Saturn encounter may have set distant centaur on path to becoming a comet

More than 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) from Earth, an ancient icy object is slowly awakening. As it drifts inward through the solar system, the frozen body known as Centaur 450P/LONEOS has begun releasing gas and dust—behavior more commonly associated with comets than with centaurs, the small icy objects that typically orbit between Jupiter […]

Precision optics to make plant health visible from space

When the ESA Earth observation mission FLEX launches into space on September 15, 2026, as scheduled, it will carry high-precision optical components from Jena, Germany. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF have developed and manufactured a silicon-based double-slit assembly as well as two high-precision mirrors for the spectrometer on […]

Martian astronomy: Percy sees a ‘Phobos eclipse’ from Mars

What’s so special about spotting Phobos crossing in front of the sun? Sure. It’s just another image of Phobos crossing the disk of the sun, as seen from the surface of Mars. Like so much of the modern space era, these images, once amazing, are now almost routine. But there’s some real science behind tasking […]

MeerKAT directly detects faint hydrogen signal from the distant universe

Astronomers from the University of Manchester and the University of the Western Cape have directly detected an extremely faint radio signal from hydrogen gas billions of light-years away, opening a powerful new way to map the large-scale structure of the universe. Using South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, the international team measured radio emissions from neutral […]

AI tool detects unusual satellite behavior to improve space safety

A new AI model can monitor satellites and spot anomalies in their behavior, reducing the risk of in-orbit collisions, according to new research published in the journal Expert Systems.

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A supermassive black hole erupted in X-rays, and its radio jets followed 300 days later

By combining roughly two decades of observations from NASA’s Swift X-ray Telescope with radio monitoring, astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Perseus Cluster suddenly flaring in X-rays, and about 300 days later, its powerful radio emission flared too. Their paper describing the connection between this black hole’s accretion disk […]

Declining star formation not caused by simple ‘fuel crisis,’ new measurements suggest

The universe has been having fewer and fewer stellar “babies.” Over the past 4.5 billion years, the rate of star birth has crashed to less than half of what it once was. But here’s the twist: the most essential “fuel” for making stars has barely decreased.

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Looking for Earth 2.0 in binary systems

While astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets over the last few decades, the true prize continues to elude them—they have yet to find an Earth-mass, rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. That’s partially due to cosmic geography—around half of all sun-like stars near us aren’t alone. They have one or […]

ESA JUICE probe targets dark Jovian moon Kallichore in 2031

Jupiter hosts more than 100 moons, with most attention focused on the four Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. This is primarily due to their active geology, including Io being the most volcanically active planetary body in the solar system and Europa having a vast subsurface liquid-water ocean beneath its icy crust. However, Jupiter’s […]

Four ‘Little Red Dot’ pairs hint at black hole mergers in early universe

After analyzing infrared images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of researchers has discovered multiple massive black holes from approximately 12.5–12.8 billion years ago that were actively accumulating surrounding matter and growing rapidly. Some were even on the path to merging, according to a study published Aug. 31 in the […]

Peptides can form well-defined structures in harsh, Venus-like conditions

When exploring solar system bodies for signs of past or present life, scientists have mainly focused on planets that have (or had) a liquid surface similar to Earth’s. However, mounting evidence suggests that the ingredients for life may exist in a very different environment: the highly acidic clouds that blanket Venus.

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Solar orbiter detects ion sorting at the solar wind’s magnetic boundary

A Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) study of data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter gives the most detailed view of the heliospheric current sheet (HCS) to date. The HCS is a sprawling, undulating surface emanating from the sun to beyond the solar system that serves as the boundary between the sun’s north and […]

Manganese’s emission lines shine a light on galactic evolution

In a new study, a team of astronomers has identified wavelengths of light that could be useful for tracing the chemical evolution of the universe. Using computational modeling to simulate how electrons interact with manganese ions—an element produced during stellar explosions called supernovae—researchers predicted how different environmental conditions could produce observable light known as emission […]

Interstellar travel V: Warp drives, wormholes, and halo drives

Welcome back to our series on Interstellar Travel, where we look at the many proposals made for sending missions to the stars since the dawn of the Space Age. In our first installment, we examined how Cold War-era developments in nuclear weapons and rockets paralleled advances in space exploration, resulting in proposals for nuclear rockets. […]

JWST reveals likely Type II supernova from when universe was only 2 billion years old

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified one of the most distant exploding stars ever confirmed. The supernova, SN 2023aeaf, was found at a redshift of 3.195—so far away that its light has been traveling for roughly 11.7 billion years. The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal on Aug. 13, offers a close-up […]