Astronomy

Astronomers have discovered a companion star in an incredibly tight orbit around Betelgeuse using the NASA and U.S. National Science Foundation-funded ‘Alopeke' instrument on Gemini North, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the NSF and operated by NSF NOIRLab. This discovery answers the longstanding mystery of the star’s varying brightness and provides insight into the physical mechanisms behind other variable red supergiants.

The New Horizons spacecraft is humanity's fastest-moving spacecraft and headed to interstellar space. Since its exploration of Pluto 10 years ago and subsequent flyby of Arrokoth in 2019, it's been traversing and studying the Kuiper Belt while looking for other flyby objects. That's not all it's been doing, however. New Horizons also has an extended program of making heliophysics observations. The mission science team has also planned astrophysical studies with the spacecraft's instruments. Those include measuring the intensity of the cosmic optical background and taking images of stars such as Proxima Centauri. As the spacecraft moves, the apparent positions of its stellar navigation targets have changed, but that hasn't bothered New Horizons one bit. It knows exactly where it is thanks to 3D observations of those nearby stars.

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.

Many people like to check that they have walked 10,000 steps over the course of a day, but falling short of that target still seems to bring serious health benefits

Many people like to check that they have walked 10,000 steps over the course of a day, but falling short of that target still seems to bring serious health benefits

Japan's Himawari-8 and Himawari-9 satellites, designed to study weather here on Earth, have also been quietly collecting valuable data on Venus for nearly a decade, scientists recently discovered.

Late Cretaceous dinosaur tracks found in Canada might have been made by different species walking together, but the evidence is far from conclusive

Hidden layers of colour in the plumage of tanagers and some other songbirds explain what makes them so eye-catching

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.

From R2D2 to the Terminator via Bender and Johnny-5, we choose our favourite robots from books, films and television series

A new moon in late July will give us dark skies – perfect for spotting this beautiful meteor shower, says Abigail Beall

Rival magicians in Victorian England both claim they can teleport. Is this all illusion, asks Emily H. Wilson, as she explores Christopher Priest’s extraordinary novel, The Prestige

Mountaineering Women: Climbing through history tells the stories of more than a dozen female climbers who have conquered the world's greatest peaks

Sierra Greer's novel about a female robot, Annie Bot, just won a prestigious sci-fi prize, the Arthur C Clarke award. But she is hardly the first of her kind, says Sophie Bushwick

A new information ecosystem is on the rise, featuring closer connections, cosy media and worker-owned websites, writes Annalee Newitz

Feedback watches with raised eyebrows as Anthropic's AI Claude is given the job of running the company vending machine, and goes a little off the rails

From reducing pain to relieving stress, the evidence for music's power is strong. Stefan Koelsch says we should use it – now