Space

Sep 17th, 2025 - By Zhang Nannan, Chinese Academy of Sciences Share Astronomers confirmed an off-center black hole in a dwarf galaxy. It offers clues to how supermassive black holes may form. Black holes are most often assumed to sit at the centers of galaxies, but a team led by Dr. Tao An of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has identified one that breaks this rule. The researchers discovered a wandering black hole in a dwarf galaxy roughly 230 million light-years from Earth ... [Read More]

Sep 17th, 2025 - In its youth, the dwarf planet Ceres may have brewed a chemical banquet beneath its icy crust. At first glance, the dwarf planet Ceres hardly inspires dreams of alien life. Orbiting between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt, it is a frigid, gray world, battered and cracked. Its surface temperatures swing between a bracing –93°C to –33°C. There is no atmosphere to speak of, and its gleaming white patches are not signs of life—but salt, likely left behind by ancient ... [Read More]

Sep 17th, 2025 - By Share NGC 7456 may look like just another spiral galaxy, but it's full of surprises. From vibrant star-forming regions glowing pink to mysterious ultraluminous X-ray sources, it's a cosmic laboratory for astronomers. A Hidden Galaxy With a Story to Tell At first glance, this galaxy might look ordinary, one spiral among countless others scattered across the Universe. But the subject of the ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week, known as NGC 7456, holds far more than meets the eye. It lies more than ... [Read More]

Sep 17th, 2025 - Some asteroids are more dangerous than others, according to a in Nature Astronomy by an international team of researchers, led by astrophysicist Auriane Egal of the Montreal Planetarium in Canada. The team had presented their findings of an investigation into the impact of small asteroid 2023 CX1 over France in February 2023. This new paper revealed that small asteroids can explode on atmospheric entry. "The asteroid was discovered in space about seven hours before entering Earth's atmosphere ... [Read More]

Sep 17th, 2025 - Astronomers have discovered a hidden population of quasars – supermassive black holes blazing from the universe's childhood – wrapped in cosmic dust. Using a clever one-two punch of telescopes, researchers first flagged suspiciously luminous galaxies with Japan's Subaru Telescope , then aimed NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at them to see what the dust was concealed. The payoff: seven objects blazing like quasars less than a billion years after the Big Bang, but so ... [Read More]

Sep 17th, 2025 - By Adrienne Berard, Penn State Share Astronomers at Penn State have nicknamed the objects "universe breakers," which may be unusual black hole atmospheres and could represent a missing link in the fast growth of supermassive black holes. Small, faint red sources detected by NASA 's James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ) are giving astronomers fresh clues about how galaxies formed in the early universe — and may point to a completely new category of cosmic object: a black hole consuming huge ... [Read More]

Sep 16th, 2025 - A young and giant star that is forming on the outer edge of our Milky Way just made itself known in spectacular fashion – by beaming a huge jet of gas across 8 light-years of interstellar space. That's almost twice the distance from our Sun to Alpha Centauri, the next closest star system. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ) happened to catch the event in action, and what it saw has scientists buzzing. The eruption, which tears through space at hundreds of thousands of miles per ... [Read More]

Sep 16th, 2025 - The sun has become more and more active over the last 16 years, in a turn that surprised scientists and could affect space weather and technology on Earth, NASA announced  this week. A new research, conducted by two NASA scientists and published earlier in September in the peer-reviewed  Astrophysical Journal Letters , shows that solar activity has ramped up after 2008 — an unexpected reversal following a decades-long decline that was initially thought to foreshadow a period of ... [Read More]

Sep 16th, 2025 - Scientists in Japan now believe that liquid water once flowed through the heart of the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, after researchers detected something unusual in the samples of the space rock that were returned to our planet five years ago . The surprising findings also have potential implications for how Earth acquired its own water, the researchers say. 162173 Ryugu is a roughly 3,000-foot-wide (900 meter) asteroid that orbits the sun every 474 days on a trajectory that frequently overlaps ... [Read More]

Sep 16th, 2025 - A planet more massive than Mercury could be lurking beyond the orbit of Pluto. It's been nearly 2 centuries since a planet was discovered in the solar system. But now scientists think they've uncovered evidence of a newcomer that just might usurp that honor from Neptune. Following an analysis of the orbits of bodies in the Kuiper Belt, a team has proposed that an unseen planet at least 25 times more massive than Pluto might reside there. These results were published in  Monthly Notices of ... [Read More]

Sep 15th, 2025 - Scientists have measured the recoil velocity from a cataclysmic collision between two black holes for the very first time. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time first proposed to exist by Albert Einstein, and detected for the first time in 2015 . Another first came in 2019, when scientists picked up a gravitational wave signal resulting from a violent merger between vastly different sized black holes . The size imbalance caused the newborn black hole to ricochet off into the universe in ... [Read More]

Sep 15th, 2025 - By Europlanet Share Deflecting an asteroid isn't just a matter of smashing into it with a spacecraft. If the strike happens in the wrong place, it could nudge the space rock into a tiny gravitational "keyhole," a hidden gateway that steers it back onto a collision course with Earth. Building on lessons from NASA 's DART mission, researchers are now creating detailed maps of asteroid surfaces to find the safest spots for impact. By aiming precisely, they hope to ensure humanity can push ... [Read More]

Sep 15th, 2025 - New research using the powerful JWST telescope has identified a planet 41 light-years away which may have an atmosphere. The planet is within the "habitable zone" , the region around a star where temperatures make it possible for liquid water to exist on the surface of a rocky world. This is important because water is a key ingredient that supports the existence of life. If confirmed by further observations, this would be the first rocky, habitable zone planet that's also known to host an ... [Read More]

Sep 15th, 2025 - A long, narrow mirror could help astronomers detect life on nearby exoplanets Astronomers are rethinking one of their oldest tools: the telescope's mirror. A new study led by Dr. Heidi Newberg of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute proposes an unorthodox but remarkably efficient design for the next generation of space telescopes: a long, narrow rectangular mirror, rather than the traditional circular kind. Their research, published September 1 in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences , ... [Read More]

Sep 14th, 2025 - Where did life on Earth begin? That sounds like a relatively straightforward question. Surely on Earth began... well, on Earth, right? We know this planet had the right conditions for life to arise, and we can see evidence stretching back more than 4 billion years , almost to its formation. An origin on the planet seems like a simple answer. Yet for years, some scientists have favoured an idea that life didn't start on Earth, but elsewhere in the cosmos. In this scenario, life (or at least the ... [Read More]

Sep 14th, 2025 - Researchers in China have conducted the most thorough search yet for alien radio signals in the nearby TRAPPIST-1 system, which may harbor potentially Earth-like planets. TRAPPIST-1 is a red dwarf star located about 40 light years away that hosts seven Earth sized rocky planets, with at least three orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water could potentially exist. This makes it one of the most Solar System like exoplanet systems discovered, with TRAPPIST-1e considered among the best ... [Read More]