Space

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 - Follow Earth on Google In early October, astronomers spotted something ancient and mysterious gliding past Mars. It was not a spacecraft or satellite, but a visitor from beyond our Solar System – an interstellar comet. Comet 3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar comet ever observed. These types of comets are true outsiders from deep space. They were born around a completely different star, long before Earth even existed. What makes 3I/ATLAS especially intriguing is that the comet might ... [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 - Follow Earth on Google About a year ago, a spacecraft named Hera took off with a huge task: help us figure out how to stop an asteroid from hitting Earth. It's now roughly halfway to the Didymos asteroid system and, so far, the journey's going better than planned. The purpose of this mission is to see if we can actually change the path of a dangerous asteroid. Hera will head to the same place where, in 2022, NASA crashed a spacecraft into a small asteroid called Dimorphos . That was part of a ... [Read More]

Oct 13th, 2025 - The asteroid Psyche may have once had vents that spewed molten metal — but only if it is chemically similar to rare, metal-rich meteorites, a new study suggests. The study, which was published online July 31 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets , could explain why the space rock has an unusual metallic cloak. Potato-shaped asteroid Psyche, a member of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is unique in being super-shiny. Radar measurements indicate that, on average, ... [Read More]

Oct 13th, 2025 - Previously undetected organic compounds have been found in ice ejected into space from Enceladus, making the satellite a prime candidate for further research. A recent study of Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has detected several organic compounds that had never been recorded there before. The findings, published this month in Nature Astronomy , provide new clues about the interior chemical composition of this icy world, as well as new hope that it could harbor life. The researchers analyzed ... [Read More]

Oct 13th, 2025 - Stars often fall into black holes, and now it seems the opposite can also occur, producing an extra long-lasting explosion as the star is consumed from within A black hole that was eaten by a star seems to have gotten revenge by consuming the star from the inside, producing a gamma-ray burst spotted about 9 billion light-years from Earth. The burst, called GRB 250702B, was first spotted by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in July. Such bursts are bright flashes caused by jets fired out ... [Read More]

Oct 13th, 2025 - When galaxies collide, it's not a gentle affair, but it does take millions of years. Over this time, the two massive star systems slowly merge together, their gravitational pull drawing them closer. At the heart of each galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, an object containing millions or even billions of times the mass of our sun. After the galaxies merge, these two black holes should eventually find each other, settling into orbit around their shared center of gravity. The result is one of ... [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]

Oct 12th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google High above the ice at the South Pole, a detector the size of a city block listens for some of the quietest messengers in the universe. In its latest analysis, the IceCube Collaboration combined 14 years of track data and 10 years of cascade data to carry out its most sensitive all-sky search for steady neutrinos.  The work targets a question that has nagged physicists for decades. Where do the highest energy cosmic rays come from, and which cosmic engines push ... [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 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 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 - Avi Loeb, a renowned Israeli‑American astrophysicist and Harvard professor, has become one of the most provocative voices in the search for extraterrestrial life. Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard since 2007, Loeb has authored over a thousand scientific papers and multiple bestselling books, including Extraterrestrial and Interstellar. He has consistently challenged mainstream astronomy, suggesting that some interstellar objects entering our solar system ... [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 - 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]