Astronomy
US Air Force cancels plans to build Starship landing pads on island bird sanctuary
Best Amazon Prime Day star projector deals 2025
Forests' vanishing snow is also bad news for carbon storage
Forests' vanishing snow is also bad news for carbon storage
Dark matter could turn 'failed stars' to the dark side, creating 'dark dwarfs'
The JWST Shows Us How Galaxies Evolve
The Milky Way and other similar galaxies have two distinct disk sections. One is the thin disk section, and it contains mostly younger stars with higher metallicity. The second is the thick disk, and it contains older stars with lower metallicity. The effort to study these disks in more galaxies and in greater detail has been stymied. But now we have the JWST, and researchers used it to examine more than 100 distant, edge-on galaxies.
When Theia Struck Earth, it Helped Set the Stage for Life to Appear
Earth life is carbon-based, and without carbon, there would be no life. New research shows how Earth got its carbon from impactors, including a boost from Theia, the impactor that created the Moon. Jupiter also pitched in to help.
Primordial Black Holes Could Have Accelerated Early Star Formation
The search for dark matter requires all of the best models, theories, and ideas we can throw at it. A new paper from Julia Monika Koulen, Stefano Profumo, and Nolan Smyth from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) tackles the implications of the sizes and abundance of one of the more interesting dark matter candidates - primordial black holes (PBHs).
How To Use Fusion To Get To Proxima Centauri's Potentially Habitable Exoplanet
Proxima Centauri b is the closest known exoplanet that could be in the habitable zone of its star. Therefore, it has garnered a lot of attention, including several missions designed to visit it and send back information. Unfortunately, due to technological constraints and the gigantic distances involved, most of those missions only weigh a few grams and require massive solar scales or pushing lasers to get anywhere near their target. But why let modern technological levels limit your imagination when there are so many other options, if still theoretical, options to send a larger mission to our nearest potentially habitable neighbor? That was the thought behind the Master’s Thesis of Amelie Lutz at Virginia Tech - she looked at the possibility of using fusion propulsion systems to send a few hundred kilogram probe to the system, and potentially even orbit it.
Reviving SETI with High-Energy Astronomy
What new methods can be developed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? This is what a recent white paper submitted to the 2025 NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) Request for Information (RFI) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the Breakthrough Listen project and Michigan State University discussed how high-energy astronomy could be used for identifying radio signals from an extraterrestrial technological civilization, also called technosignatures. This study has the potential to help SETI and other organizations develop novel techniques for finding intelligent life beyond Earth.
Webb Refines the Bullet Cluster's Mass
One of the most iconic cosmic scenes in the Universe lies nearly 3.8 billion light-years away from us in the direction of the constellation Carina. This is where two massive clusters of galaxies have collided. The resulting combined galaxies and other material is now called the Bullet Cluster, after one of the two members that interacted over several billion years. It's one of the hottest-known galaxy clusters, thanks to clouds of gas that were heated by shockwaves during the event. Astronomers have observed this scene with several different telescopes in multiple wavelengths of light, including X-ray and infrared. Those observations and others show that the dark matter makes up the majority of the cluster's mass. Its gravitational effect distorts light from more distant objects and makes it an ideal gravitational lens.
Space Park Leicester and the ESA are Building a Lab that Could House Extraterrestrial Samples Someday
Will YR4 Hit the Moon? We Won't Know Until 2028
Earlier this year, asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered and found to have a trajectory through the Earth/Moon system in 2032. The world's telescopes focused on the potential threat and downgraded the chance to negligible for the Earth...but it still has a non-zero chance of hitting the Moon. As the asteroid became too dim to continue observing, its Moon impact chance stood at 4%. When will we update this number? Not until it does another close flyby in 2028.