Space

Mar 31st, 2025 - In our vast galaxy, one star holds a special position – Proxima Centauri. Located just over four light-years away, it's the closest star to our solar system. This proximity alone makes it a focus of scientific curiosity. But there's another reason it captures attention. Proxima Centauri hosts a planet that lies in the star's habitable zone – a region where conditions could support liquid water. That simple fact sparks questions about the possibility of life. Yet, this hope runs into ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - An astronomer says goodbye to Gaia, the satellite that mapped the galaxy. On Thursday 27 March, the European Space Agency (ESA) sent its last messages to the Gaia Spacecraft . They told Gaia to shut down its communication systems and central computer and said goodbye to this amazing space telescope. Gaia has been the most successful ESA space mission ever, so why did they turn Gaia off? What did Gaia achieve? And perhaps most importantly, why was it my favourite space telescope? Running on ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - Black holes are among the most powerful and mysterious objects in the universe. Their gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape them. For decades, astronomers have tried to understand how supermassive black holes formed and grew during the early years of the universe. But the task has remained difficult. Thick clouds of dust and gas often block these regions from view . A breakthrough study has now provided a rare glimpse into one such hidden region. An international team of ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - In April 2019, rare primitive meteorites fell near the town of Aguas Zarcas in northern Costa Rica. In an article in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science , an international team of researchers describes the circumstances of the fall and show that mudball meteorites are not necessarily weak. "Twenty-seven kilos of rocks were recovered, making this the largest fall of its kind since similar meteorites fell near Murchison in Australia in 1969," said meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - A team of astronomers has unveiled the most detailed images yet of the universe's infancy , capturing light that traveled for more than 13 billion years before reaching Earth.  These observations, made from a telescope high in the Chilean Andes, provide an unprecedented glimpse of the cosmos when it was just 380,000 years old – equivalent to baby pictures of a universe that has since grown into its middle age. "We are seeing the first steps towards making the earliest stars and ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - The powerful James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ) has just completed the first of two planned observations of the infamous "city-killer" asteroid 2024 YR4, which will make a perilously close approach to Earth and the moon in December 2032. Making use of emergency telescope time awarded to an international team of astronomers in February, JWST's first observation of the building-size asteroid reveals that 2024 YR4 may be slightly larger and rockier than previous ground-based telescope studies ... [Read More]

Mar 31st, 2025 - The ice-giant planet Uranus, which travels around the sun tipped on its side, is a weird and mysterious world. Now, in an unprecedented study spanning two decades, researchers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered new insights into the planet's atmospheric composition and dynamics. This was possible only because of Hubble's sharp resolution, spectral capabilities, and longevity. The team's results will help astronomers to better understand how the atmosphere of Uranus works and ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2025 - A team of scientists has developed a recipe for black holes that eliminates one of the most troubling aspects of physics: the central singularity, the point at which all our theories, laws and models shatter. If you were going to design an object to preserve mystery while being utterly troubling, you couldn't do much better than a black hole . First, the outer boundary of these cosmic titans is a one-way light-trapping surface called an event horizon , the point at which a black hole's gravity ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2025 - Behold, the piping host particles of solar wind streaming from our Sun, caught in new footage from the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter. The video was captured by the orbiter's Metis instrument, a coronagraph which blocks light directly from the Sun in order to see fainter phenomena in its outer atmosphere, or corona. New research describing the observations was published today in The Astrophysical Journal. "In this paper, we present observations by Metis during its perihelion passage of a striking ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2025 - Hycean worlds, which are a possible kind of exoplanet with deep oceans surrounded by a thick envelope of hydrogen, could provide the best chance for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to detect biosignatures, according to a new study. Those potential signs of life are a group of chemicals called methyl halides, which on Earth are produced by some bacteria and ocean algae. "Unlike an Earth-like planet, where atmospheric noise and telescope limitations make it difficult to detect ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2025 - NASA's Curiosity rover has made another remarkable discovery on Mars – the largest organic compounds ever detected on the Red Planet. These molecules , discovered in a rock sample drilled in 2013, offer fresh insights into the potential of Mars to support life. The findings suggest that Mars might have hosted more advanced prebiotic chemistry than scientists had assumed. Inside Curiosity's onboard mini-lab called SAM, scientists identified three organic molecules: decane, undecane, and ... [Read More]

Mar 30th, 2025 - What it is: The Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy Where it is: 200,000 light-years away, in the constellations Tucana and Hydrus When it was shared: March 21, 2025 Why it's so special: The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of our galaxy's closest neighbors and is visible to the naked eye, yet most humans will never see it. The dwarf galaxy, which contains just several hundred million stars , compared with the Milky Way 's 100 billion stars, can be seen only from the Southern ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2025 - Astronomers have used the remains of an ancient, dead star to uncover information about how stars explode and form black holes. The astronomers reconstructed the makeup of the long-dead star that exploded in a violent supernova more than a million years ago. Using data collected by NASA 's Chandra X-ray Observatory, researchers led by Noa Keshet, Ehud Behar and Timothy Kallman of the Goddard Space Flight Center, conducted what they describe as "supernova archaeology." The term refers to ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, March 28 The Moon passes 9° south of Venus at 10 A.M. EDT this morning. We'll check out the planet — now a morning star as well, visible before dawn — later in the week.  Tonight, let's take advantage of the moonless dark to enjoy some deep-sky observing. A few hours after sunset, Virgo has cleared the horizon and appears in the southeast. Start by finding 4th-magnitude 110 Virginis, a star in far eastern Virgo ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2025 - In a Sky Full of Satellites, Astronomers Find Creative Ways to Observe the Stars By & In the next few months, from its perch atop a mountain in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will begin surveying the cosmos with the largest camera ever built. Every three nights, it will produce a map of the entire southern sky filled with stars, galaxies, asteroids and supernovae — and swarms of bright satellites ruining some of the view. Astronomers didn't worry much about satellites photobombing ... [Read More]

Mar 28th, 2025 - This is what it looks like when light from one galaxy is bent around the mass of another. The latest image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope , pictured above, also happens to be a stunning illustration of Einstein's theory of general relativity. So much so that the cosmic phenomenon is called an "Einstein ring." Einstein rings happen when light from one distant object is bent around the mass of another, slightly closer and even larger object. The effect is normally too subtle to observe up ... [Read More]