Astronomy

The gas giant has been measured for the first time in decades, trimming 8 kilometres from its diameter

The gas giant has been measured for the first time in decades, trimming 8 kilometres from its diameter

 In his new book, Daniel Yon explains how our brain is constantly constructing reality

'Wake up and ask yourself, 'Is what I'm doing helping us get back to the moon?' … If it's not, stop doing it.'

Venus has double close conjunctions with the crescent Moon and Regulus in the dawn next Friday the 19th. Meanwhile, Saturn and Neptune are coming to opposition.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, September 12 – 21 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Image: Part of the Gibson Desert in Western Australia is featured in this image, captured by the Φsat-2 mission in June 2025.

It was the 114th Falcon 9 mission of 2025 already.

"This shows how effective the approach of 'Discover with Subaru Telescope, explore with James Webb' can be."

The new finding may solve an "astrophysics mystery that has stood for nearly half a century."

Stellar mass black holes have only a few solar masses, and are much different from their gigantic counterparts, supermassive black holes. When these modestly-massive black holes are actively accreting matter, new research shows that the process is anything but orderly. Instead, it's characterized by different velocities, different ionization zones, and other complexities.

The JWST has begun examining the atmosphere of the habitable zone planet TRAPPIST-1 e. It's not finished yet, but the first observations indicate that the the planet hasn't retained its primary, or original, atmosphere. The TRAPPIST-1 star exhibits powerful flaring that likely stripped it away.

Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and has been observed in great detail for decades. Some research suggests it hosts exoplanets, while other research counters that. The latest observations of the star's disk with ALMA favour the existence of a planet.

Circumstellar discs are believed to be key components in planetary formation. However, we have very little actual evidence of planets growing in the “rings” that surround young stars. So planet formation theorists were ecstatic to learn that two new papers in Astrophysical Journal Letters describe a planet that is actively forming in the gap it most likely created in the ring system of a young, Sun-like star.

After the formation of the Solar System, it took a maximum of three million years for primordial Earth's chemical composition to settle. At the time, there was hardly any water, carbon compounds, or other ingredients necessary for life to emerge. Only a planetary collision that came later would have brought water to Earth, according to a new study by researchers from the Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of Bern.

A new development study from the Southwestern Research Institute outlines a possible mission that could rendezvous with and explore the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.

This sparkling scene of star birth was captured by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. What appears to be a craggy, starlit mountaintop kissed by wispy clouds is actually a cosmic dust-scape being eaten away by the blistering winds and radiation of nearby, massive, infant stars.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured newborn stars forming in clouds of dust and gas (colored golden and orange in this image) in a star-forming region called Pismis 24.

"Sometimes it's the extreme objects that help us understand what's happening in the average ones."

Astronomers have struggled to explain why a long and thin cloud forms above Mars’s Arsia Mons volcano each year, until now