Space

Sep 1st, 2025 - The European Space Agency-led has split the flood of energetic particles flung out into space from the sun into two groups, tracing each back to a different kind of outburst from our star. The sun is the most energetic particle accelerator in the solar system . It whips up electrons to nearly the speed of light and flings them out into space, flooding the solar system with so-called 'Solar Energetic Electrons' (SEEs). Researchers have now used Solar Orbiter to pinpoint the source of these ... [Read More]

Sep 1st, 2025 - Humanity is obsessed with astronomical record keeping. The Babylonians compiled their first listing of the stars in the 12th century b.c.e. Around 1000 b.c.e., they followed it with an expanded catalog that includes familiar constellations and star clusters, as well as motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets. The Mayans inscribed into stone and painted onto cloth calendars and almanacs, tracking planets, eclipses, and possibly even the precession of the equinoxes. Today, telescopes and ... [Read More]

Sep 1st, 2025 - The Earth supports the only known life in the universe, all of it depending heavily on the presence of liquid water to facilitate chemical reactions. While single-celled life has existed almost as long as Earth itself, it took roughly three billion years for multicellular life to form. Human life has existed for less than one-10 thousandth of the age of Earth. All of this suggests that life might be common on planets that support liquid water, but it might be uncommon to find life that studies ... [Read More]

Sep 1st, 2025 - Gaia has transformed how we see the night sky. What looks calm and unchanging is actually full of motion – stars racing across space, clusters forming and breaking apart, and entire star families stretching thousands of light-years. For the past decade, the Gaia space observatory has been quietly watching it all unfold with its twin telescopes. Since 2014, Gaia has collected more precise information about our galaxy than any mission before. The telescopes tracked nearly two billion stars ... [Read More]

Sep 1st, 2025 - What was the universe like in the first few hundreds of millions of years after it came into existence? How did the first stars and galaxies form? Those are questions that astronomers now have a better chance of answering, thanks to a new research program using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which came online in 2022. The MINERVA program, co-led by a Tufts astronomer, will give researchers an even better view than before of the early universe by using instruments on the Webb telescope ... [Read More]

Sep 1st, 2025 - A "cannibalistic" solar storm is about to slam into Earth's magnetic field , triggering vibrant auroras that will potentially be visible in up to 18 different U.S. states, just in time for Labor Day. On Saturday (Aug. 30), sunspot 4204, located near the sun's equator, unleashed a long-duration, M-class solar flare — the second most powerful type of eruption our home star's surface is capable of producing. The M2.7 magnitude blast, which occurred over more than 3 hours, also spat out a ... [Read More]

Aug 31st, 2025 - For years, scientists have wondered exactly when Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, first came into existence. A team of researchers from Nagoya University in Japan and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) has now uncovered the answer. These scientists discovered it hidden in meteorites that landed on Earth. These space rocks contain chondrules, which are tiny molten droplets formed during violent collisions between small rocky bodies called planetesimals. These ... [Read More]

Aug 30th, 2025 - Astronomers have imaged a newborn gas giant, WISPIT 2b, that sits inside a wide gap in a disk of dust and gas around a young, sun-like star. The event was captured with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO VLT). The planet shows up as a compact source tucked into the dark lane between bright rings. It moves from epoch to epoch in a way that fits an orbit . The host star, WISPIT 2, is only about 5 million years old, so this is a snapshot of a system that is still ... [Read More]

Aug 30th, 2025 - One of the advantages of having so many telescopes watching large parts of the sky is that, if astronomers find something interesting, there are probably images of it from before it was officially discovered sitting in the data archives of other satellites that no one thought to look at. That has certainly been the case for our newest interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS , which, though discovered in early July, had been visible on other telescopes as early as May. We previously reported on Vera ... [Read More]

Aug 30th, 2025 - By Nannan Zhang, Chinese Academy of Sciences Share GW190814's gravitational waves suggest a hidden supermassive black hole nearby. The finding reshapes how binary black holes may form. Binary black holes are already among the universe's most extraordinary phenomena, but scientists at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have uncovered evidence suggesting they might not exist in isolation. Instead, some of these systems could be influenced by an even ... [Read More]

Aug 30th, 2025 - The universe feels simple at first glance: stars, gas, dust, and the gravity that binds it all. Then you look more closely and realize that nothing could be farther from the truth. For decades, the standard picture has said that most of what is out there is not what we can see. It is a mix of ordinary matter and two invisible components often called dark matter and dark energy. That picture has guided textbooks, space missions, and how we read the sky. It has also raised tough questions that ... [Read More]

Aug 29th, 2025 - By Indranil Banik, The Conversation Share New data on baryon acoustic oscillations strengthen the case for a local cosmic void. The finding offers a possible solution to the Hubble tension. When we look at the night sky, it can appear as though our cosmic surroundings are filled with countless stars, planets, and galaxies. However, researchers have long proposed that our local region of the universe may contain far fewer galaxies than expected. Evidence increasingly points to the possibility ... [Read More]

Aug 29th, 2025 - The first light from the explosion that was the death of a massive star in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud reached Earth on Feb. 23, 1987. Supernova 1987A's proximity gave astronomers unprecedented access into the final stages of stellar life, and in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope began taking high-res images of the former star. Then, on Aug. 29 of that year, NASA announced that Aug. 23-24 observations had resolved a ring of material around the supernova remnants in unparalleled detail: ... [Read More]

Aug 29th, 2025 - Asteroids have been drifting through our solar system since long before the Earth had continents, oceans, or even life itself. The ancient space rocks contain clues about the origins of our solar system, and now scientists have finally acquired some of these space treasures. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission has delivered samples from the asteroid Bennu, and their analysis is reshaping our understanding of ancient space rocks. Color-changing mystery of asteroids When viewed through telescopes, some ... [Read More]

Aug 29th, 2025 - By University of California - Santa Cruz Share Water-rich sub-Neptunes may offer key clues to where life could exist beyond Earth. For astrobiologists, the hunt for life outside our solar system begins with the same question you would ask in a desert: where is the water? Among the planets discovered so far, a very common type appears to have interiors rich in water. These worlds are known as "sub-Neptunes" because their size and mass fall between Earth and Neptune . Most sub-Neptunes circle ... [Read More]

Aug 29th, 2025 - Early Earth may not have had the right ingredients for life — until a nearby Mars-size planet crashed into it, two new studies hint. Early Earth was a barren wasteland incapable of supporting life until a big protoplanet crash carried in the necessary ingredients, a new study suggests. That collision of the proto-Earth and a Mars-size body — nicknamed Theia — has been theorized for decades, especially in discussions of how our moon may have formed from the resulting pieces of ... [Read More]