There are many worlds and many systems of Universes existing all at the same time, all of them perishable.

— Anaximander 546 BC

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Space and Astronomy News from Universe Today
Updated: 15 hours 48 min ago

Researchers at SwRI May Have Solved the Mystery of Uranus' Radiation Belts

Sun, 12/07/2025 - 1:34pm

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists believe they may have resolved a 39-year-old mystery about the radiation belts around Uranus.

Categories: Astronomy

Russia Loses Launch Capability After Accident at Baikonur Cosmodrome

Sat, 12/06/2025 - 8:44pm

A severe accident at the Baikonur Cosmodrome involving a wrecked maintenance cabin has indefinitely delayed Russia's ability to launch crewed missions and payloads to the International Space Station (ISS).

Categories: Astronomy

Did Asteroids Invent Gum Billions of Years Ago?

Sat, 12/06/2025 - 6:51am

What is “gum”? Most people have probably never considered this question, and might answer something like a chewy material you can put in your mouth. But, to a scientist they might answer something like “nitrogen-rich polymeric sheets”, because precisely defining the chemistry of a material is important to them. Or at least, that’s what they called a type of organic material found in the sample collected of the asteroid Bennu by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. But more informally, scientists have taken to calling it “space gum”, and the process it formed under is making some of them question current models of asteroid formation.

Categories: Astronomy

Dust In A Telescope's Eye Could Blind It To Earth 2.0

Fri, 12/05/2025 - 6:47pm

Hot exozodiacal dust can thwart our efforts to detect exoplanets. It causes what's called coronagraphic leakage, which confuses the light signals from distant stars. The Habitable Worlds Observatory will face this obstacle, and new research sheds light on the problem.

Categories: Astronomy

China Outlines Future Plans in New Video, Including Finding Earth 2.0

Fri, 12/05/2025 - 4:01pm

A video that appeared on CGTN's Hot Take details four missions that China will be sending to space in the coming years, including a survey telescope that will search for Earth 2.0.

Categories: Astronomy

Historic May 2024 Gannon Solar Storm Compressed Earth’s Plasmasphere

Fri, 12/05/2025 - 2:05pm

A powerful geomagnetic superstorm is a once a generation event, happening once every 20-25 years. Such an event transpired on the night of May 10/11, 2024, when an intense solar storm slammed into the Earth’s protective magnetic sheath. Now, a recent study shows just how intrusive that storm was, and how long it took for the Earth’s plasma layer to recover.

Categories: Astronomy

SPHERE Shows Us How Our Solar System Isn't Much Different Than Others

Fri, 12/05/2025 - 1:57pm

Observations with the SPHERE instrument on the European Southern Observatory's VLT revealed the presence of debris rings similar to structures in our Solar System. SPHERE found rings similar to the Kuiper Belt and the Main Asteroid Belt. Though individual asteroids and comets can't be imaged, these debris rings infer that other solar systems have architectures similar to ours.

Categories: Astronomy

Scientists and Senators are Excited About the Sugars Found in the OSIRIS-REx Samples

Fri, 12/05/2025 - 7:19am

It’s been over two years since the samples from Bennu gathered by OSIRIS-REx were returned to Earth. But there’s still plenty of novel science coming out of that 121.6 g of material. Three new papers were released recently that describe different aspects of that sample. One in particular, from Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University in Japan and their co-authors, has already attracted plenty of attention, including from US Senator (and former astronaut) Mark Kelly. It shows that all of the building blocks for early life were available on the asteroid - raising the chances that planets throughout the galaxy could be seeded with the abiotic precursors for life.

Categories: Astronomy

Long Ago, Mars Had Massive Watersheds — Now Finally Mapped

Fri, 12/05/2025 - 5:20am

What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the Red Planet’s watery past? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) conducted a first-time mapping study involving Martian river basins. This study has the potential to not only gain insight into ancient Mars and how much water existed there long ago but also develop new methods for mapping ancient river basins on Mars and potentially other worlds.

Categories: Astronomy

Why Scientists Are Studying Mayonnaise in Space

Fri, 12/05/2025 - 4:54am

Scientists have launched COLIS, a special laboratory aboard the International Space Station designed to study how everyday materials like sunscreens, mayonnaise, and medications behave in near zero gravity. Researchers discovered that gravity influences the long term stability of soft matter far more dramatically than previously understood, affecting how these materials age and restructure at the molecular level. This research could fundamentally improve how we design everything from controlled release drugs to self assembling materials, demonstrating that understanding materials in space offers unexpected benefits for life on Earth.

Categories: Astronomy

When Ancient Scribes Accidentally Became Scientists

Fri, 12/05/2025 - 4:26am

On a summer day in 709 BCE, scribes at the Lu Duchy Court in ancient China looked up to witness something extraordinary. The Sun vanished completely from the sky, and in its place hung a ghostly halo. They recorded the event carefully, noting that during totality the eclipsed Sun appeared "completely yellow above and below." Nearly three millennia later, that ancient observation has helped modern scientists measure how fast Earth was spinning and understand what our Sun was doing at a time when Homer was composing poetry.

Categories: Astronomy

New Research Could Explain Why Earth has Active Tectonics and Venus Does Not

Thu, 12/04/2025 - 4:30pm

An international team has made a significant breakthrough in understanding the tectonic evolution of terrestrial planets. Using advanced numerical models, the team systematically classified for the first time six distinct planetary tectonic regimes. Their work provides a unified theory on the geological evolution of both Earth and Venus.

Categories: Astronomy

An Adolescent Growth Spurt In Young Stars Helps Giant Planets Form

Thu, 12/04/2025 - 3:48pm

Intermediate mass stars experience periods of rapid growth in their late stages of formation. The growing young star emits more radiation that encourages greater accretion. Rather than depleting their protoplanetary disks and preventing gas giants from forming, the opposite is true.

Categories: Astronomy

Lessons from the Past: Responsible Science and Astrobiology

Thu, 12/04/2025 - 3:10pm

In a recent paper, a team of SETI and astrobiology specialists examines four controversial claims about the existence of extraterrestrial life. From these, they present recommendations for scientists and science communicators when addressing future claims of discovery.

Categories: Astronomy

Ten Versions of Earth's Future Can Help Us Hunt for ET

Thu, 12/04/2025 - 7:22am

Searching for technosignatures - signs of technology on a planet that we can see from afr - remains a difficult task. There are so many different factors to consider, and we only have the technological capabilities to detect a relatively small collection of them. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv but also accepted for publication into The Astrophysical Journal Letters, from Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and his co-authors explores some of those capabilities by using a framework they developed known as Project Janus that estimates what technology will look like on Earth 1,000 years from now in the hopes that we can test whether or not we can detect it on another planet.

Categories: Astronomy

Helium Streams Observed on Super-Puff Exoplanet

Wed, 12/03/2025 - 11:29pm

What can an exoplanet leaking helium teach astronomers about the formation and evolution of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated atmospheric escape on a puffy exoplanet. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of gas giant planets, specifically with many gas giant planets observed orbiting extremely close to their stars.

Categories: Astronomy

A Blueprint For Visiting An Interstellar Comet

Wed, 12/03/2025 - 6:30pm

arXiv:2512.00492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe how the ESA Comet Interceptor mission, which is due to launch in 2028/29 to a yet-to-be-discovered target, can provide a conceptual basis for a future mission to visit an Interstellar Object. Comet Interceptor will wait in space until a suitable long period comet is discovered, allowing rapid response to perform a fast flyby of an object that will be in the inner Solar System for only a few years; an enhanced version of this concept ...

Categories: Astronomy

The JWST Discovered Another Perplexing Early Galaxy

Wed, 12/03/2025 - 2:54pm

The JWST has made a name for itself by discovering mature galaxies in the Universe's early times. This time, a pair of Indian astronomers working with the JWST found a fully-formed spiral galaxy much like the Milky Way only 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery, and others like it, are forcing scientists to reconsider their understanding of the cosmic timeline.

Categories: Astronomy

We Are Moving Through The Universe Faster Than We Thought

Wed, 12/03/2025 - 11:49am

We've long known that we move through the Universe relative to the cosmic microwave background, but a new study of radio galaxies finds an even faster result, which could contradict the standard model of cosmology.

Categories: Astronomy

These Two Galaxies Are Tying The Knot And Producing Stars

Wed, 12/03/2025 - 10:52am

The European Space Agency has release its ESA/Webb Picture of the Month and it features a pair of dwarf galaxies engaged in a tentative dance, like nervous partners at a social. The pair are a staggering 24 million light-years away. But even at that great distance, the pair of galaxies is the closest-known interacting pair of dwarfs, other than the Milky Way's Magellanic Clouds, where both the stellar populations and the gas bridge linking the galaxies have been observed.

Categories: Astronomy