analysing the light together. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Two Million X-Ray Sources, and One Cluster That Doesn’t Fit The eROSITA telescope has released its second great catalogue of the X-ray sky with close to two million sources across half the sky, roughly double what it published before. Buried in it is a result from Bonn that matters more than the headline number. A team there went after the faintest part of a massive galaxy cluster, the outer region where fresh material is still arriving along threads of gas stretching between clusters. Nobody had measured that emission before. The gas turns out to be hotter, denser and poorer in heavy elements than the modelsRead More →

Twenty Years of Watching One Galaxy, and It Made Less Sense Blazars are galaxies with a jet aimed almost directly at us, and they flicker across every part of the spectrum at once. Almost everything we think we know about them comes from short observing campaigns just a handful of days, every year or two, in one narrow band of energy. A Polish and German team has now done the opposite, following a single blazar for nearly twenty years with two orbiting observatories and in two observations from 2012 they found something in the spectrum that nobody had predicted. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Solar Magnetic Field Braids May Have a Previously Hidden Cause Scientists using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawai’i have found a mechanism occurring on the Sun’s surface that they think is heating our star’s outer atmosphere. The process, called a Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability (KHI), could well be the root cause of a phenomenon called flux braiding that builds up and moves around on the Sun and heats the coronasphere. This discovery may well also explain the fundamental physics of similar activity at other stars. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Every Snowflake Needs a Speck of Dust and So Do Planets A snowflake cannot form out of nothing. Water vapour will sit in the air quite happily, supercooled and reluctant, until it finds a speck of dust to build on and then it crystallises around it. Cosmochemists have had a version of that problem for decades. The early Solar System was a furnace of gas, and the first solid grains had to condense out of it somehow, yet condensing from a perfectly uniform gas is slow and difficult work. New research from Caltech, analysing fragments of a meteorite that fell over Mexico in 1969, suggestsRead More →

How to Find Lunar Ice? Moonquakes to the Rescue! The surface of the Moon is a bleak and forbidding place that might be hiding a lot of water ice on and under the dusty landscape. However, most possible ice deposits don’t just stand out in an image. You need specialized mapping to find traces of water ice. So, scientists have devised another way to find the Moon’s frosty hidden reserves. They use seismic waves from moonquakes as locator beacons. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Europa’s Interior Ocean Could be Harder to Reach Than We Thought Lujendra Ojha, a planetary scientist, led a study suggesting that Europa’s icy shell may be a stronger barrier between the moon’s hidden ocean and its surface than previously thought. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

What If There’s a Star Inside a Black Hole? Ask what lies inside a black hole and the honest answer has always been a bit of a shrug and something about a singularity, a point where density becomes infinite and physics stops being able to tell you anything at all. It is the most unsatisfying answer in astrophysics, second only perhaps to what happened before the Big Bang. Now two theorists in China have produced a solution in which something else sits inside the horizon entirely, a neutron star, whole and intact, twelve kilometres across, its interior perfectly well behaved and apparently defying the lawsRead More →