Space

Oct 15th, 2025 - New images from the James Webb telescope have captured previously unseen details of the gargantuan jets shooting out of the famous black hole M87* — the first-ever black hole to be directly imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. The new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images, published Sept. 22 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics , have also revealed the clearest views yet of the massive counter-jet that's ricocheting through space in the opposite direction, the study authors found. ... [Read More]

Oct 15th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google The center of our galaxy is quiet in a very specific way. A new paper describes a search for stars flung from the middle of the Milky Way and translates its silence into a quantifiable measurement. At first glance, the galaxy's silence might seem unremarkable. But to astronomers, what they do not find can be just as revealing as what they do. If the black hole at the center of the Milky Way had recently merged with another massive object, the aftermath should have left a ... [Read More]

Oct 15th, 2025 - , Phys.org On July 2, 2025, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (Fermi-GBM) captured around three hours' worth of signals that appeared to come from the same source. When scientists compiled this data with signals picked up by multiple other instruments, like the Einstein Probe (EP) Wide-field X-ray Telescope and the Russian gamma-ray spectrometer, Konus-Wind, they found that they were dealing with the longest gamma ray burst (GRB) ever recorded. At around 25,000 seconds in duration (around ... [Read More]

Oct 15th, 2025 - For thirteen years, from 2004 to 2017, the Cassini-Huygens mission conducted a detailed survey of the Saturn system. It fundamentally altered our understanding of gas giants and their satellites and gave us a fair bit of surprise. Yet perhaps no satellite has been as surprising as largest moon, Titan. Saturn dwarfs its moon easily, even though Titan, at 3,200 miles across, is almost 50% bigger than Earth's moon. If you look really closely above Saturn's rings, there is a barely visible whitish ... [Read More]

Oct 15th, 2025 - By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The rings of Saturn are among the wonders of our solar system, with a diameter of roughly 175,000 miles (280,000 kilometers) as they encircle the giant planet. But smaller celestial bodies in the solar system also boast ring systems that are impressive in their own right, even if their scale is not as grand. Scientists said they have observed for the first time a ring system in the process of formation and evolution, consisting of four rings and diffuse ... [Read More]

Oct 15th, 2025 - The largest and oldest crater on the moon did not form as we initially suspected, a new study suggests. The findings hint that a specific region of the lunar surface could be more scientifically interesting than we thought — with big implications for NASA 's upcoming Artemis missions , which are scheduled to land astronauts within this newly realized area of interest as soon as 2027. The moon formed around 4.46 billion years ago , when an ancient Mars-size protoplanet, known as Theia, ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Imagine shining a flashlight through a window with a tiny chip in the glass. On the wall behind the window, the beam would show a small kink where the chip bends the light. Astronomers just did something similar on a cosmic scale. They used a distant galaxy as the "flashlight," a nearer massive galaxy as the "window," and spotted a subtle kink in the light. That suggests the presence of a hidden object of about a million times the mass of our Sun, lying billions of ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - Voyager 1 is one of humanity's greatest achievements in space travel. This spacecraft was launched by NASA in September 1977 on a one-way trip to the outer reaches of our solar system. Originally, it was built to just fly past Jupiter and Saturn, but Voyager 1 went on to exceed all expectations, becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and even making Unlocking the secrets of the outer planets On September 5, 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 from Cape Canaveral, ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google A split-second flash from the nearby starburst galaxy M82 has sparked a careful rethinking of what we call a short gamma-ray burst . The signal was so brief and intense that it first looked like a compact-object merger far across the universe, yet the evidence points to a different engine close to home. In a new study, researchers analyze GRB 231115A and show why it matches the profile of an extragalactic magnetar giant flare. The analysis was led by Aaron C. Trigg of the ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - by looking at young stars nearby, assuming that these environments could be representative of all star systems. However, as astronomers discover thousands of exoplanets unlike anything in our own solar system, they have realized most stars actually form in crowded, intense clusters that are surrounded by massive, hot stars. Now, a team of researchers has decided to take a closer look at these high-radiation environments, and one star in particular, to understand how this harsher setting might ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted an object, named the Infinity Galaxy, that turns a basic rule of galaxy evolution on its head – a likely direct collapse black hole. These objects form directly from the collapse of a massive gas cloud instead of from a dying star, sits not inside a galaxy's core but between two colliding galactic centers, embedded in a cloud of gas. The system, nicknamed the Infinity Galaxy for its figure eight shape, ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - Astronomers have yet to find irrefutable proof for any natural satellites of exoplanets—so-called exomoons—but as circumstantial evidence accumulates and the list of candidates grows, the discovery of a true-blue exomoon seems to be looming on the horizon . The latest not-quite-smoking-gun claim concerns a potential exomoon that may be erupting to spew debris onto and around its host planet. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have identified a cloud of gas ... [Read More]

Oct 14th, 2025 - Analyses of its emissions using NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory indicate that the interstellar comet probably has a very different structure than comets in the solar system. Comet 3I/Atlas continues to be full of surprises. As well as being only the third interstellar object ever detected, new analysis shows it is producing hydroxyl (OH) emissions, with these compounds betraying the presence of water on its surface. This discovery was made by a team of researchers at Auburn University in ... [Read More]

Oct 13th, 2025 - A new study has proposed the existence of Planet Y, an alternative Planet Nine candidate that is smaller and closer to Earth than the hypothetical Planet X, which astronomers have been hunting for almost a decade. However, the evidence for this newly theorized world is "not definitive." Astronomers believe they have uncovered evidence of a previously unknown ninth planet lurking in the not-too-distant reaches of the solar system . This hypothetical world, dubbed "Planet Y," could be around the ... [Read More]

Oct 13th, 2025 - Betelgeuse, the brilliant red star marking Orion's shoulder, has long been suspected of harboring a secret. I have to confess, Betelgeuse holds a special place in my heart as the first star I ever looked at through a telescope as a child, so learning that astronomers theorized this massive supergiant wasn't alone made it even more intriguing. Proving it, however, required catching a fleeting alignment and deploying some of our most powerful space telescopes in a race against time. Now, ... [Read More]

Oct 13th, 2025 - The James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ) has revealed a hidden "doomed" star that could help solve a giant astrophysical mystery. The star is a massive red supergiant, which JWST snapped just before the star exploded in a fiery supernova. Massive red supergiants should, in theory, cause most supernovas, but they're rarely observed. The latest JWST observation, described in a new study published Wednesday (Oct. 8) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters , adds weight to the idea that these giants ... [Read More]