Space

Apr 1st, 2025 - Deep within the Flame Nebula, about 1,400 light-years away in the Orion constellation, hot cosmic gas and dust are fueling the birth of new stars. This area is less than a million years old and contains not only newly forming stars but also so-called "failed stars" known as brown dwarfs.  Because brown dwarfs lack the mass to fuse hydrogen in their cores, they gradually cool down and fade, making them difficult to detect with most telescopes. Yet, at this early stage, they remain warm ... [Read More]

Apr 1st, 2025 - A newly released video has revealed a gigantic plume of solar wind towering above the sun in a never-before-seen, "cyclone-like" configuration that emerged in the wake of a massive solar explosion. The striking timelapse footage also captured strange lines streaking across the fiery scene like pixelated UFOs — but are actually distant stars. The video, which was released March 26 by the European Space Agency (ESA), is sped-up footage originally taken over an eight-hour period on Oct. 12, ... [Read More]

Apr 1st, 2025 - Jupiter's striking size, swirling gases, and dramatic bands in its atmosphere set it apart from every other planet. One of its most iconic features is the Great Red Spot, a storm so vast that it has defined the planet's appearance for centuries. Until now, much of the discussion has centered on the spectacle of that colossal storm itself. Recent observations are shining a new light on what happens above this famous vortex. These details open a fresh perspective on Jupiter's upper atmosphere, ... [Read More]

Apr 1st, 2025 - One of the most powerful objects in the universe is a radio quasar — a spinning black hole spraying out highly energetic particles. Come too close to one, and you'd get sucked in by its gravitational pull, or burn up from the intense heat surrounding it. But ironically, studying black holes and their jets can give researchers insight into where potentially habitable worlds might be in the universe. As an astrophysicist , I've spent two decades modeling how black holes spin, how that ... [Read More]

Apr 1st, 2025 - Earth Is Safe From Menacing Asteroid—but Our Moon Might Take the Hit An asteroid is headed toward a close approach to Earth on December 22, 2032. But fear not, the Webb Space Telescope just re-confirmed that asteroid 2024 YR4 has a nearly 0% probability of crashing into Earth. That said, astronomers are unable to rule out a possible impact with the Moon. The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile discovered the asteroid on December 27, 2024. Shortly after its ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - A team of astronomers has unveiled the most detailed images yet of the universe's infancy , capturing light that traveled for more than 13 billion years before reaching Earth.  These observations, made from a telescope high in the Chilean Andes, provide an unprecedented glimpse of the cosmos when it was just 380,000 years old – equivalent to baby pictures of a universe that has since grown into its middle age. "We are seeing the first steps towards making the earliest stars and ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - The ice-giant planet Uranus, which travels around the sun tipped on its side, is a weird and mysterious world. Now, in an unprecedented study spanning two decades, researchers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered new insights into the planet's atmospheric composition and dynamics. This was possible only because of Hubble's sharp resolution, spectral capabilities, and longevity. The team's results will help astronomers to better understand how the atmosphere of Uranus works and ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - Scientists caught a massive and extremely powerful X-class solar flare being spat out from the sun on Friday (March 28), just before the stellar eruption triggered a radio blackout across two continents. A video captured by the GOES-16 satellite, which is jointly operated by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), shows the X-class solar flare bursting forth from a sunspot on the sun's surface at around 11:20 a.m. EST on March 28. This X1.1-class solar flare , which ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - Gaia: the best space telescope you never heard of just shut down On Thursday 27 March, the European Space Agency (ESA) sent its last messages to the Gaia Spacecraft . They told Gaia to shut down its communication systems and central computer and said goodbye to this amazing space telescope. Gaia has been the most successful ESA space mission ever, so why did they turn Gaia off? What did Gaia achieve? And perhaps most importantly, why was it my favourite space telescope? Running on empty ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2025 - NASA's Curiosity rover has made another remarkable discovery on Mars – the largest organic compounds ever detected on the Red Planet. These molecules , discovered in a rock sample drilled in 2013, offer fresh insights into the potential of Mars to support life. The findings suggest that Mars might have hosted more advanced prebiotic chemistry than scientists had assumed. Inside Curiosity's onboard mini-lab called SAM, scientists identified three organic molecules: decane, undecane, and ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2025 - A team of scientists has developed a recipe for black holes that eliminates one of the most troubling aspects of physics: the central singularity, the point at which all our theories, laws and models shatter. If you were going to design an object to preserve mystery while being utterly troubling, you couldn't do much better than a black hole . First, the outer boundary of these cosmic titans is a one-way light-trapping surface called an event horizon , the point at which a black hole's gravity ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2025 - This is what it looks like when light from one galaxy is bent around the mass of another. The latest image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope , pictured above, also happens to be a stunning illustration of Einstein's theory of general relativity. So much so that the cosmic phenomenon is called an "Einstein ring." Einstein rings happen when light from one distant object is bent around the mass of another, slightly closer and even larger object. The effect is normally too subtle to observe up ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2025 - In a Sky Full of Satellites, Astronomers Find Creative Ways to Observe the Stars By & In the next few months, from its perch atop a mountain in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will begin surveying the cosmos with the largest camera ever built. Every three nights, it will produce a map of the entire southern sky filled with stars, galaxies, asteroids and supernovae — and swarms of bright satellites ruining some of the view. Astronomers didn't worry much about satellites photobombing ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, March 28 The Moon passes 9° south of Venus at 10 A.M. EDT this morning. We'll check out the planet — now a morning star as well, visible before dawn — later in the week.  Tonight, let's take advantage of the moonless dark to enjoy some deep-sky observing. A few hours after sunset, Virgo has cleared the horizon and appears in the southeast. Start by finding 4th-magnitude 110 Virginis, a star in far eastern Virgo ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2025 - Astronomers have used the remains of an ancient, dead star to uncover information about how stars explode and form black holes. The astronomers reconstructed the makeup of the long-dead star that exploded in a violent supernova more than a million years ago. Using data collected by NASA 's Chandra X-ray Observatory, researchers led by Noa Keshet, Ehud Behar and Timothy Kallman of the Goddard Space Flight Center, conducted what they describe as "supernova archaeology." The term refers to ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2025 - By For centuries, humans have wondered if planets exist around other stars and dreamed of what these alien worlds might be like. Eventually technology began catching up with our imagination. Despite many false starts and dead ends over all that time, astronomers announced the first discovery of exoplanets in 1992 . These planets were not like Earth, nor were they orbiting a star like the sun, but they were confirmed to exist. It was the first evidence ever found of worlds beyond those of our ... [Read More]