Universe Today

This ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week captures all the glory of the star-forming region N159. It's in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and is dwarfed by its much larger neighbour, the Tarantula Nebula. But N159 is gorgeous, too, so captivating that it's been featured as a Picture of the Week several times.

Our planet's liquid iron outer core is slowly giving up its secrets to a trio of satellites launched by ESA in 2013. Called Swarm, the three probes have been studying Earth's magnetic field at the source. In the process, they've revealed startling changes in a molten layer region 2,200 kilometers beneath the Pacific Ocean. In 2010, material in that area of Earth's outer core changed direction. Insteading of moving slowly westward, it's now headed east and picking up speed. Scientists are working to figure out why by using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm data and additional information from ESA's CryoSat mission and ground-based instruments.

Open star clusters are prevalent stellar structures in the Milky Way. Astronomers think their could be 100,000 of them. But they're not all the same: some are binary clusters, and within those, there's a hierarchy based on how they form. Recent research explores the different types and how many of each type is in the Milky Way.

The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) detector network has a new trick up its sleeve to improve the instruments’ sensitivity to gravitational waves: it’s called Astrophysical Calibration and it plays a role similar to auto-tune in music production.

In December 2019, astronomers detected a one hour brightening of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a classic gravitational microlensing event. These occur when a compact object bends a distant the light of a distant star as it passes in front of it. The object responsible in this instance, named Phoebe, has a mass of roughly three times that of our Moon making it far too small to be a stellar black hole, but consistent with a primordial black hole formed moments after the Big Bang.

Physicists have thought for decades that microscopic black holes can theoretically emerge not from exploding stars but from delicate "critical states" in which space and time organise themselves into a crystal like structure. Now, for the first time, researchers from TU Wien and Goethe University Frankfurt have derived an exact mathematical formula describing this bizarre phenomenon using a surprising trick involving infinitely many dimensions!

The JWST has shown us some strange things about supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the early Universe. Many of them are far more massive than we think they should be. Now astronomers working with the JWST have found one that seems to have formed before its galaxy did.

Complex organic molecules (COMS) are at the heart of life. They're created where jets from protostars slam into the interstellar medium, environments that scientists call natural laboratories. In these intense environments, important carbon-bearing molecules are created. Recent research took a close look at one of these jets and found some COMS in them for the first time.

A new statistical model reveals more details about the ringdown period of merging black holes.

There’s nothing like a random celestial coincidence, turned good internet meme. In this case, the chance event is this weekend’s Full Moon, which also happens to be the second Full Moon of May, and is also the most distant and visually smallest Full Moon of the year.

You’re on a camping trip with your family and your parents tell you to turn off all the lights. But, of course, your little brother wants to shine his flashlight directly at the sky saying aliens will see it. You finally get him to shut off his flashlight, and you give your eyes a few minutes to adjust to the darkness. As they do, more and more stars begin to appear in the night sky that were initially hidden beneath the glare of your (loser) brother’s flashlight. As the stars get brighter and increase in number, you start firing off a slew of questions in your head: How far away are they? Are there planets around them? What kinds of life are on those planets?

An international team led by Associate Professor Kimihiko Nakajima of Kanazawa University has captured a rare look at the early universe. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the power of gravitational lensing, the team achieved a definitive characterization of LAP1-B, an ultra-faint galaxy from 13 billion years ago.

In the heirarchy of black holes, intermediate mass black holes (IMBH) lie in between stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes. But the problem is that we've never found one. There have been hints, but nothing conclusive. Could gravitational microlensing of Fast Radio Bursts help find them?

Scientists have captured one of the most detailed observations ever of a failed solar eruption, a powerful blast from the Sun that built into what should have been a billion tonne plasma ejection, then stalled and collapsed back to the surface. Using data from five spacecraft simultaneously, the team identified a double magnetic process that strangled the eruption from both above and below.

In August 2025, a NASA spacecraft detected a solar radio burst that refused to stop lasting 19 days, nearly four times longer than any previously recorded. A team of researchers used data from four spacecraft spread across the inner Solar System to track the event and pinpoint its source to a magnetic structure called a helmet streamer, likely supercharged by a series of powerful solar eruptions.

Astronomers have discovered a remarkable triple star system in which two Sun like stars orbit each other every 4.75 days, while a giant star, ten times the size of our Sun circles the pair every 412 days. All three orbit in almost exactly the same plane, and because we view that plane edge on from Earth, the stars eclipse each other in a distinctive pattern that allows all three to be measured simultaneously. The giant is slowly swelling and will eventually overflow its gravitational boundary, triggering a dramatic mass transfer event that could reshape or even destroy the system.

Our Sun is a loner. It lacks a stellar companion hurtling through interstellar space with it. But we’ve known for a long time that’s actually relatively rare - most stars have at least one gravitationally bound partner. Understanding how exactly those stars are related to each other is critical for observational campaigns - especially for those of exoplanets. So a new paper from researchers at the University of Madrid that categorizes almost every star within ten light years into companion categories is a welcome addition to the literature on the subject, and could be used to inform the next round of planet habitable planet hunting satellites.

We’ve been reporting a lot lately on the negative impacts of satellite constellations. And unfortunately it’s time for another article about a paper pointing out the potential hazards of them. This one, by lead author Conner Barker of University College London, focuses on the pollution caused by rocket launches - and admittedly contains some good news, but also a cautionary tale that policy makers should be aware of.

In a stellar flyby, a star approaches our Solar System close enough to create gravitational mayhem. The last one was 70,000 years ago. There are more in the future, and it's possible that they could disrupt comets from the Oort Cloud and send them into the inner Solar System, with the risk of catastrophic impact.

We've discovered large numbers of small rocky exoplanets, but they're at such great distances that habitability is extremely difficult to determine. New research suggests than since Mars is on the edge of being habitable, studying it in detail can shed light on rocky exoplanets. If we can understand things like tectonic activity and atmospheric escape on Mars, we can understand how they may play out on rocky exoplanets.