Space

Oct 11th, 2025 - Auburn University team detects water's ultraviolet fingerprint in interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS Auburn University Department of Physics (Auburn, AL) For millions of years, a fragment of ice and dust drifted between the stars—like a sealed bottle cast into the cosmic ocean. This summer, that bottle finally washed ashore in our solar system and was designated 3I/ATLAS, only the third known interstellar comet. When Auburn University scientists pointed NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory ... [Read More]

Oct 11th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A swirl of gas and dust orbits a young star named HD 135344B, 440 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. Inside that haze, astronomers have spotted telltale spirals that most theories link to the tug of a growing world. Now, fresh images from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope ( VLT ) point to a compact object exactly where one of those spirals begins. That bright signal, embedded deep in the disc, is likely a planet still gathering mass . ... [Read More]

Oct 11th, 2025 - reading time 3 minutes Every large galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole at its center, each one emitting powerful winds of hot gas from its event horizon. Our galaxy should be no exception. Yet for the last 50 or so years, astronomers have been searching for winds coming from the black hole at the Milky Way's center, and in all that time, they found nothing. Not even a gentle breeze. Until now. In a preliminary study, a team of scientists detail the strongest evidence found yet of winds ... [Read More]

Oct 10th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, October 10 The Moon passes 5° north of Uranus at 5 A.M. EDT. The pair is visible in the southwest in the hours leading up to sunrise, although you'll need binoculars to view the distant ice giant, as it glows a faint magnitude 5.6. Look for Uranus just over 4° south of Pleiades. There's a short dark window this evening before the Moon rises. Use it to see if you can spot the small, often-overlooked constellation Triangulum, ... [Read More]

Oct 10th, 2025 - Two greenish-hued comets are swinging through the inner solar system this fall, offering a rare chance to spot them in the coming weeks. The comets, named C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) and C/2025 R2 (SWAN), are visible from the Northern Hemisphere now as their orbits take them through our cosmic backyard on their journey around the sun. Two comet appearances in the same month are very uncommon. Both celestial objects can be seen with binoculars or small telescopes through the end of October. Comet Lemmon ... [Read More]

Oct 10th, 2025 - As an astronomer studying the universe beyond Earth, I'm fond of "outside the box" views almost by default. But one of my favorites is whenever a spacecraft takes a snapshot of our home world and the moon from a great distance. Stuck here on the planet's surface, our mundane perspective is rarely challenged, so seeing both our world and its lone natural satellite side by side is a rare gift, a jolt to our cosmic complacence. Sometimes the image shows both objects in detail, as the DSCOVR ... [Read More]

Oct 10th, 2025 - Over the course of human history, perhaps no single object in the night sky has drawn more attention than the Andromeda Galaxy, which the 10th-century Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi dubbed a "nebulous smear." For centuries, the fuzzy object nestled in the night sky between her mythological parents, Cepheus and Cassiopeia, and winged Pegasus held her secrets close. As science advanced, successive generations of astronomers debated Andromeda's nature: Was it a star? Or a nebula? Could ... [Read More]

Oct 10th, 2025 - reading time 3 minutes When two black holes meet, they are drawn to one another by way of their enormous gravity, initiating a powerful orbital dance, spiraling closer together over time, until one subsumes the other and they merge. One of the most energetic events in the universe, actually seeing a binary black hole system in action has proven elusive until now. A group of scientists report that they have captured the first image of two black holes circling each other once every 12 years or ... [Read More]

Oct 10th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google The universe is expected to look roughly the same in every direction, but a stubborn and consistent streak pattern identified by astronomers isn't playing by those rules. A new look at radio maps of the sky shows a pronounced tilt – called a dipole – where one side has more or hotter sources than the other. It's stronger than standard models predict, raising fresh questions about what we thought we knew. Cosmic microwave background Lukas Böhme of ... [Read More]

Oct 9th, 2025 - Ask most astronomers, and they'll tell you that dark matter and dark energy make up more than 95 percent of the universe and that they are the explanations for many of the large-scale phenomena we observe. But a new study published Sept. 12 in the journal " Galaxies"  offers a different scenario: that what we see is the weakening of some fundamental forces of nature, such as gravity. The study was led by Rajendra Gupta, Adjunct Professor in the Department of physics at the ... [Read More]

Oct 9th, 2025 - The second most distant object ever spotted by the James Webb telescope may be a 'dark star' powered by dark matter rather than nuclear fusion. By looking at the wavelengths of light picked up by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers have identified four dark star candidates — with one seemingly possessing a "smoking gun" helium absorption signature, the researchers reported in a study published Sept. 30 in the journal PNAS . First hypothesized in 2007, dark stars are ... [Read More]

Oct 9th, 2025 - Tracking dust devils across Mars now gives us a much better understanding of this windy planet. For decades, scientists have watched Martian dust devils swirling across the red planet's dusty surface. Now, using 20 years of data from the European Space Agency's Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter , researchers have tracked over a thousand of these tiny tornadoes — and what they found could change how we explore Mars. It's Windier Than We Thought Mars's atmosphere is extremely thin, ... [Read More]

Oct 8th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google The Sun has a weather pattern of its own, and one of the strangest features is the solar rain that falls in its atmosphere during flares. However, it's not water that rains down; it's plasma. This state of matter is a gas so hot that atoms have lost electrons, causing them to cool into clumps that tumble back toward the surface. Scientists have watched this coronal rain form very quickly during solar flares, then streak along magnetic arches like beads. That speed has ... [Read More]

Oct 8th, 2025 - Astronomers have observed a gigantic cosmic "contrail" in a distant galaxy. The trail of gas and dust may have been churned out by a passing massive black hole , although there are other possible causes, scientists report in a new study. The contrail was spotted in the spiral galaxy NGC 3627, located roughly 31 light-years from our solar system in the constellation Leo. Although contrails have been previously identified in the Milky Way , NGC 3627's is the most clearly defined contrail ever ... [Read More]

Oct 8th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which explored Saturn and its moons for more than a decade, has yielded a new discovery. A recent peer-reviewed study found complex organic fragments in fresh ice grains from Saturn's moon Enceladus, renewing hope that this water world harbors life in its oceans. These grains were blasted from fractures near the south pole and struck the spacecraft at about 11.2 miles per second during an October 2008 pass. That fast hit provided a more defined ... [Read More]

Oct 7th, 2025 - A rare interstellar comet — only the third ever confirmed to enter our solar system — was photographed last week, closely approaching Mars, the European Space Agency said Tuesday.  The images taken on Friday by two Mars orbiters show a bright, fuzzy white dot of the comet, also known as 3I/ATLAS , appearing to move against a backdrop of distant stars as it was about 18,641,135 miles away from Mars. The comet poses no threat to Earth, NASA has previously said.  "This was a ... [Read More]