Space

Oct 1st, 2025 - All the puzzle pieces are there. When it comes to habitable places in our solar system, the tiny moons of Saturn don't seem likely candidates. Yet time and time again, they've proven themselves to be exciting places for life. Europa, Titan, and Enceladus all have a claim to potential habitability. A new study just made Enceladus even more interesting. In 2005, Cassini found  the first evidence  that Enceladus has a hidden ocean beneath its icy surface. After that, Enceladus has teased ... [Read More]

Oct 1st, 2025 - October's longer nights bring two transits of Titan across Saturn, while Io and Europa tango together across Jupiter three times. Mercury and Mars make a brief evening appearance, and Venus dominates the morning sky. Plus, the fine Orionid meteor shower occurs during the dark of the Moon. Mercury and Mars meet in the evening sky, although their low altitude means Northern Hemisphere observers will find them difficult to spot. They reach conjunction less than 2° apart on Oct. 19. Both set ... [Read More]

Oct 1st, 2025 - The DART mission achieved its goal of changing one asteroid's orbit around another, but questions remain about why the orbit continued to alter over the following month After NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, its orbit slowly but surely changed over the next month, and astronomers can't explain why. In 2022, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) flew a nearly-600-kilogram satellite into a small asteroid called Dimorphos, which orbits a larger one called Didymos. Before the ... [Read More]

Oct 1st, 2025 - A huge "wave" is rippling through our galaxy, pushing billions of stars in its wake, a new study reveals. The Milky Way 's galactic wave was spotted in mapping data from the European Space Agency 's (ESA) Gaia space telescope, which charted the positions and movement patterns of millions of stars with high accuracy before retiring earlier this year . Like ripples in a pond, the wave has a very large influence: It affects stars between 30,000 and 65,000 light-years away from the galaxy's center, ... [Read More]

Oct 1st, 2025 - A glancing blow—not a head-on crash—may explain Mercury's massive metallic core In the crowded early Solar System, young planets frequently collided and reshaped each other. But Mercury stood out. It formed unusually close to the Sun. Mercury's days are longer than its years. It lacks an atmosphere and despite being closes to the Sun , it's not as hot as Venus. But the strangest thing about Mercury is its core. Mercury shouldn't exist—or at least, not like this. Mercury is ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - By Heidelberg University Share A detailed image reveals an unusual plasma jet structure, suggesting the presence of two merging supermassive black holes at the galaxy's core. For more than a century and a half, the distant galaxy OJ 287, located five billion light years from Earth, has intrigued scientists with its unusual changes in brightness. Astronomers have long suspected that the mystery lies in the presence of two supermassive black holes merging at the galaxy's center. A team of ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - The black hole at the centre of a galaxy more than 50 million light years away is spewing out a jet of extremely hot plasma – though we have studied it for a century, we are only now seeing it in great detail More than a century ago, astronomer Heber Curtis spotted the first black hole jet – a vast stream of superheated plasma from the supermassive behemoth that sits at the centre of galaxy M87 . Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has observed this jet in extreme detail. Since it ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - It's a sweltering Tuesday in Washington, D.C., the kind of day that stretches the definition of Earth as a "habitable" planet. But on an eighth-floor terrace near the U.S. Capitol building, dozens of people are outside anyway, talking and watching as passersby dart between pools of shade on the sticky streets below. Besides the heat, the onlookers are sweating something else, too— an audacious project to learn, at last, whether we have any neighbors living on Earth-like planets in our ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. . Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. T he planet Venus is a hellish world. Not only is this enigmatic, boiling globe holding tight to its secrets under thick clouds saturated with sulfuric acid, it harbors a biological question mark in those very clouds: Could Venus's atmosphere be a haven for high-altitude life? Venus is often called Earth's sister planet, and it might also host a biota all its own. While the planet's torrid surface ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - Black holes are often seen as cosmic monsters that swallow anything unlucky enough to stray too close. But new research suggests they do not always win — some stars can skim the Milky Way 's central black hole, Sagittarius A* ; lose mass; and stagger away. Scarred but alive, these survivors shine brighter than before, leaving clues that astronomers are only now learning to read. "Just as the moon pulls tides on Earth, a black hole tugs on a star with far greater force," Rewa Clark Bush , ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - Lots of carbon molecules but little sign of water in a super-Jupiter's disk. Many of the most interesting bodies in our Solar System aren't planets, but the moons that orbit them. They have active volcanoes, hydrocarbon oceans, geysers, and moon-wide oceans buried under icy crusts. And, as far as we can tell, the physics of the processes that produce large planets should make moon formation inevitable. Given how common planets are, our galaxy should be teeming with moons. Yet, despite some ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - Scientists armed with the immense observing power of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have detected faint traces of fluorescent flatulence leaking out from the dwarf planet Makemake, which lurks in the outer reaches of the solar system . This is only the second time that a gas has been detected on an object this far from Earth, and hints that this wee world is far more active than we once thought. Makemake is a roughly spherical object measuring around 890 miles (1,430 kilometers) across, ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - With a low but notable chance of hitting our moon this asteroid is in the sights of scientists. A city-block-sized asteroid named 2024 YR4 is hurtling through space, and it has our Moon in its sights. Asteroid 2024 YR4 caused quite the stir last year when astronomers calculated a 3% chance of hitting Earth. Since then, the trajectory models have been refined, and it's no longer believed it has a chance of hitting Earth. But it does have a 4% chance of hitting the Moon in December 2032. This ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - reading time 4 minutes More often than not, astronomers have a specific something they're looking for when searching the cosmos. But the universe is achingly huge and mysterious, leading to discoveries no one ever set out to find. These unexpected catches often end up being way cooler and more significant than what astronomers intended to explore. Here are ten of our favorite "accidental" cosmic discoveries—unintentional findings that nevertheless contributed greatly to our understanding ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - By Georgia Jiang, University of Maryland Share A new study reveals that seismic activity on the Moon may threaten the stability of future long-term infrastructure. A recent study found that ground shaking caused by moonquakes, not meteorite impacts, was responsible for altering the terrain in the Taurus-Littrow valley, the site of the Apollo 17 landing in 1972. The research also identified a likely source of these surface changes and evaluated the potential hazards by applying new seismic ... [Read More]

Sep 30th, 2025 - It's actually "fluffier" than we thought. Here on Earth, dust is a collection of small particles originating from geological sources, such as rocks, as well as other materials like pollen, dirt, bacteria, or pollutants. In space, dust wouldn't consist of pollen or bacteria. For decades, astronomers assumed space dust to be a sparse collection of specks of rock and carbon, like tiny billiard balls. It's a simple idea, and according to a new study, it's probably wrong. Cosmic dust, it turns out, ... [Read More]