Astronomy

What are the JWST's Little Red Dots? While they appear to be galaxies, there's no observational certainty. New research examines the idea that they're actually stars, suggesting that they're actually the progenitors for supermassive black holes.

Magnetic fields play an important, if sometimes underappreciated, part in planetary systems. Without a strong magnetic field, planets can end up as a barren wasteland like Mars, or they could indirectly affect massive storms as can be seen on Jupiter. However, our understanding of planetary magnetic fields are limited to the eight planets in our solar system, as we haven’t yet accrued much data on the magnetic fields of exoplanets. That could be about to change, according to a new preprint paper by a group of research scientists from Europe, the US, India and the UAE.

Just imagine it, the news stories are all over your phone when you wake! The day will surely come that we will discover that we are not alone in the Universe! What happens the day after though? A new research paper from the SETI Post Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews tackles this question, outlining how NASA and the global scientific community should prepare for the moment humanity detects signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

NASA’s TRACERS spacecraft will look at the snap of magnetic field lines at the boundary between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field.

The post NASA Launches TRACERS Mission to Study Space Weather appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Astronomers have found a baby system that’s just beginning to build planets — and it can tell us about how and where planet formation starts.

The post Webb Space Telescope Spies Baby Planetary System appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Researchers hoped CMB-S4, a $900-million cosmology experiment, would answer one of the greatest questions in physics. Instead it’s become another cautionary tale of pursuing big science amid shrinking budgets

High humidity and overnight low temperatures that are relatively hot will put tens of millions of people under heat alerts over the course of the coming week

Physicists superheated gold to 14 times its melting point, disproving a long-standing prediction about the temperature limits of solids

As large language models like Claude 4 express uncertainty about whether they are conscious, researchers race to decode their inner workings, raising profound questions about machine awareness, ethics and the risks of uncontrolled AI evolution