Universe Today

Current gravitational wave observatories can't see a range of frequencies known as mid-band. That could change with a new detector that uses a trick from atomic clocks.

As a kid you ever play that game Guess Who? If you haven’t, it’s actually kinda fun.

Lockheed Martin Skunk Works has executed the first test flight of the X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft in partnership with NASA. The first flight was subsonic, but eventually the plane will demonstrate technologies aimed at reducing sonic booms to gentle thumps.

Black holes are eating each other and growing fat on the remains! They then seem to move on, finding new partners to devour in what can only be described as a cycle of violence. Two gravitational wave detections from late 2024 have caught these “second generation" black holes in the act, one spinning so fast it ranks among the most extreme ever observed, the other rotating backwards. These aren't simple collisions between black holes born from dying stars, instead they're the products of earlier mergers now colliding again in crowded stellar neighbourhoods, carrying the scars and strange spins of their violent pasts into the fabric of spacetime itself.

A giant spider sprawls across space, its three light year legs stretching into the cosmos powered by a star in its death throes. The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the Red Spider Nebula in stunning new detail, revealing not just the spectacular structure of a dying Sun like star, but also hints of a hidden companion influencing the show. What appeared faint and unremarkable in previous observations now blazes with infrared light, exposing hot dust shrouding the central star and fast moving jets of ionized iron creating ripples through expelled stellar material.

I tour a science show around the UK and have often fancied a flame thrower based demo, theatres are not so keen though. Imagine the Sun as a flamethrower in its youth, hurling solar storms and plasma bombs into space with incredible ferocity. Scientists have just witnessed what those ancient events might look like by observing a young star similar to our infant Sun, and the findings are both alarming and fascinating. Using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground observatories across three countries, researchers captured a two stage plasma eruption far more powerful than anything we see from the modern Sun, the kind of violence that may have either destroyed early life on Earth or surprisingly made it possible in the first place.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is slated to be the next Great Observatory for the world. Its main focus has been searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-like exoplanets. However, to do that, it will require a significant amount of effort with only a coronagraph, the currently planned primary instrument, no matter how powerful that coronagraph is. As new paper from Fabien Malbet of the University of Grenoble Alpes and his co-authors suggest an improvement - add a second instrument to HWO’s payload that will be able to astrometrically track planets down to a precision of .5 micro-arcseconds (µas). That would allow HWO to detect Earth-size planets around hundreds of nearby stars - dramatically increasing the number of potential candidates for atmospheric analysis.

Can water-rich exoplanets survive orbiting white dwarf stars, the latter of which are remnants of Sun-like stars? This is what a recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the likelihood of small, rocky worlds with close orbits to white dwarfs could harbor life. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life as we know it, or don’t know it, and where to find it.

A team of scientists has released a new survey mapping massive galaxy clusters, some of the largest structures in the universe, to test whether our fundamental understanding of the laws of the universe need revision. The analysis, using six years of Dark Energy Survey data, addresses an ongoing debate about whether the universe has more structure than our best models predict, ultimately reinforcing that our current rules remain accurate while demonstrating that galaxy clusters provide a powerful independent method for probing the universe's deepest mysteries.

Astronomers have created the first large scale map of dark molecular gas in the Milky Way, revealing vast networks of invisible star forming material that have so far have remained undetected. Using the Green Bank Radio Telescope to observe faint signals from carbon, the research team has finally started to uncover one of astronomy's biggest mysteries. Their discovery uncovers turbulent flows of gas moving faster than expected and show how raw galactic matter transforms into the molecular clouds where stars are born.

A new study has reviewed how space habitat designs have evolved from inflatable bubbles to 3D-printed structures built from Martian dust. The research traces how engineers have wrestled with extreme temperatures, the bombardment of radiation, and the challenge of building on worlds without breathable air, transforming each obstacle into solved problems with innovative ideas and designs that could soon house the first permanent residents of the Moon and Mars.

Everyone’s favorite interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS isn’t really hiding near perihelion this week, as amateur astronomers reveal. Don’t believe the breathless ballyhoo that you’re currently reading around the web about interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS. In a clockwork Universe, comets are the big wildcard, and interstellar comets doubly so. This particular comet is scientifically interesting enough in its own right, no alien interlopers needed.

In the 1970’s Vera Rubin didn’t set out to upend modern cosmology.

Asteroids spin. Most of them do so rather slowly, and up until now most theories of asteroid rotation have failed to explain exactly why. A new paper from Wen-Han Zhou at the University of Tokyo and his co-authors might finally be able to fully explain that mystery as well as a few others related to asteroid rotation. Their work was presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in late September and could impact our understanding of how best to defend against a potentially hazardous asteroid.

Could scientists find life in the clouds of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recently submitted manuscript hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how the biosignatures of microbes could be identified in exoplanet atmospheres and clouds. This study has the potential to help scientists develop new methods for finding life on exoplanets, either as we know it or even as we don’t know it.

A team led by a University of Maryland astronomer detected large complex organic molecules in ices outside of the Milky Way for the first time, offering a glimpse into the chemistry of the early universe.

We cannot see directly beyond the cosmic microwave background, which means we can't directly observe the first 380,000 years of the Universe. But there are indirect ways we might observe this period.

Satellites orbiting Earth face a constant assault from highly reactive single atom of oxygen which are created when solar radiation splits oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere. These atoms don't just create drag that pulls spacecraft back to Earth, they also bind to satellite surfaces, causing corrosion that limits most satellites to roughly five year lifespans. A team of engineers at the University of Texas at Dallas have been developing a protective coating using techniques borrowed from microelectronics and optical manufacturing to counter the effects. The process the team have developed enables satellites to withstand conditions even harsher than those found in space. If successful, this coating could not only extend satellite lifetimes but enable spacecraft to operate in very low Earth orbit, a region currently too hostile for most missions.

Astronomers have discovered a clever way to make a single telescope capture sharper details than should be physically possible. The technique involves feeding starlight through a special optical fibre called a photonic lantern. Anyone else thinking of a certain glowing green lantern from a movie? Alas not, instead of special powers, it splits light according to its spatial patterns like separating a musical chords into individual notes. The researchers achieved resolution that has never been achieved before without linking multiple telescopes together. When they tested the technique on a star 162 light-years away, they not only proved it works but stumbled upon an unexpected discovery, that the star's surrounding gas disc is mysteriously lopsided.

The famous Tycho supernova of 1572, witnessed by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, didn't explode in empty space as has been assumed. New analysis reveals it detonated inside a planetary nebula, the ghostly shell of gas expelled by an earlier dying star. The evidence lies in two "ear" shaped structures that were sticking out from the remnant's main shell, matching similar features in three other supernovae previously identified as explosions within planetary nebulae. This discovery supports the "core-degenerate" model where a white dwarf star merges with a companion star's core, with the explosion occurring hundreds of thousands of years later while the nebula remains intact. Most strikingly, if Tycho follows this pattern, it suggests that 70-90% of normal Type Ia supernovae may actually be supernovae inside planetary nebulae!