Universe Today

This collection of images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes contains regions where stars are forming. Often nicknamed “stellar nurseries,” they are cosmic gardens from which stars – not plants – emerge from the interstellar soil of gas and dust.

It’s amazing how much one movie can act as a cultural touchpoint for an entire topic - even a topic as serious as defense of a planet. Popular media consistently use the 1998 movie Armageddon as a reference when talking about how we would destroy a civilization-ending asteroid. That’s despite the movie’s glaring scientific flaws, not the last of which is the likely size of the rogue comet that threatens the Earth. Planetary defense researchers at MIT were recently interviewed by the university’s media department as part of their “3 Questions” series. One of the most important takeaways is that the size of any likely planetary impactor in our lifetime is going to be much smaller than the kilometer-sized behemoth that did in Bruce Willis’ character - but we could face a threat from a handful of them before the end of the century.

Every green leaf on Earth does something remarkable, it absorbs visible light for photosynthesis but reflects near-infrared light back into space, creating a distinctive spectral signature that could in principle be spotted from across the Galaxy. It's called the vegetation red edge, and it may be our best hope of detecting life on distant worlds. Now a new study has tackled one of the biggest obstacles to using it, the messy, patchy reality of real planets with real clouds.

Mars today is a frozen, barren world where liquid water can briefly appear on its surface but evaporates almost instantly in the thin atmosphere, unable to persist in any meaningful quantity. But a handful of pale, bleached rocks spotted by NASA's Perseverance rover are telling a very different story about the planet's past, one of tropical downpours, sodden landscapes, and conditions that might once have been hospitable to life.

In his blockbuster 1982 novel "Space", the writer James A. Michener wove a gripping tale of astronauts trapped on the Moon during a major solar storm. Warnings from Earth didn't come soon enough to save them from death by radiation sickness. To avoid such a tragedy happening with the Artemis crews (as with the Apollo crews of the past), NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will monitor the Sun. If it acts up, the teams will be able to send warnings and instructions to the Artemis crews to pro tect them.

Finding life beyond our solar system goes beyond measuring an exoplanet’s size, as rocky, Earth-sized worlds might not have the conditions for life as we know it. While exoplanets can be directly imaged by blocking their star’s glare, these images are fuzzy and lack resolution to provide enough details about the habitability. Therefore, astronomers are limited to studying an exoplanet’s atmosphere, and this has proven to be quite beneficial in teaching scientists about an exoplanet’s formation and evolution, and whether it contains the necessary ingredients for life as we know it.

For decades, astronomers thought they knew that pulsars broadcast their signatight beams of radio waves fired from near the surface, close to the magnetic poles. A new study of nearly 200 of the fastest spinning pulsars in the universe has just turned that idea on its head. It turns out these extraordinary objects are broadcasting from two completely separate locations at once, and one of them lies right at the outer edge of their magnetic grip on space itself.

The Sun doesn't just pump out light and heat, it blasts a continuous stream of charged particles across the Solar System, and that solar wind is far more complex than it looks. Hidden within it are waves that act as invisible middlemen, constantly shuffling energy between particles as the wind expands outward. Now, thanks to the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft, we have our clearest picture yet of how those waves behave close to the Sun itself.