Universe Today

It's 2041 and an astronaut on Mars Station 1 orbiting the Red Planet is inspecting life support systems in the bowels of the habitat. They open a compartment and are aghast to discover a mysterious goop clinging to the walls in microgravity that definitely shouldn't be there. In their shock, they immediately have flashbacks from every alien-based science fiction movie they've ever seen, and are convinced they not only just discovered the first signs of alien life, but they won't live to tell about it. After telling the rest of the crew in a heated panic, they calmly explain it's not an alien menace, but a substance called biofilm, which has been present on Earth for billions of years.

An international team of astronomers has uncovered the first definitive evidence that at least some fast radio bursts (FRBs) originate in binary stellar systems.

Supermassive black holes grow larger by accreting matter. When they're actively accreting matter they're called active galactic nuclei (AGN). AGN are the most luminous sources of persistent radiation in the Universe, yet they turn on and off as the SMBH passes through quiet and active phases. Astronomers have found one that is just turning on its powerful jets after a long period of dormancy.

Using the South Pole Telescope, astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. Operating at millimetre wavelengths that can penetrate the dust obscuring our view of the core of the Galaxy, the telescope caught these dramatic magnetic energy releases in one of the most extreme environments in our Galaxy. The discovery opens a new observational window for studying stellar behaviour in regions previously hidden from view and provides insights into how stars survive and behave in the intense gravitational and radiation environment surrounding the Milky Way's central black hole.

The comet bearing Edmond Halley's name may have been misnamed! New research from Leiden University reveals that an 11th Century English monk recognised the famous comet's periodicity centuries before the British astronomer. Eilmer of Malmesbury witnessed the comet's appearances in both 989 and 1066, linking the two observations and understanding they represented the same celestial visitor returning after decades, a realisation documented by the medieval chronicler William of Malmesbury but overlooked by scholars until now. The discovery challenges whether history's most famous comet should continue bearing Halley's name when a Benedictine monk beat him to the discovery by more than 600 years.

Dark matter remains invisible to our telescopes, yet its gravitational fingerprints pervade the universe. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have produced one of the most detailed dark maps ever created, revealing with unprecedented clarity how dark matter and ordinary matter have grown up together. The map shows that wherever galaxies cluster in their thousands, equally massive concentrations of dark matter occupy the same space, a close alignment that confirms dark matter's gravity has been shepherding regular matter into stars, galaxies, and ultimately the complex planets capable of supporting life.

AI faces strong skepticism due to its potential for misuse, its drain on resources, and even its potential dumbing down of students. But new results illustrate its uses. A team of astronomers have used a new AI-assisted method to search for rare astronomical objects in the Hubble Legacy Archive. The team sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts in just two and a half days, uncovering nearly 1400 anomalous objects, more than 800 of which had never been documented before.

Why are SMBH in the early Universe so massive? According to astrophysical models, these extraordinarily large SMBH haven't had time to become so massive. Super-Eddington accretion might explain it, but can it explain a very unusual early SMBH recently discovered?

It's been about one millennia since humans directly observed a core-collapse supernova in the Milky Way. That's strange, since there should be 1 or 2 every century. By working with neutrino detectors, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory should be able to detect far more supernovae.

Lately we’ve been reporting about a series of studies on the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), NASA’s flagship telescope mission for the 2040s. These studies have looked at the type of data they need to collect, and what the types of worlds they would expect to find would look like. Another one has been released in pre-print form on arXiv from the newly formed HWO Technology Maturation Project Office, which details the technology maturation needed for this powerful observatory and the “trade space” it will need to explore to be able to complete its stated mission.

There’s a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4%), but non-negligible. And scientists are starting to prepare both for the bad (massive risks to satellites and huge meteors raining down on a large portion of the planet) and the good (a once in a lifetime chance to study the geology, seismology, and chemical makeup of our nearest neighbor). A new paper from Yifan He of Tsinghua University and co-authors, released in pre-print form on arXiv, looks at the bright side of all of the potential interesting science we can do if a collision does, indeed, happen.

How long did it take to establish the water content within Jupiter’s Galilean moons, Io and Europa? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of scientists from the United States and France investigated the intricate processes responsible for the formation and evolution of Io and Europa. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of two of the most unique moons in the solar system, as Io and Europa are known as the most volcanically active body in the solar system and an ocean world estimated to contain twice the volume of Earth’s oceans, respectively.

Icy comets contain common crystals that can only be formed in extreme heat. But comets reside in the frigid outer reaches of the Solar System. How did these materials form, and how did they find their way into the Solar System's cold fringes?

Water exists across Mars in underground ice, soil moisture, and atmospheric vapour, yet most of it remains frustratingly beyond practical reach for future explorers. A new comparative study from the University of Strathclyde evaluates the technologies that could extract this vital resource from various Martian sources, assessing each method's energy demands, scalability, and suitability for the Red Planet's harsh conditions.

Stars change in brightness for all kinds of reasons, but all of them are interesting to astronomers at some level. So imagine their excitement when a star known as J0705+0612 (or, perhaps more politically incorrectly, ASASSN-24fw) dropped to around 2.5% of its original brightness for 8.5 months. Two new papers - one from Nadia Zakamska and her team at the Gemini Telescope South and one from Raquel Forés-Toribio at Ohio State and her co-authors - examine this star and have come to the same conclusion - it’s likely being caused by a circumsecondary disk.

Thousands of pieces of abandoned spacecraft orbit Earth, and when gravity finally pulls them down, authorities rarely know exactly where they'll land. Now researchers at Johns Hopkins University have demonstrated a clever solution. Surprisingly they have found using earthquake detecting seismometers they can track falling space debris in real time by listening for the sonic booms it produces. The technique successfully traced a Chinese spacecraft module as it streaked across California at Mach 25-30, revealing its actual trajectory lay 25 miles north of predictions, a significant improvement that could help authorities quickly locate potentially toxic debris and protect people from contamination.

New research from the International Space Station reveals that in near weightless conditions, both bacteriophages and their *E. coli* hosts mutate in ways not seen on Earth. This unexpected finding not only deepens our understanding of how microbial life adapts to extreme environments but has already yielded practical benefits. Some of the mutations discovered in space dwelling viruses led researchers to create superior viruses that specifically infect and kill bacteria, capable of fighting drug resistant bacterial infections back on Earth.

The Circinus Galaxy, a galaxy about 13 million light-years away, contains an active supermassive black hole that continues to influence its evolution. The largest source of infrared light from the region closest to the black hole itself was thought to be outflows, or streams of superheated matter that fire outward.

We live near a fusion reactor in space that provides all our heat and light. That reactor is also responsible for the creation of various elements heavier than hydrogen, and that's true of all stars. So, how do we know that stars are element generators?

The earliest galaxies in the universe earned the nickname "monster galaxies" for good reason, they formed stars at rates hundreds of times faster than the Milky Way, growing rapidly after the dawn of time. Astronomers using ALMA and the James Webb Space Telescope have now revealed that three such monsters each achieved their extraordinary growth through completely different mechanisms. By comparing where stars are forming today with where they formed in the past, researchers discovered that galaxy collisions, internal instability, and minor mergers can all trigger these growth spurts, fundamentally changing our understanding of how the universe's most massive galaxies came to be.