Universe Today

The Southwest Research Institute-led Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) instruments aboard ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) spacecraft and NASA’s Europa Clipper made unique observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in late 2025. SwRI leads the UVS instruments on both spacecraft, simultaneously imaging both hemispheres of the comet and detecting the comet’s ultraviolet emissions.

Chinese-born cryptocurrency investor Chun Wang has become the latest deep-pocketed space enthusiast to set his sights on a trip around Mars. But first, he wants to take a ride around the moon on SpaceX's Starship. And SpaceX is willing to work with him.

Superluminous supernovae are the royalty in the supernova world. They're up to 100 times brighter than a standard supernova, and astrophysicists want to know why. New research shows that magnetars are responsible.

Dust scatters light, absorbs light, re-emits light, and ruins everything. It's why our maps of the Milky Way were wrong before 1930, and it's why one of the biggest cosmological announcements of the 2010s quietly evaporated.

It’s getting crowded up there. Over the past few years, the advent of SpaceX’s Starlink and other players in the mega-satellite constellation game are adding an exponential load of satellites and orbital debris to the low Earth orbit environment. But all that goes up, must eventually come down. Now, a new study looks at solar activity over time as a predictor for how reentries trend.

Neutrinos, the second most common fundamental particles in the universe, are notoriously difficult to detect. So far we’ve only been able to do so by building giant vats of water far underground with hundreds of photodetectors watching for brief flashes of light. But a new CubeSat mission hopes to change that dynamic and enable the neutrino detectors of the future a much less constrained and expensive existence - in space.

Some animals can move efficiently beneath granular surfaces. These include the sandfish (Scincus scincus), a lizard native to the Sahara. It can burrow into the sand and then literally "swim" through the desert sand to hunt or escape predators. German researchers are working on a rover wheel design that mimics that swimming motion. In testing, the wheel system outperformed regular wheels.

A new study reevaluates the Kardashev Scale using a new framework that includes the Bitcoin network as a means of measuring the trajectory of human development.

Exoplanet hunters are keen to find the next extrasolar earthlike planet, one that may harbor life as we know it. But preliminary results from a new study indicate that our galaxy may be filled with a plethora of exo-Venuses. Yet as one exoplanetary researcher notes: the template for such exo-worlds --- our own Venus --- has been ‘criminally underexplored.’

Spacecraft often use planets for gravity-assist or "slingshot" maneuvers. NASA's Psyche mission used Mars for that purpose during a May 15th flyby. The flyby accelerated the spacecraft and aimed it at its eventual destination, the asteroid 16 Psyche. The flyby was also an opportunity to take some pictures of Mars, and to test and calibrate the spacecraft's science instruments.

New Mexico State University (NMSU) astronomy graduate student Khagendra Katuwal studied 70 coronal holes on the sun to better understand the connection between solar activity and space weather. His paper was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

In 2014, researchers presented the discovery of water vapour plumes being emitted from Jupiter's moon Europa. This caused quite a stir; it meant that the moon's buried ocean was accessible without contending with the thick ice shell that concealed it. But new research by the same researchers questions those detections.

Typically when we think of astronomy, we think of pictures of M87 captured on a backyard telescope or the soaring colorful peaks of the Eagle Nebula seen by Hubble. But perhaps the most influential type of astronomy of the last 100+ years doesn’t directly result in the stunning pictures we’re so accustomed to today. It captures radio waves from some of the most interesting objects in the universe. And in her new book, The Echoing Universe: How Radio Astronomy Helps Us See the Invisible, Dr. Emma Chapman, a radio astronomer at the University of Nottingham, tracks how these longest wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum have influenced the practice of astronomy and our understanding of our place in the universe.

Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter, which performed the first controlled, powered flight on another planet, was an excellent demonstration of human ingenuity. But it was just that - a demonstrator. The intention with Ingenuity was simply to prove that we could, in fact, fly on another planet. But now we’ve proved that we can, it’s time to do something more useful with that new ability - like do actual science. A new mission designed to do just that recently passed a critical testing milestone, opening the way for future Mars helicopter missions that will make Ingenuity look like our very first steps.

When people eventually head to the Moon for long-term exploration and habitation, they'll need equipment and habitats made of well-tested materials. That's where NASA's Lunar Environment Test Rig (LESTR) comes in handy. It simulates extreme cold lunar night conditions right here in a NASA Glenn lab, testing equipment in temperatures ranging from 40K to 125K (-233 C to -148 C) in a vacuum.

Galaxies grow through mergers and collisions, and astronomers want to know more about the mergers in the Milky Way's past. But mergers can stir up the stars in the resulting galaxy, making it difficult to determine exactly when an ancient merger occurred. A new study led by researchers at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC) may have overcome that challenge.

Years of grievance against dust. It ruins lungs, suits, rovers, and Mars missions. The first installment of an apology, sort of, to the most annoying substance in the cosmos.

In the closing decades of the 20th century, several proposed explanations were put forward for why humanity has not yet found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in the cosmos.

Ever since the JWST found over-massive black holes in the early Universe, researchers have been trying to understand them. Theory showed that black holes and their galaxies grew in synchronization with each other. That can't explain the JWST's findings, but new research might.

No quantum gravity. The wrong peak in the wave function. Boltzmann Babies. Roger Penrose pointing out that the arrow of time was smuggled in through the back door. The no-boundary proposal is beautiful. It is also possibly wrong in many specific ways.