Universe Today

The JWST has pushed the boundaries of exoplanet characterization. But one thing it hasn't done yet is to determine if rocky exoplanets close to our Solar System can retain their atmospheres. The authors of a new study propose a new "five-scale height challenge" that will help astronomers obtain more precise atmospheric information on rocky exoplanets using Webb.

Our quest for universal internet is stealing the stars. Thousands of satellites now travelling across the night sky are far brighter than international safety limits, turning what was once humanity's window to the cosmos into a highway of artificial lights. New research reveals that major constellations like Starlink and OneWeb are breaking the brightness rules designed to protect both cutting edge astronomy and the simple joy of stargazing potentially robbing future generations of the dark skies that have inspired wonder for centuries.

For over four centuries, the dark blemishes on our Sun's surface have puzzled astronomers. Now, German scientists have cracked the code behind sunspot stability, revealing how these Earth sized magnetic monsters, each powerful enough to rival an MRI machine yet spanning areas larger than our entire planet, maintain their grip on the solar surface for weeks or months at a time. This breakthrough not only solves one of astronomy's oldest mysteries but could revolutionize our ability to predict the explosive solar storms that threaten our satellite dependent world.

The source of Earth's water is one of the most compelling questions facing scientists. Earth's habitability depends on multiple factors, but water is the basis for life, and it had to come from somewhere. Did comets and meteorites deliver it after Earth formed? Or did water become part of our planet as it formed?

When astronauts live on the Moon permanently, they're going to need a safe habitat, ideally made out of local construction material. A new paper suggests that lunar astronauts could cover a 17-meter crater with a dome made from a lunar regolith-based geopolymer. A 3D printer would extrude a paste made of lunar regolith that would be sintered together into the shape of the dome. This would provide protection from radiation and could even maintain a pressurized habitat.

An international team of astronomers have discovered an Earth-size exoplanet on a very tight orbit around its star. It completes an orbit in only 5 hours and 22 minutes. Unfortunately, the planet will either be torn to pieces or crash into its star in about 31 million years.

The Milky Way is surrounded by about 60 satellite galaxies. The famous ones are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. But according to a new simulation, the Milky Way could have 80 and even 100 satellite galaxies that we haven't detected so far. These galaxies will be hard to find. They've had most of their mass stripped by the gravity of the Milky Way's halo. But new telescopes like Vera Rubin should be able to spot them.

Sometimes in order to support an idea, you first have to discredit alternative, competing ideas that could take resources away from the one you care about. In the scientific community, one of the most devastating ways you can do that is by making the other methods appear to be too expensive to be feasible, or, better yep, prove they wouldn’t work at all due to some fundamental limitation. That is what a recent paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev, the world’s most prominent proponent of a Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) telescope mission, does. He examines how effective alternative telescope technologies would be at creating a 10x10 pixel map of an exoplanet about 32 light years away. Unsurprisingly, there’s only one that is able to do so without giant leaps and bounds in technology development - the SGL telescope.

Scientists have recreated the universe's first moments by smashing atomic nuclei together at near-light speeds, generating temperatures 1,000 times hotter than the Sun's core and briefly forming the same "soup" of fundamental particles that existed microseconds after the Big Bang. In this groundbreaking research, heavy particles act like tiny cosmic detectives, moving through this primordial matter and revealing how the chaotic early universe transformed into the structured reality we see today. By understanding how these massive particles behave under the most extreme conditions imaginable, researchers are essentially reading the universe's origin story written in the language of fundamental physics.

China is poised to make space exploration history again with its Tianwen-3 mission launching in 2028. With the audacious plan to drill two meters beneath Mars' radiation blasted surface it aims to collect samples that could harbor ancient microbial life, and bring them back to Earth for the first time in human history! The mission's most intriguing challenge isn't the technical feat of interplanetary sample return, it’s the quarantine protocols required once these potentially life containing samples arrive on Earth making this mission as much about protecting our planet as it is about exploring another.

A 14year study of Hong Kong's Earth Hour participation has revealed that it's not the millions of apartment windows or office buildings that steal our night sky, but rather a small handful of brightly lit skyscrapers and LED advertising boards that have an outsized impact on darkness above cities. When these decorative lights and digital screens go dark, the night sky becomes up to 50% darker, offering a hopeful new strategy for tackling light pollution without requiring massive citywide changes. Could this be he the change that dramatically improve night sky visibility for stargazers, wildlife, and anyone hoping to reconnect with the the night sky above our urban landscapes?

When Einstein's predicted ripples in spacetime pass through magnetic fields, they cause the current carrying wires to dance at the gravitational wave frequency, creating potentially detectable electrical signals. Researchers have discovered that the same powerful magnets used to hunt for dark matter could double as gravitational wave detectors. This means experiments already searching for the universe's most elusive particles could simultaneously capture collisions between black holes and neutron stars, getting two of physics' most ambitious experiments for the price of one, while potentially opening entirely new windows into the universe's most violent events.

There are tens of thousands of pieces of space debris hurling around the Earth right now. Since it can cost tens of millions of dollars to remove just a single piece of space debris, which are the ones that we should be most concerned with? A few years ago, 11 teams of experts came together to rank the 50 most concerning pieces of debris, the ones that they think would be the highest priority. Although they used different approaches, 20-40% of the objects ended up on several experts' lists.

Portrait of a galaxy cluster

Armed with a drone and a device which is a cross between a scoop and a spatula, a graduate student is cracking the code of Mars by studying California's desert dunes. By comparing wind carved patterns in the Algodones Desert with satellite images of the Red Planet, researchers are creating humanity's first comprehensive database of Martian sand formations, work that could determine where future astronauts can safely establish bases without getting buried alive. Her pioneering research proves that sometimes the keys to exploring alien worlds aren't found in billion dollar space missions, but in the shifting sands right here on Earth.

It's assumed that our region of the Universe isn't special, and the Hubble Tension, or mismatch of expansion rates of the Universe at different times, is happening everywhere. But what if our place is unusual, for example, if the Milky Way is inside a lower-density region of the Universe, with stronger gravity pulling material away from us in all directions? A new paper suggests we might be in a void that's emptying out towards higher-density regions all around us.

Hidden in the darkness between Uranus and Neptune, a team of astronomers have discovered a small world locked in a million year gravitational waltz with Uranus. The asteroid enjoying this celestial dance with Uranus completes exactly three orbits for every four of the ice giant, representing the first known stable partnership of its kind in this remote region of the Solar System. The discovery proves that even in the apparent chaos of space, there are elegant mathematical relationships that have persisted, revealing new secrets about how gravitational forces sculpt the architecture of our planetary system.

December 24th, 2024, NASA's Parker Solar Probe made its closest approach to the Sun so far, coming within just 6.1 million km from the surface of the Sun. During this flyby, it captured data and images, including this incredible picture using the Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR. In this WISPR image, you can see the corona and solar wind, charged particles coming from the Sun, hurled across the Solar System. The next pass will happen in September.

Close encounters with massive objects can alter the orbits of planets around their stars. Stellar flybys can change planetary orbits, and may be responsible for some of the rogue or free-floating planets astronomers have discovered. But stars aren't the only massive objects out there, and new research suggests that primordial black holes may alter the orbits of exoplanets.

Astrobiology can be split into two very distinct fields. There’s the field that astronomers are likely more familiar with, involving large telescopes, exoplanets, and spectroscopic signals that are pored over to debate whether they show signs of life. But there is another camp, collective known as the Origins researchers that focus on developing a scientific understanding of how life originally developed on Earth. A new paper from Cole Mathis at Arizona State and Harrison B. Smith at the Institute of Science in Tokyo suggests a new path forward to tackling those challenges - set them up as competitions and let a hefty prize motivate scientific teams and individuals to pursue them.