Universe Today

For the first time, astronomers have caught a stellar nursery in the act of blowing giant celestial bubbles, revealing a massive outflow of gas stretching over 650 light-years from one of the Milky Way’s most extraordinary star clusters. Using nearly two decades of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, researchers traced this budding stream of supercharged particles as it expands beneath our Galaxy’s disk, offering crucial insights into how young, massive stars shape galactic evolution.

Lunar dust poses one of the most persistent challenges for spacecraft operations on the Moon, clinging stubbornly to surfaces and infiltrating equipment with potentially devastating consequences. Now, researchers have developed a comprehensive mathematical model that reveals exactly how electrically charged dust particles behave when they collide with spacecraft at low speeds, uncovering surprising insights about what makes them stick and what allows them to bounce away.

Astronomers have measured water streaming from interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS for the first time since it passed closest to the Sun. Using a spacecraft that’s been watching the Sun for nearly three decades, scientists detected hydrogen glowing around the comet and calculated that it was producing water at extraordinary rates. These measurements not only confirm that interstellar comets behave remarkably like our own Solar System’s icy wanderers, but also provide crucial clues about what comets looked like in the early universe.

ESA’s Gaia space telescope has achieved something astronomers thought nearly impossible, detecting planets while they’re still forming inside the dusty discs surrounding newborn stars. By measuring the subtle gravitational wobbles that unseen companions induce on their host stars, Gaia has found hints of planets, brown dwarfs, and companion stars in 31 young stellar systems out of 98 surveyed.

The iconic 2019 and 2022 photographs of black holes M87* and Sagittarius A* captivated astronomers worldwide with their fuzzy orange doughnut shapes. Now, scientists are preparing to take the next giant leap by creating the first ever 3D movies of black holes that could fundamentally reshape our understanding of gravity and the universe’s most violent phenomena.

Two spiral galaxies locked in a slow motion collision have been captured in stunning detail by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The pair grazed past each other millions of years ago, triggering spectacular waves of star formation and distorting their elegant spiral arms into sweeping silver blue streamers. This celestial dance, playing out over hundreds of millions of years, offers astronomers a rare glimpse into the violent yet creative process that shapes galaxies across the universe.

A supernova observed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in 1181 CE didn’t fully explode, instead it sputtered and left behind a rare “zombie star” surrounded by long filaments resembling fireworks. New research by Syracuse University physicist Eric Coughlin explains how these unusual structures formed. After the failed detonation, the surviving white dwarf launched a fast, dense wind that slammed into surrounding gas. The collision created finger-like plumes through a fluid instability, but a second instability that normally tears such structures apart never activated. In some sense, the stars didn’t quite die!

A female mouse that spent two weeks aboard China’s space station has successfully given birth to healthy pups after returning to Earth. This marks the first time offspring have been born from mammals that have traveled in space. The birth demonstrates that short term spaceflight doesn’t impair reproductive capability and provides crucial data for understanding how space environments affect mammalian development, a critical question for future long-l duration human missions beyond Earth.

How did hot Jupiters end up orbiting so close to their stars, thus earning their moniker? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers from The University of Tokyo investigated the orbital evolution of hot Jupiters ended, specifically regarding where their orbits started before orbiting so close to their stars. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.

Scientists have discovered that moons could theoretically orbit all seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system despite the complex gravitational environment. Using computer simulations, a team of researchers have mapped stable zones where satellites could survive around each planet. They found that moons can remain stable up to about 40-45% of each planet’s sphere of gravitational influence. The neighbouring planets squeeze these stable zones slightly inward compared to isolated planets, but the effect is modest. Long term calculations suggest only tiny moons, roughly one ten millionth the mass of Earth, could survive the immense tidal forces.

Researchers have been trying to look at interstellar object 3I/ATLAS from every conceivable angle. That includes very unconventional ones. Recently, while 3I/ATLAS passed out of view of the Earth, it moved into a great vantage point for one of our interplanetary probes. Europa Clipper, whose main mission is to explore Jupiter’s active moon, turned its gaze during its six year journey back towards the center of the solar system and observed 3I/ATLAS as it was reaching its perihelion, and out of sight from the Earth.

A team led by the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) analyzed samples of C-type asteroids in a recent study. Their findings support the idea that these asteroids can serve as a crucial source of materials if and when asteroid mining is realized.

Supermassive black holes have a reputation for devouring everything in sight, but new observations from the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array reveal they can be surprisingly picky eaters. Even when galaxy mergers deliver enormous amounts of cold molecular gas directly to a black hole’s doorstep, many choose to nibble rather than gorge raising questions about what triggers feeding episodes. The discovery suggests black hole growth during galaxy collisions may be far more inefficient and episodic than we previously thought.

A joint research team from South Korea has developed a fascinating wheel inspired by origami and Da Vinci bridge principles that could unlock access to the Moon’s most dangerous and scientifically useful terrain. The wheel expands from 230 mm to 500 mm in diameter on demand, allowing small rovers to navigate steep lunar pits and lava tube entrances that would trap conventional vehicles.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the largest planet forming disk ever observed around a young star, stretching nearly 40 times the diameter of our Solar System. Nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito” for its hamburger like appearance when viewed edge on, this massive disk reveals an unexpectedly chaotic and asymmetric structure with wisps of material extending far above and below its central plane. The discovery offers an unprecedented window into how planets might form in extreme environments, challenging previous assumptions about the orderly nature of planetary nurseries.

At the end of their lives, most satellites fall to their death. Many of the smaller ones, including most of those going up as part of the “mega-constellations” currently under construction, are intended to burn up in the atmosphere. This Design for Demise (D4D) principle has unintended consequences, according to a paper by Antoinette Ott and Christophe Bonnal, both of whom work for MaiaSpace, a company designing reusable launch vehicles for the small satellite market.

Launched in March, NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky in 102 colors. This map will enable 3D distance measurements to other galaxies and allow astronomers to measure the influence of Cosmic Inflation on the large-scale structure of the Universe.

Solar sails have some major advantages over traditional propulsion methods - most notably they don’t use any propellant. But, how exactly do they turn? In traditional sailing, a ship’s captain can simply adjust the angle of the sail itself to catch the wind at a different angle. But they also have the added advantage of a rudder, which doesn’t work when sailing on light. This has been a long-standing challenge, but a new paper available in pre-print from arXiv, by Gulzhan Aldan and Igor Bargatin at the University of Pennsylvania describes a new technique to turn solar sails - kirigami.

Even most rocket scientists would rather avoid hard math when they don’t have to do it. So when it comes to figuring out orbits in complex three-body systems, like those in Cis-lunar space, which is between the Earth and the Moon, they’d rather someone else do the work for them. Luckily, some scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seems to have a masochistic streak - or enough of an altruistic one that it overwhelmed the unpleasantness of doing the hard math - to come up with an open-source dataset and software package that maps out 1,000,000 cis-lunar orbits.

Ready for another amazing year of skywatching? 2025 was a wild year, with a steady parade of comets knocking on naked eye visibility, and one extra special interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS. The sky just keeps on turning into 2026. Watch for mutual eclipse season for the major moons of Jupiter, as the moons pass one if front of the other. The ongoing solar cycle is also still expected to be active into 2026, producing sunspots space weather and more. And (finally!) we’ll see the return of total solar eclipses on August 12th, as umbral shadow of the Moon crosses Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain.