Space

Jul 8th, 2025 - Over the past two years, scientists using the 10-meter South Pole Telescope (SPT) have mapped about 1/25 of the sky using 16,000 ultra-sensitive millimeter-wave detectors. The data offer new details about the early universe and help scientists probe the nature of dark energy, the mysterious force driving cosmic acceleration. Now, the international team behind the effort has released their data, revealing the most detailed maps yet of the cosmic microwave background's (CMB) temperature and ... [Read More]

Jul 8th, 2025 - Whoooooo's there? Just a "Cosmic Owl," the latest strange discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ). A new study using JWST data has helped scientists spot an owl-faced object peering out at us from billions of light-years away. Formed through the extremely unusual collision of two rare ring galaxies , the structure also serves as a natural laboratory where researchers can study many of the processes accompanying the evolution of galaxies. Galaxies come in several shapes, from ... [Read More]

Jul 8th, 2025 - Royal Astronomical Society Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighbouring regions of the universe, astronomers say. Their theory is a potential solution to the 'Hubble tension' and could help confirm the true age of our universe, which is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old. The latest research –  shared at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) in Durham ... [Read More]

Jul 8th, 2025 - Our quest for dark matter is sending us on some wild adventures. Stars like our Sun are powered by nuclear fusion, but a bizarre type of stars called "dark dwarfs" could actually be powered by elusive dark matter. It's a bold new idea in astrophysics, and one that would make the universe even more intriguing than it is now. But there's only one problem: we haven't yet seen a dark dwarf. Our universe is made of what? Grossly speaking, the universe is primarily composed of three things: ordinary ... [Read More]

Jul 7th, 2025 - A fascinating glimpse into how a solar system like our own is born has been revealed with the detection of planet-forming "pebbles" around two young stars. These seeds to make new worlds are thought to gradually clump together over time, in much the same way Jupiter was first created 4.5 billion years ago, followed by Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The planet-forming disks, known as protoplanetary disks, were spotted out to at least Neptune-like orbits around the young ... [Read More]

Jul 7th, 2025 - The visitor is simply passing through our solar system. On July 1, 2025, a telescope in Chile detected something unexpected: a faint object streaking across the sky at an unusual speed and angle. Within hours, astronomers realized what they were seeing. This wasn't a comet from the outer reaches of our own solar system, but rather a cosmic drifter from another star. The object, now officially named 3I/ATLAS, is only the third confirmed interstellar visitor ever observed in our solar system. ... [Read More]

Jul 6th, 2025 - A top a mountain in Chile, where the days are dry and nights are clear, a team of scientists and engineers is preparing for one of the most important astronomical missions in recent times. Among them is Kshitija Kelkar, whose life has taken an interesting turn. Twenty years ago in Pune, the city she's originally from, Kelkar sent a photo of a lunar eclipse she had taken with a digital camera to Sky and Telescope , a popular astronomy magazine. The publication accepted the photo and released it ... [Read More]

Jul 6th, 2025 - Most meteorites that have reached Earth come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter . But we have 1,000 or so meteorites that come from the Moon and Mars. This is probably a result of asteroids hitting their surfaces and ejecting material towards our planet. It should also be physically possible for such debris to reach the Earth from Mercury , another nearby rocky body. But so far, none have been confirmed to come from there — presenting a longstanding mystery. A new study my ... [Read More]

Jul 6th, 2025 - Astronomers poring over new data from the James Webb Space Telescope have reported the most compelling hints yet that "dark stars," cosmic behemoths fed by dark matter, really existed. A new analysis of five ultra‑distant objects shows spectra and shapes that match simulations of dark stars rather than ordinary fusion‑powered suns. The candidates sit more than 13 billion light‑years away, meaning their light left them when the universe was only a few hundred million years old. ... [Read More]

Jul 6th, 2025 - What it is: The Bullet Cluster Where it is: 3.7 billion light-years from Earth, in the constellation Carina When it was shared: June 30, 2025 Why it's so special: Galaxy clusters act as a magnifying lens, shining light on the faintest and most distant objects — a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. On the rarest of occasions, galaxy clusters collide, creating an even more massive lens. The James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ) recently provided extremely detailed observations of such ... [Read More]

Jul 5th, 2025 - Scientists have observed a new type of black hole that is too heavy to have been born from a star but still too slim to act as an anchor for an entire galaxy. These black holes are being being referred to as "lite" intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH), and they're extremely hard to identify because of how low-frequency their signals tend to be. The quest to find these IMBHs has come about due to the fact that we've discovered ultramassive black holes that can measure up to millions of times the ... [Read More]

Jul 5th, 2025 - In 2006, Pluto was famously demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet. It remains the most famous dwarf planet today, but there are others in our solar system , including potentially hundreds that haven't been discovered yet. But what, exactly, is a dwarf planet? And how many dwarf planets are there? A dwarf planet is a celestial body that is smaller than a planet but bigger than an asteroid or other small rock in the solar system. They're not planets because they only meet two of the three ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - Sky This Week is brought to you in part by Celestron. Friday, July 4 Mercury reaches its greatest eastern elongation (26°) from the Sun at 1 A.M. EDT this morning. You can view the tiny planet in the evening sky, still standing 8° high in the west 40 minutes after sunset and glowing at magnitude 0.5 in Cancer. The bright point of light can guide your way to the Beehive Cluster (M44), roughly 2° to the planet's northwest (upper right), visible in the same field of view as Mercury in ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - A planet orbiting a young star far beyond our solar system is behaving in a strange way. Instead of just soaking up radiation from its star, this planet may actually be the one triggering powerful energy blasts. The stellar bursts are so intense, they strip away the planet's atmosphere bit by bit. Scientists think this could be the first time we've seen a planet play such a dangerous game with its host star. Stirring up deadly flares Until recently, this kind of interaction was just a theory. ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - , Phys.org As NASA's spacecraft traveled through the Kuiper Belt at a distance of 438 million miles from Earth, an international team of astronomers used the far-flung probe to conduct an unprecedented experiment: the first-ever successful demonstration of deep space stellar navigation. A paper describing the results was accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal . The pre-print is available on the server . As a proof-of-concept test, the researchers took advantage of the spacecraft's ... [Read More]

Jul 4th, 2025 - In March of this year, a refrigerator-sized spacecraft unfurled its solar panels 435 miles above Earth and pointed a wide-field space telescope toward the Milky Way's glittering plane. Its name is SPHEREx, short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer. The scientific appetite of the spacecraft is as sweeping as its title. Every six months, the observatory will scan the sky in 102 infrared channels – far beyond just a few colors. ... [Read More]