Universe Today

Astronomers have found more than 6,000 exoplanets in the Milky Way. They've even begun to characterize the atmospheres of some of them. But the Milky Way has consumed many of its dwarf satellites. How have exoplanets fared in these remnants? How are they different? To answer those questions, astronomers have to find some of these planets, and a new survey is poised to do just that.

At this point in history, astronomers and engineers who grew up watching Deep Impact and Armageddon, two movies about the destructive power of asteroid impacts, are likely in relatively high ranking positions at space agencies. Don’t Look Up also provided a more modern, though more pessimistic (or, unfortunately, realistic?), look at what might potentially happen if a “killer” asteroid is found on approach to Earth. So far, life hasn’t imitated art when it comes to potentially one of the most catastrophic events in human history, but most space enthusiasts agree that it's worth preparing for when it will. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Maxime Devogèle of ESA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Coordination Centre and his colleagues analyzes a dry run that happened around a year ago with the discovery of asteroid 2024 YR4.

In March of 2024 the [DESI collaboration](https://www.desi.lbl.gov/collaboration/) dropped a bombshell on the cosmological community: slim but significant evidence that dark energy might be getting weaker with time.

Swift observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have revealed the explosive death of a star just as the blast was breaking through the star’s surface. For the first time, astronomers unveiled the shape of the explosion at its earliest, fleeting stage. This brief initial phase wouldn’t have been observable a day later and helps address a whole set of questions about how massive stars go supernova.

So I got an email from Adam Reiss. You know, the guy who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt for discovering the rate of cosmic expansion is accelerating. He pointed out a few issues with the decelerating Universe paper, and with his permission I'd like to share them with you.

Keep an eye on the sky Sunday night and early Monday morning for the Leonid meteors, and a possible second auroral storm. Once every other generation, the Lion roars. If skies are clear Monday morning, keep an eye out for one of the best annual November showers, the Leonid meteors. Also as an extra treat, the skies may stream with aurora once again.

Most people interested in space exploration already know lunar dust is an absolute nightmare to deal with. We’re already reported on numerous potential methods for dealing with it, from 3D printing landing pads so we don’t sand blast everything in a given area when a rocket lands, to using liquid nitrogen to push the dust off of clothing. But the fact remains that, for any long-term presence on the Moon, dealing with the dust that resides there is one of the most critical tasks. A new paper from Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is enough of a polymath that our last article about his research was covering a telescope at the solar gravitational lens, updates our understanding of the physical properties of lunar dust, providing more accurate information that engineers can use to design the next round of rovers and infrastructure to support human expansion to our nearest neighbor.

The Shenzhou-20 mission's three-person crew has returned home after more than a week of delays caused by damage to their spacecraft, allegedly caused by an impact with a tiny piece of space debris.

Astronomers have discovered that the famous Pleiades star cluster, otherwise known as the "Seven Sisters" is actually the bright core of a sprawling family of stars spread across nearly 2,000 light years. By combining stellar spin measurements with precise motion tracking, researchers identified over 3,000 related stars and revealed the Pleiades is twenty times larger than previously thought.

Astronomers have discovered that our Solar System is moving through the universe more than three times faster than cosmological models predict, a finding that challenges fundamental assumptions about how the universe works. By analysing the distribution of distant radio galaxies using advanced statistical methods, the team detected motion so unexpectedly rapid it earned the rare five sigma statistical significance that scientists consider definitive evidence.

Carl Sagan, along with co-author Edwin Salpeter, famously published a paper in the 70s about the possibility of finding life in the cloud of Jupiter. They specifically described “sinkers, floaters, and hunters” that could live floating and moving in the atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet. He also famously talked about how clouds on another of our solar system’s planets - Venus - obfuscated what was on the surface, leading to wild speculation about a lush, Jurassic Park-like world full of life, just obscured by clouds. Venus turned out to be the exact opposite of that, but both of those papers show the impact clouds can have on the Earth for life. A new paper by authors as the Carl Sagan Institute, led by Ligia Coelho of Cornell, argues that we should look at clouds as potential habitats for life - we just have to know how to look for it.

The next few months are likely to bring a dramatic transition for NASA, under the leadership of a new administrator who has new ideas about changing the course of the space agency.

The JWST surprised when it detected very early galaxies that were extremely luminous. This suggested that they were more massive than researchers thought they could be. Not enough time had passed for them to grow so large. New research has an explanation.

Astronomers have used machine learning to discover seven new quasar lens systems, arrangements where a quasar's host galaxy bends light from a more distant galaxy behind it. The find more than doubles the number of known candidates and demonstrates how artificial intelligence can unearth astronomical needles in haystacks containing hundreds of thousands of objects. A team of researchers are training neural networks on synthetic data to revolutionising the search for these rare natural lenses.

Scientists have discovered a 900 metre wide impact crater in southern China, the largest modern meteorite scar on Earth. The Jinlin crater triples the size of the previous record holder and suggests that recent extraterrestrial impacts have been far more dramatic than anyone realised.

A new study of supernovae suggests that the standard model of cosmology isn't quite right. If the data holds up, what other cosmological models might work better?

A new discovery adds to the growing menagerie of exoplanets. These days, word of a new exoplanet discovery raises nary an eyebrow. To date, the current number of known exoplanets beyond our solar system stands at confirmed 6,148 worlds and counting. But a recent study out of the University of Liège in Belgium titled Two Warm Earth-sized Planets and an Earth-sized Candidate in the Binary System TOI-2267 shows just how strange these worlds can be.

Getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the dream of many astronomers. The most powerful space telescope currently in our arsenal, the JWST has been in operation for almost four years at this point, after a long and tumultuous development time. Now, going into its fifth year of operation, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the science and mission operations centers for the JWST has received its highest number ever of submission for observational programs. Now a team of volunteer judges and the institute's scientists just have to pick which ones will actually get telescope time.

A research team has conducted the first systematic search for optical counterparts to a neutrino "multiplet," a rare event in which multiple high-energy neutrinos are detected from the same direction within a short period. The event was observed by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a massive detector buried deep within the Antarctic ice.

Is Saturn's moon Enceladus habitable? There's ample evidence that the moon holds a warm ocean underneath its frozen surface, and that the building blocks of life are present in that ocean. But for life to arise and persist, the ocean needs to sustain itself for a long time, and new research shows that's exactly what's happening.