Behold, directly overhead, a certain strange star was suddenly seen...
Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied, I stood still.

— Tycho Brahe

Astronomy

Stellar Duo

NASA Image of the Day - 3 hours 2 min ago
The bright variable star V 372 Orionis takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which has also captured a smaller companion star in the upper left of this image. Both stars lie in the Orion Nebula, a colossal region of star formation roughly 1450 light years from Earth.
Categories: Astronomy, NASA

Best Amazon Prime Day 2025 drone deals

Space.com - 7 hours 51 min ago
We've rounded up the best Amazon Prime Day drone deals as the retailer's annual sales event kicks off on July 8 and runs through to July 11.
Categories: Astronomy

Anti-Prime Day camera deal from Walmart — be ready to capture the crescent moon crossing the Pleiades on July 20

Space.com - 8 hours 2 min ago
The Sony A7 III is $1380 from Walmart on this anti-Prime deal and is a huge $118 cheaper than Amazon!
Categories: Astronomy

Can Canada get to orbit? Companies NordSpace and ProtoSpace hope to launch country's 1st space mission (exclusive)

Space.com - 8 hours 34 min ago
Canadian company NordSpace hopes to be the first in the country's history to launch an orbital rocket from Canadian soil. They've got the support of ProtoSpace, a specialized aerospace manufacturing provider hoping to support Canada's budding space industry.
Categories: Astronomy

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APOD - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 8:00pm

Why is there a spiral around the North Pole of Mars?


Categories: Astronomy, NASA

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APOD - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 8:00pm


Categories: Astronomy, NASA

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APOD - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 8:00pm

Face-on spiral galaxy NGC 6946 and open star cluster NGC 6939 share


Categories: Astronomy, NASA

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APOD - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 8:00pm

If you know where to look, you can see a thermonuclear explosion from a white dwarf star.


Categories: Astronomy, NASA

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APOD - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 8:00pm

Does the Milky Way always rise between these two rocks?


Categories: Astronomy, NASA

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APOD - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 8:00pm

What do you see when you look into this sky?


Categories: Astronomy, NASA

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APOD - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 8:00pm

It came from outer space.


Categories: Astronomy, NASA

Globular Clusters: The Vera Rubin Observatory is Just Getting Started

Universe Today - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 5:49pm

The long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory has delivered some preliminary observations of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae field. 47 Tuc is the Milky Way's second-brightest globular cluster, second to Omega Centauri. The Rubin Observatory's data demonstrates the telescope's promising scientific potential.

Categories: Astronomy

The JWST Shows Us How Galaxies Evolve

Universe Today - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 5:49pm

The Milky Way and other similar galaxies have two distinct disk sections. One is the thin disk section, and it contains mostly younger stars with higher metallicity. The second is the thick disk, and it contains older stars with lower metallicity. The effort to study these disks in more galaxies and in greater detail has been stymied. But now we have the JWST, and researchers used it to examine more than 100 distant, edge-on galaxies.

Categories: Astronomy

When Theia Struck Earth, it Helped Set the Stage for Life to Appear

Universe Today - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 5:49pm

Earth life is carbon-based, and without carbon, there would be no life. New research shows how Earth got its carbon from impactors, including a boost from Theia, the impactor that created the Moon. Jupiter also pitched in to help.

Categories: Astronomy

Primordial Black Holes Could Have Accelerated Early Star Formation

Universe Today - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 5:49pm

The search for dark matter requires all of the best models, theories, and ideas we can throw at it. A new paper from Julia Monika Koulen, Stefano Profumo, and Nolan Smyth from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) tackles the implications of the sizes and abundance of one of the more interesting dark matter candidates - primordial black holes (PBHs).

Categories: Astronomy

How To Use Fusion To Get To Proxima Centauri's Potentially Habitable Exoplanet

Universe Today - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 5:49pm

Proxima Centauri b is the closest known exoplanet that could be in the habitable zone of its star. Therefore, it has garnered a lot of attention, including several missions designed to visit it and send back information. Unfortunately, due to technological constraints and the gigantic distances involved, most of those missions only weigh a few grams and require massive solar scales or pushing lasers to get anywhere near their target. But why let modern technological levels limit your imagination when there are so many other options, if still theoretical, options to send a larger mission to our nearest potentially habitable neighbor? That was the thought behind the Master’s Thesis of Amelie Lutz at Virginia Tech - she looked at the possibility of using fusion propulsion systems to send a few hundred kilogram probe to the system, and potentially even orbit it.

Categories: Astronomy

Reviving SETI with High-Energy Astronomy

Universe Today - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 5:49pm

What new methods can be developed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? This is what a recent white paper submitted to the 2025 NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) Request for Information (RFI) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the Breakthrough Listen project and Michigan State University discussed how high-energy astronomy could be used for identifying radio signals from an extraterrestrial technological civilization, also called technosignatures. This study has the potential to help SETI and other organizations develop novel techniques for finding intelligent life beyond Earth.

Categories: Astronomy

Webb Refines the Bullet Cluster's Mass

Universe Today - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 5:49pm

One of the most iconic cosmic scenes in the Universe lies nearly 3.8 billion light-years away from us in the direction of the constellation Carina. This is where two massive clusters of galaxies have collided. The resulting combined galaxies and other material is now called the Bullet Cluster, after one of the two members that interacted over several billion years. It's one of the hottest-known galaxy clusters, thanks to clouds of gas that were heated by shockwaves during the event. Astronomers have observed this scene with several different telescopes in multiple wavelengths of light, including X-ray and infrared. Those observations and others show that the dark matter makes up the majority of the cluster's mass. Its gravitational effect distorts light from more distant objects and makes it an ideal gravitational lens.

Categories: Astronomy

Will YR4 Hit the Moon? We Won't Know Until 2028

Universe Today - Mon, 07/07/2025 - 5:49pm

Earlier this year, asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered and found to have a trajectory through the Earth/Moon system in 2032. The world's telescopes focused on the potential threat and downgraded the chance to negligible for the Earth...but it still has a non-zero chance of hitting the Moon. As the asteroid became too dim to continue observing, its Moon impact chance stood at 4%. When will we update this number? Not until it does another close flyby in 2028.

Categories: Astronomy