Astronomy

It’s really quite reasonable to assume the stars don’t move! Indeed that was the opinion of our ancestors however we now know they are far from stationary. Imagine a star racing through space so fast it could travel from Earth to the Moon in just three minutes. These are known as hypervelocity white dwarfs and they have puzzled astronomers for years. Now, a team of researchers have finally cracked the mystery of how they get launched at such incredible speeds.

When an interstellar object (ISO) travels through our inner Solar System, the immediate question is "Where did it come from?" There are only fleeing opportunities to study these, since their trajectories take them out of the Solar System pretty quickly. A new research effort aims to understand where the most recent ISO, 3I/ATLAS, originated.

NASA Says Mars Rover Discovered Potential Biosignature Last Year - https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-says-mars-rover-discovered-potential-biosignature-last-year/ Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09413-0

Are we alone in the universe? It’s a question that has, despite extensive and sometimes ingenious attempts, yet to be answered. In one of the most ambitious searches for extraterrestrial intelligence ever conducted, Chinese scientists have used the world's largest radio telescope to scan the famous TRAPPIST-1 star system for signs of alien technology. The Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope is the world's largest single dish radio telescope, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is one of its five key science objectives.

Science advances through data that don’t fit our current understanding. At least that was Thomas Kuhn’s theory in his famous On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So scientists should welcome new data that challenges their understanding of how the universe works. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might just have found some data that can do that. It looked at an exoplanet around a millisecond pulsar and found its atmosphere is made up of almost entirely pure carbon.

Traditionally, black holes are usually thought to reside at the centers of galaxies. However, a research team led by Dr. An Tao from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has discovered a wandering black hole in a dwarf galaxy located about 230 million light-years away.

It was a chilly night when I peered through my 10” Meade LX200 telescope from Norfolk in the UK! I wasn’t completely convinced it would appear nor even be visible but bang on the prediction, asteroid 2002 MN drifted by my field of view and I was amazed at how accurately we could predict its path! That precision in tracking asteroid trajectories has become even more critical now that we're actively exploring how we can deflect them. A team of scientists have made a discovery about asteroid deflection that's both fascinating and sobering at the same time. Hit an asteroid in the wrong spot, and you might accidentally steer it through a "gravitational keyhole" that sending it back toward Earth years later.

There are plenty of labs working on solutions to Kessler Syndrome, where there’s so much debris in low Earth orbit that rockets are no longer capable of reaching it without being hit with hypersonic parts of defunct equipment. While we haven’t yet gotten to the point where we’ve lost access to space, there will come a day where that will happen if we don’t do something about it. A new paper from Kazunori Takahashi of Tohoku University in Japan looks at a novel solution that uses a type of magnetic field typically seen in fusion reactors to decelerate debris using a plasma beam while balancing itself with an equal and opposite thrust on the other side.

As someone who has lectured for more years than I care to remember and written books about space, I've grown accustomed to constantly rewriting sections as new discoveries emerge. The discovery of the dwarf planet Makemake led to such rewrites, but until now we didn't know much about this elusive world. A team of scientists at the Southwest Research Institute has recently changed that with their detection of methane gas on Makemake using the James Webb Space Telescope. It's exactly the kind of discovery that sends authors like me back to the drawing board, because this finding doesn't just add another detail to Makemake's story, it fundamentally changes how we view these distant worlds.

Interstellar comets are rare, and astronomers don't like to miss an opportunity to observe one. Now the Gemini South Telescope has taken a turn at imaging Comet 3I/ATLAS, the visitor from another star system. The images help show that the comet's tail is growing as it approaches the Sun.

A team of Japanese astronomers has detected protostellar outflow jets in the outer regions of the Milky Way. This is the first detection of this type of jets in this part of the galaxy. Since this part of the galaxy is similar to the more ancient Universe, it's evidence that star formation in the modern Universe is similar to star formation in the ancient Universe.

Rocky material that impacted Mars lies scattered in giant lumps throughout the planet’s mantle, offering clues about Mars’ interior and its ancient past. Data provided by the now-retired InSight lander is shedding light on how this shaped Mars' structure and evolution.

Astronomers have detected an explosion of gamma rays that repeated several times over the course of a day, an event unlike anything ever witnessed before. It took place in a distant galaxy and was first detected on July 2nd. Scientists are trying to understand what could've caused it.

Extremophiles are a favorite tool of astrobiologists. But not only are they good for understanding the kind of extreme environments that life can survive in, sometimes they are useful as actual tools, creating materials necessary for other life, like oxygen, in those extreme environments. A recent paper from Daniella Billi of the University of Rome Tor Vergata , published in pre-print form in Acta Astronautica, reviews how one particular extremophile fills the role of both useful test subject and useful tool all at once.

A swarm of galaxies called the Bullet Cluster is the biggest, best natural laboratory for studying dark matter that astronomers have ever seen

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

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.