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Zodiacal Dust in Exoplanetary Systems Could Hinder Our Search For Life On Other Worlds Most exoplanetary systems have a plane of dust similar to the zodiacal dust of our solar system. This dust absorbs some of the very light we use to find biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres, and could make our search for life more challenging. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
The Asteroid That May Be Three Worlds We have been watching asteroid (44) Nysa for well over a century without ever really knowing what it looks like. Now the sharpest images ever taken of it, from two of the largest telescopes on Earth, have revealed two deep valleys running right around its circumference and the team behind them think those are necks, joining three separate lobes into a single 75 kilometre body. If that holds up, Nysa is the first three lobed world we have ever found. And in the glare beside it the same observations turned up something nobody was looking for, a tinyRead More →
Smashed Ice Worlds Formed Neptune’s Inner Moons and Rings The planet Neptune has 16 known moons, with its largest Moon, Triton, comprising more than 99.5 percent of the mass of all of them. Triton’s incredible size has led scientists to hypothesize it was a captured object originating from the Kuiper Belt, which wreaked havoc on Neptune’s original moon system upon its capture and subsequential elliptical orbit. Today, some remnants of these original moons are part of the dusty rings that orbit Neptune. But what did that original moon system consist of? Were they the same small worlds observed today or are they pieces of whatRead More →
Interstellar Travel: The Space Age and Nuclear Rockets Given the state of our technology, it would take a spacecraft a ridiculously long time to reach even the nearest star in our galaxy. However, scientists continue to ponder ways in which we could achieve the dream of interstellar spaceflight. Here are a few of their best ideas. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
Charon’s Mountains Reveal Moon Once Spun 10x Faster Pluto’s moon, Charon, is one of the most unexplored (and arguably underappreciated) planetary objects in the entire solar system. This is primarily because it’s only been visited once by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its famous Pluto flyby in July 2015. Despite this quick encounter, New Horizons beamed back troves of data regarding Charon that scientists continue to pour over with the goal of gaining insight into Charon’s formation and evolution. This is because Charon is the largest moon compared to its parent body in the solar system, noted by it being half of Pluto’s diameter andRead More →
Astronomers Measure the Long Reach of a Quasar There are a number of things in the Universe that could wipe out life as we know it, but — for now, and for Earth — a blast from our galaxy’s supermassive black hole isn’t one of them. That’s not to say that Sagittarius A* doesn’t pose a danger. If it wakes up someday and blasts out a strong wind, that definitely could affect Earth. It could well have powered a quasar in the past, and could do so again. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
Astrobiologist Uses Apollo Lunar Samples As Mirror Onto Early Earth A Tokyo-based astrobiologist is using an ingenious new way to garner insight into Earth’s 3.5-billion-year-old biosphere. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
The Star That Exploded Without Hydrogen Twenty five years ago a star in the constellation Puppis blew itself apart and then vanished behind a curtain of its own soot. Astronomers knew only that the explosion contained no hydrogen at all, which for the most abundant element in the universe is a very strange absence. Now the dust has finally thinned, and the culprits have stepped into view, a white dwarf quietly stripping a rare helium star of its substance. But the emerging picture came with something nobody expected, clumps of gas tearing outwards at twenty million miles an hour, of a kind never seen inRead More →
NASA Wants to Toss 10,000 Tiny Probes Directly Into Saturn’s Rings Cassini, NASA’s last major mission to Saturn, famously plunged to its fiery death in the gas giant’s atmosphere at the end of its mission. It had captured more accurate in-situ data of the Saturnian system than any mission before or since. But there’s one particular part that it couldn’t directly approach – Saturn’s rings. But NASA very obviously wants to take a nice up-close look at them, as they have recently funded a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant to send a swarm of 10,000 highly expendable “femtosatellites” to get upRead More →
What happens to a moon when its planet is stolen? The galaxy is littered with rogue planets, worlds flung out of the systems that built them, drifting between the stars with no sun to call their own. But when a planet is torn away, does anything go with it? New simulations say yes, a passing star can rip a world out of its orbit and leave its moons still faithfully circling it, sailing off into the dark as a set. If our own Jupiter were evicted tomorrow, all four Galilean moons would go with it. And in that darkness, with no sunlight at all, oneRead More →
It Took a Century, but Astronomers Imaged Betelgeuse’s Companion Most of us are familiar with Betelgeuse (also known as alpha Orionis), the bright shoulder star in the constellation Orion. It’s a red supergiant star that lies somewhere between 400 and 550 light-years away from us and is quite bright. Betelgeuse contains about 14 times the mass of the Sun and is a fairly young star compared to ours. It appears to be no more than 10 million years old, which means that it evolved rapidly from a protostar to the red giant we see today. That lifecycle means Betelgeuse will explode as a supernova sometimeRead More →
Mercury’s Weak Magnetic Field Periodically Traps Solar Wind The planet Mercury is the first planet from the Sun but also one shrouded in mystery. This is primarily due to the limited number of spacecrafts that have visited it, but this limited data has provided scientists with new and exciting characteristics previously thought impossible. One fascinating aspect is its magnetic field, which was first discovered in March 1974, which both surprised and puzzled scientists due to the planet’s small size, which is measured at about half the size of the continental United States from coast to coast. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
What Killed Galaxies in the Early Universe? Galaxies in the infancy of the Universe are the building blocks of more modern galaxies. They began as small “shreds” of material that coalesced over time to form larger ones. That’s why astronomers use observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the young Universe. The light from those early objects appears in the infrared part of the spectrum, which JWST is tuned to see. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
Primordial Black Holes Can Trigger Type Ia Supernovae, and Astronomers Should be Able to Find Them Primordial black holes (PBH) remain hypothetical, but that isn’t stopping astrophysicists from figuring out how they could interact with other stellar objects. New research shows how PBHs, formed in the early Universe from collapsing pockets of dense subatomic matter instead of from stars, can enter white dwarfs. In some cases, that could’ve triggered a Type Ia supernova with particular chemical fingerprints, which should be detectable. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
Radio Array Detects Polarized Light From a GRB On March 10, 2026, the Fermi telescope gamma-ray burst team reported the detection of a long-duration gamma ray burst that occurred when a star exploded inside a dense, highly magnetized cloud of hydrogen gas. That HII region is a bubble of ionized hydrogen created by winds from a massive young star. Astronomers immediately turned as many telescopes as possible to view the burst and its afterglow, including the NSF’s Karl Jansky Very Large Array. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
The ELT’s Spectrograph Could Sniff Out Biosignatures on Other Worlds Before any major telescope commissioning, there are dozens of papers that attempt to define what we can expect from it. We’re starting to see some come through for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which hopefully will get a more imaginative name when the 39m behemoth is officially commissioned in Chile in the 2030s. A new paper from Evann Kurzawa-Ferrandez and his co-authors at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and available in pre-print on arXiv, showcases what kind of biologically relevant gases we can find on some of our nearest exoplanets. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
Mars’ Double Storm Problem A new study presented at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting suggests that solar storms may warm the Martian lower atmosphere, but only when they strike during a major Martian dust storm. The discovery was accidental, emerging from a search for a different effect entirely, and hints that the weather system on Mars may be more tangled and interconnected than scientists previously assumed. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
The Exciting Plan to Photograph an Alien Continent NASA has selected a concept study, led by physicist Paul Stankus, exploring whether a pair of spacecraft flying in tight formation could one day produce an actual image of an Earth like exoplanet’s surface, oceans, continents and all. It’s an early stage idea, backed by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program, but if it ever came together, it would represent an extraordinary leap beyond simply detecting a distant world to genuinely seeing its face. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
A Thermal Camera Trick Could Let LIGO See Twice as Far A team of researchers have found a surprisingly simple way to boost the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. It’s surprisingly simple to, just point an ordinary thermal imaging camera at the mirrors themselves. The technique could improve LIGO’s next upgrade by up to 31%, letting it detect neutron star collisions tens of millions of light years farther away, and is already being built into the design of its planned successor, Cosmic Explorer. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
Alien Signals May Hide in Unexplored High Radio Frequencies Confirming the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence via radio signals, also called technosignatures, is the cornerstone of radio astronomy. While humanity has been asking since time immemorial whether or not we’re alone in the universe, radio astronomers are at the frontlines trying to tirelessly answer this longstanding question. To accomplish this, they’ve traditionally focused on a specific radio frequency band called the “water hole”, which resides between 1.42 and 1.66 GHz. This is due to two water-forming molecules, hydrogen and hydroxyl, emitting these frequencies. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →
