Universe Today

Mercury is one of the four rocky worlds of the Solar System, yet its chemistry is very different from Earth, Venus, and Mars. Missions to the planet show that it has an iron-poor, but sulfur- and magnesium-rich crust. Furthermore, it's known to planetary scientists as the most reduced planet in the Solar system. It means that the chemical makeup is dominated by sulfides, carbides, and silicides -- as opposed to oxides like we see here on Earth.

Binary stars are common, but for a long time astronomers have thought that exoplanets would have trouble forming around them. In recent years, powerful telescopes have detected about 50 of these planets. Now, new simulations show that their formation isn't actually rare, it's just that they tend to be on wide orbits, with few opportunities to observe transits. Also, many of them are ejected and become rogue planets.

One of the most intriguing puzzles in cosmology is the existence of supermassive black holes that seem to appear very early in the history of the Universe. Astronomers keep finding them at times when, by all that they understand about the infant Universe, they shouldn't be there. The standard theory of black hole formation suggests that they shouldn't have had enough time to grow as massive as they appear to be. Yet, there they are, monster black holes with the mass of at least a billion suns. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a large population of them in early epochs, and they've been observed in very early quasars as well.

It has been a dream of astronomers and solar scientists for ages. A new mission gives solar researchers a powerful new tool in their arsenal: on-demand, total solar eclipses. Launched in 2024, The European Space Agency’s Proba-3 mission has proven the feasibility of a free-flying, space-based coronagraph. Now, first science results from the mission are giving us a view of the origin of space weather. The results were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The idea of sending a swarm of tiny laser-sail powered spacecraft to our nearest exoplanet won't go away. While complex and punctuated with tough problems, the idea is the only realistic way of reaching another solar system this century, according to researchers. But the scientific benefits would be huge.

Every star that has ever lived has been slowly spinning down, losing rotational energy across billions of years until, at the end, it collapses. But new research from Kyoto University has revealed that the story is far stranger than that. Some stars, in their final moments, don't slow down at all, they spin up and nobody predicted it.

Stars are not born by chance. New research shows that the mass of a star cluster dictates exactly what kinds of stars it will produce from cool, dim dwarfs to blazing stellar giants ten times the mass of our Sun. It is a discovery that rewrites our understanding of how galaxies grow and evolve, and raises questions that astronomers will be grappling with for years to come.

Astronauts take time to adjust how firmly they grip and handle objects when moving between Earth and space, because the brain continues making predictions based on whichever gravitational environment it has most recently adapted to. Research from the Université catholique de Louvain reveals that this adjustment process works in both directions and sheds new light on how the brain anticipates and manages the risk of making mistakes.

On top of Kitt Peak in the Arizona Desert, a robotic surveyor just completed a five year mission to catalogue the positions of tens of millions of galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has now created the largest, most detailed 3D map of our universe ever constructed. And it’s not done yet, its main mission has been extended through 2028.

Exoplanet science and the search for life beyond Earth continue to advance at break-neck speeds, with the number of confirmed exoplanets by NASA rapidly approaching 6,300, with 223 of those exoplanets being designated as terrestrial (rocky) exoplanets. With the promise of discovering an increasing number of Earth-sized exoplanets increasing every day, new telescopes from across the world have the opportunity to contribute to this incredible field.

You’re in the lab analyzing Martian regolith samples within your cozy Mars habitat serving on fifth human mission to Mars. The power within the habitat has been flowing flawlessly thanks to the MARS-MES (Mars Atmospheric Resource & Multimodal Energy System), including the general habitat lighting, science lab, sleeping quarters, exercise equipment, the virtual reality headsets the crew use for rest & relaxation, oxygen and fuel generation, and water. All this from converting the Martian atmosphere into workable electricity.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research have produced the most detailed simulations ever of solar prominences. These vast clouds of cooler plasma suspended in the Sun's scorching outer atmosphere have often perplexed solar astronomers. Their research reveals that two separate processes work together to keep these structures alive, and could one day help us predict the violent eruptions that drive dangerous space weather here on Earth.

Our Galaxy's halo of hot gas is measurably warmer on one side than the other and a team of scientists have found the culprit. The gravitational pull of the Large Magellanic Cloud is drawing the Milky Way slowly southward, compressing the gas in its path and heating it up, much like a piston in an engine. The discovery solves a puzzle that has intrigued astronomers since the temperature difference was first detected in 2024.

Where exactly is the edge of the Milky Way? That question is harder to answer than one might expect. Since we’re inside of the galaxy itself, it’s obviously hard to judge the “edge” to begin with. But it gets even more complicated when defining what the edge even is - the galaxy simply gets less dense the farther away from the center it goes. A new paper by researchers originally at the University of Malta thinks they have an answer though. The “edge” can be defined as the star-forming region, and in their paper, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, they very clearly show that “edge” to be between 11.28 and 12.15 kiloparsecs (or about 40,000 light years) from the center.

The 570 megapixel Dark Energy Camera captured this image of the iconic Sombrero Galaxy. The galaxy has characteristics of both elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies, and is likely the result of multiple mergers and cannibalizations of dwarf galaxies. A faint stellar stream, only fully traced a few years ago, is revealed by DECam's resolving power.

NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat - fungi.