Universe Today (Page 5)

Uranus Mission Concept CASMIUS to Probe Ice Giant Secrets The ice giant Uranus is one of the most fascinating objects in the solar system, with its sideways rotation, intricate ring system, and unique family of moons. However, it is also one of the least explored objects in the solar system, owing to its extreme distance from the Sun. With NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft remaining as the only spacecraft to visit Uranus, scientists continue to design and envision mission concepts for returning to explore Uranus and its icy secrets. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

NASA Narrows Artemis Landing Sites to 9 Key Regions Less than two days from now, NASA’s Artemis II mission is scheduled to lift off for its historic 10-day journey around the Moon, marking the first time humans have ventured beyond Low Earth Orbit for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, and possibly even set new distance records for traveling beyond Earth. However, Artemis II is only scheduled as a flyby mission and will not be landing humans on the lunar surface, with this endeavor being scheduled for later missions. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Oldest Carbon-rich Stars Open a Window to Early Cosmic Chemistry Astronomers studying the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Pictor II have found an extremely chemically peculiar star that contains traces of elements created by the first stars in the Universe. It’s called PicII-503, a “second-generation star” that is one of the most chemically primitive stars ever found. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

To Celebrate the Coming of Spring, NASA Releases Images of “Blossaming” Stellar Nurseries This collection of images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes contains regions where stars are forming. Often nicknamed “stellar nurseries,” they are cosmic gardens from which stars – not plants – emerge from the interstellar soil of gas and dust. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

We Could Be Hit By Five Building-sized Asteroids By The End Of The Century – So What Are We Going To Do About It? It’s amazing how much one movie can act as a cultural touchpoint for an entire topic – even a topic as serious as defense of a planet. Popular media consistently use the 1998 movie Armageddon as a reference when talking about how we would destroy a civilization-ending asteroid. That’s despite the movie’s glaring scientific flaws, not the last of which is the likely size of the rogue comet that threatens the Earth. Planetary defense researchers at MIT were recently interviewed byRead More →

How Plants Could Betray Themselves Across the Galaxy Every green leaf on Earth does something remarkable, it absorbs visible light for photosynthesis but reflects near-infrared light back into space, creating a distinctive spectral signature that could in principle be spotted from across the Galaxy. It’s called the vegetation red edge, and it may be our best hope of detecting life on distant worlds. Now a new study has tackled one of the biggest obstacles to using it, the messy, patchy reality of real planets with real clouds. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Mars Was Once a World of Rain Mars today is a frozen, barren world where liquid water can briefly appear on its surface but evaporates almost instantly in the thin atmosphere, unable to persist in any meaningful quantity. But a handful of pale, bleached rocks spotted by NASA’s Perseverance rover are telling a very different story about the planet’s past, one of tropical downpours, sodden landscapes, and conditions that might once have been hospitable to life. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Solar Activity Could Threaten the Artemis Crew In his blockbuster 1982 novel “Space”, the writer James A. Michener wove a gripping tale of astronauts trapped on the Moon during a major solar storm. Warnings from Earth didn’t come soon enough to save them from death by radiation sickness. To avoid such a tragedy happening with the Artemis crews (as with the Apollo crews of the past), NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will monitor the Sun. If it acts up, the teams will be able to send warnings and instructions to the Artemis crews to pro tect them. Universe Today Go toRead More →

New Henrietta Spectrograph to Probe Alien Atmospheres Finding life beyond our solar system goes beyond measuring an exoplanet’s size, as rocky, Earth-sized worlds might not have the conditions for life as we know it. While exoplanets can be directly imaged by blocking their star’s glare, these images are fuzzy and lack resolution to provide enough details about the habitability. Therefore, astronomers are limited to studying an exoplanet’s atmosphere, and this has proven to be quite beneficial in teaching scientists about an exoplanet’s formation and evolution, and whether it contains the necessary ingredients for life as we know it. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Pulsars Rewrite the Rules For decades, astronomers thought they knew that pulsars broadcast their signatight beams of radio waves fired from near the surface, close to the magnetic poles. A new study of nearly 200 of the fastest spinning pulsars in the universe has just turned that idea on its head. It turns out these extraordinary objects are broadcasting from two completely separate locations at once, and one of them lies right at the outer edge of their magnetic grip on space itself. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

How the Solar Wind Really Works The Sun doesn’t just pump out light and heat, it blasts a continuous stream of charged particles across the Solar System, and that solar wind is far more complex than it looks. Hidden within it are waves that act as invisible middlemen, constantly shuffling energy between particles as the wind expands outward. Now, thanks to the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft, we have our clearest picture yet of how those waves behave close to the Sun itself. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Blocking out the Stellar Lighthouses Finding another Earth is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time and the biggest obstacle isn’t the distance, it’s the glare. An Earth like planet orbiting a Sun like star is ten billion times fainter than its host. A team of NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing a remarkable piece of optical wizardry that could solve the problem of seeing planets hidden by the stellar glare and they’re already within striking distance of the performance needed to make it work. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

A Galactic Wind Caught in the Act Twelve million light years away, a galaxy is throwing a tantrum on a cosmic scale. M82, the Cigar Galaxy is forming stars at ten times the rate of our own Milky Way, and all that frenzied activity has been blasting superheated gas outward in a colossal wind stretching 40,000 light years. Scientists have long known the wind exists, but now, for the first time, they’ve measured exactly how fast it’s moving and the answer raises as many questions as it answers. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Bennu’s Rugged Rocks Explained by Deep Internal Cracks Asteroids don’t get the love they deserve. They don’t get “cool points” because they’re not a planet or a potential life-harboring moon. They’re “just a bunch of rocks”. But asteroids are so much more, as they are time capsules of the early solar system that have survived billions of years untouched by weathering or plate tectonics. One of the most intriguing asteroids that has been explored is asteroid Bennu, and specifically how its physical characteristics greater differed from Earth-based observations in 2007 after NASA OSIRIS-REx spacecraft visited Bennu in 2018. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Exomoons Could Be Habitable for Billions of Years, Provided they have Hydrogen Atmospheres Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun. A research team from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has shown that moons around free-floating planets can keep their water oceans liquid for up to 4.3 billion years by virtue of dense hydrogen atmospheres and tidal heating—that is to say, for almost as long as Earth has existed and sufficient time for complex life to develop. Universe Today Go toRead More →

Mars-Like Worlds Near M-Dwarfs May Lose Air in Millions of Years The criteria for finding an Earth-like planet unofficially comes down to two things: water and the habitable zone. But a phenomenon known as atmospheric escape often “escapes” the minds of many astronomy fans, and it turns out that atmospheric escape is one of the key characteristics for finding an Earth-like world. Although extensive research has been conducted on how the planet Mars might have lost its atmosphere, and potentially the ability to sustain life, how would the atmosphere enveloping a Mars-like exoplanet respond to stars different from our own? Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

A Signal From Before the Stars On 12 November 2025, LIGO picked up a gravitational wave signal that stopped astronomers in their tracks. The object that produced it was too small to be any known type of black hole, smaller in fact, than our own Sun. If confirmed, it would be something that has never been directly detected before, a primordial black hole forged in the violent chaos of the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Now two astrophysicists believe they can explain exactly what LIGO found and why it could crack open one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology. Universe TodayRead More →

Hunting Moon Water With Neutrons Water is the difference between a temporary visit and a permanent home. If humanity is serious about building a lasting presence on the Moon, finding usable ice near the lunar south pole isn’t just a scientific curiosity, it’s a practical necessity. Now NASA is sending a clever instrument that hunts for water without digging a single hole, using the behaviour of subatomic particles to sniff out hidden ice deposits up to three feet underground. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

Hera Aces A Massive Engine Burn On Its Way To Didymos In September 2022, humanity crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid – on purpose. The objective of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was to see if we could intentionally modify the orbit of Dimorphos, the small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. According to all accounts, the mission worked spectacularly, but it was a one-way trip, so our ability to see what happened to the binary asteroid system has so far been limited to ground-based telescopes. That wasn’t good enough for the planetary defense community, so they planned a follow up mission called Hera,Read More →

Uncovering the Effects of Microgravity on Liver Metabolism A team led by Professor Mian Long from the Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, investigated the effects of space microgravity on cultured liver cells aboard the China Space Station. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →