Space

Oct 17th, 2025 - This long-duration comet will make its closest approach to Earth this fall, before disappearing into the outer solar system for another 1,000 years. It was early January 2025 when a faint light spot was observed at the Mt. Lemmon Observatory in Arizona. Follow-up observations revealed that the object was a comet visiting from the outer edge of the solar system, and it was named Comet Lemmon (C/2025 A6). Its "period"—the time it takes to complete its lengthy orbit of the sun—is about ... [Read More]

Oct 17th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Warm Jupiters – gas giants parked closer to their stars than Jupiter is to the Sun – keep turning up with orbits that are stretched but strangely well-behaved. Many of these planets move in long ovals yet still trace paths neatly aligned with their stars. A growing set of measurements shows this pattern is real, not a fluke. The signal, seen across systems hundreds of light-years away, is forcing theorists to rethink how giant planets form and move. That's ... [Read More]

Oct 17th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, October 17 The Summer Triangle is now sinking in the west late in the evening as the winter constellations prepare to take over the sky. Look west around 10 P.M. local daylight time and you can still see the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle about 50° high.  Tonight the asterism appears almost as a right triangle, with a horizontal base formed by Altair in Aquila and Vega in Lyra. Above Lyra is Deneb in Cygnus, the ... [Read More]

Oct 17th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers used the ALMA radio array in Chile to show that two narrow spiral arms are funneling gas toward the central monster in the Circinus galaxy. The galaxy sits about 13 million light years away in the southern sky. Only a small share of that inflow reaches the inner engine. Less than 12 percent keeps going inward, while the rest gets pushed back out. Circinus galaxy's spiral arms Circinus hosts a supermassive black hole , a central black hole with millions of ... [Read More]

Oct 17th, 2025 - Standing on Earth and gazing out into the night sky, you'd think our Milky Way galaxy is relatively calm. Oh sure, there's the occasional supernova and a bit of unrest as huge gas clouds collide and start to form stars. But as a whole, the vast cosmic neighborhood in which we live feels stately. Most nearby galaxies we can see look that way as well, just quietly going about their cosmic business. Tranquil. But that's not the case for all galaxies. Centaurus A is an overly enthusiastic oddball ... [Read More]

Oct 16th, 2025 - Astronomers have discovered a surprisingly small "dark object" lurking within a distant ring of warped light. The record-breaking find could help shed light on the mysterious identity of dark matter, which would have major implications for the field of cosmology . The hidden object, likely a clump of invisible dark matter, was spotted within B1938+666 — an "Einstein ring" located around 10 billion light-years from Earth. This luminous halo (which appears dark in the black-and-white ... [Read More]

Oct 16th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google The Southern sky just got a sharper set of eyes. A new high-resolution echelle spectrograph on the 4.1 meter SOAR Telescope in Chile has taken its first look at Eta Carinae, a volatile pair of massive stars that keeps astronomers on their toes. This spectrograph uses finely spaced diffraction gratings to separate light into detailed spectra for precise measurement. The instrument's debut is more than a ribbon cutting. It sets up fresh tests of how violent stars grow, shed ... [Read More]

Oct 16th, 2025 - Long before starlight filled the cosmos for the first time, the young universe may have been simmering, according to a new study. The findings suggest that about 800 million years after the Big Bang, energy from newborn black holes and the fading embers of the first stars was already warming vast clouds of intergalactic hydrogen gas, offering a rare glimpse into a largely uncharted chapter of the universe's youth. The results also bring astronomers a step closer to detecting a faint radio ... [Read More]

Oct 16th, 2025 - Follow Earth on Google Astronomers report the longest gamma-ray burst ever recorded, confirmed in a new paper. The signal, labeled GRB 250702B, flashed for about 7 hours after NASA's Fermi telescope first saw it on July 2, 2025. The team argues the engine was not a normal collapsing star. They present evidence that a preexisting black hole plunged into a partner star and powered jets from deep inside. GRB 250702B is unprecedented In simple terms, a gamma-ray burst (GRB) is the most energetic ... [Read More]

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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 - 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 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]