Astronomy

What is going on with this galaxy?

Why isn't this ant a big sphere?

As the Sun set, a bright Full Moon rose on July 10.

Stars are forming in Lynds Dark Nebula

What's happened in Hebes Chasma on Mars?

'We had an idea for a meat planet' — Revenge of the Savage Planet game director Alex Hutchinson talks strange new worlds and mocking corporate spaceflight.

Trans-Neptunian Objects reside in the distant Solar System as remnants of the System's early days. They follow unusual orbits and range in colour from reds to greys. New research uses their colours and orbits to show how a stellar flyby can account for their modern-day orbits.

All eyes are on the newly discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, currently inbound to the inner solar system. Initial observations have revealed that it's rich in water ice, and it's believed that it originated from the Milky Way's thick disk, ancient stars that orbit above and below the galactic plane. This could mean that 3I/ATLAS is billions of years older than the Solar System, the oldest comet ever discovered. It should reveal more as it heats up and outgasses as it gets closer to the Sun.

When we leave Earth, we have to bring everything with us, from the air we breathe to the food we eat. For example, a 6-person, 1000-day mission might require 108 tonnes of food. In a new paper, researchers suggest ways that synthetic biology could allow us to convert local resources, regenerate resources in closed-loop environments, protect explorers from radiation, and create custom medicine on demand to support long-term space exploration.

Very massive stars (VMSs)have had a massive impact on the formation of our universe. However, there aren’t very many of them, with only around 20 known specimens in the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud. Even observing those is difficult for the current generation of telescopes, which is where an unexpected technological champion might play a role. According to a new paper by Fabrice Martins of CNRS and a group of European and American researchers, the upcoming Habitable World Observatory (HWO) might be our most useful tool when it comes to finding these elusive giants.

Our quest for universal internet is stealing the stars. Thousands of satellites now travelling across the night sky are far brighter than international safety limits, turning what was once humanity's window to the cosmos into a highway of artificial lights. New research reveals that major constellations like Starlink and OneWeb are breaking the brightness rules designed to protect both cutting edge astronomy and the simple joy of stargazing potentially robbing future generations of the dark skies that have inspired wonder for centuries.

For over four centuries, the dark blemishes on our Sun's surface have puzzled astronomers. Now, German scientists have cracked the code behind sunspot stability, revealing how these Earth sized magnetic monsters, each powerful enough to rival an MRI machine yet spanning areas larger than our entire planet, maintain their grip on the solar surface for weeks or months at a time. This breakthrough not only solves one of astronomy's oldest mysteries but could revolutionize our ability to predict the explosive solar storms that threaten our satellite dependent world.

The source of Earth's water is one of the most compelling questions facing scientists. Earth's habitability depends on multiple factors, but water is the basis for life, and it had to come from somewhere. Did comets and meteorites deliver it after Earth formed? Or did water become part of our planet as it formed?

When astronauts live on the Moon permanently, they're going to need a safe habitat, ideally made out of local construction material. A new paper suggests that lunar astronauts could cover a 17-meter crater with a dome made from a lunar regolith-based geopolymer. A 3D printer would extrude a paste made of lunar regolith that would be sintered together into the shape of the dome. This would provide protection from radiation and could even maintain a pressurized habitat.

An international team of astronomers have discovered an Earth-size exoplanet on a very tight orbit around its star. It completes an orbit in only 5 hours and 22 minutes. Unfortunately, the planet will either be torn to pieces or crash into its star in about 31 million years.

The Milky Way is surrounded by about 60 satellite galaxies. The famous ones are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. But according to a new simulation, the Milky Way could have 80 and even 100 satellite galaxies that we haven't detected so far. These galaxies will be hard to find. They've had most of their mass stripped by the gravity of the Milky Way's halo. But new telescopes like Vera Rubin should be able to spot them.

Sometimes in order to support an idea, you first have to discredit alternative, competing ideas that could take resources away from the one you care about. In the scientific community, one of the most devastating ways you can do that is by making the other methods appear to be too expensive to be feasible, or, better yep, prove they wouldn’t work at all due to some fundamental limitation. That is what a recent paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev, the world’s most prominent proponent of a Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) telescope mission, does. He examines how effective alternative telescope technologies would be at creating a 10x10 pixel map of an exoplanet about 32 light years away. Unsurprisingly, there’s only one that is able to do so without giant leaps and bounds in technology development - the SGL telescope.

Scientists have recreated the universe's first moments by smashing atomic nuclei together at near-light speeds, generating temperatures 1,000 times hotter than the Sun's core and briefly forming the same "soup" of fundamental particles that existed microseconds after the Big Bang. In this groundbreaking research, heavy particles act like tiny cosmic detectives, moving through this primordial matter and revealing how the chaotic early universe transformed into the structured reality we see today. By understanding how these massive particles behave under the most extreme conditions imaginable, researchers are essentially reading the universe's origin story written in the language of fundamental physics.