Space

For the first time, astronomers have spotted evidence of a pair of dwarf galaxies featuring giant black holes on a collision course with each other. In fact, they haven’t just found just one pair – they’ve found two. The first pair of merging dwarf galaxies is in the cluster Abell 133, about 760 million light-years

Dust storms are a serious hazard on Mars. While smaller storms and dust devils happen regularly, larger ones happen every year (during summer in the southern hemisphere) and can cover continent-sized areas for weeks. Once every three Martian years (about five and a half Earth years), the storms can become large enough to encompass the

The image above may look like a fairly normal picture of the night sky, but what you’re looking at is a lot more special than just glittering stars. Each of those white dots is an active supermassive black hole. And each of those black holes is devouring material at the heart of a galaxy millions

Sending a lander to Venus presents several huge engineering problems. Granted, we’d get a break from the nail-biting entry, descent, and landing, since Venus’ atmosphere is so thick a lander would settle gently to the surface like a stone settles in water – no sky cranes or retrorockets required. But the rest of the endeavor

A handful of objects uncovered in JWST data has astronomers stumped. What’s thought to be half a dozen galaxies appear to be massive and well-formed, in spite of appearing as they were just 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. Yet according to current cosmological models, there simply wasn’t enough time for them

Mars rovers tasked with hunting for traces of biology could roll over microscopic life forms without smelling a thing, simply because their instruments aren’t up to the task. A new study carried out in Earth’s oldest desert shows how current technology can’t always spot the signatures of life on our own planet’s surface. Let alone

Jupiter is well known for its spectacular aurorae, thanks in no small part to the Juno orbiter and recent images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Like Earth, these dazzling displays result from charged solar particles interacting with Jupiter’s magnetic field and atmosphere. Over the years, astronomers have also detected faint aurorae in

Russia’s space agency said Saturday it was planning to send a rescue ship on February 24 to bring home three astronauts whose return vehicle was damaged by a tiny meteoroid. “The launch is expected on February 24,” a spokesman for the Roscosmos space agency told AFP. Last Monday, the space agency said it had delayed

Our Solar System is a pretty busy place. There are millions of objects moving around – everything from planets, to moons, to comets, and asteroids. And each year we’re discovering more and more objects (usually small asteroids or speedy comets) that call the Solar System home. Astronomers had found all eight of the main planets

A space rock recovered within just a few short hours of entering Earth’s atmosphere has revealed there may not be such a thing as a “pristine” meteorite. The Winchcombe meteorite fell to Earth in February 2021 after exploding mid-air over Gloucestershire in England, and in the days that followed, multiple fragments were retrieved from the

A comma-shaped molecular cloud near the center of the Milky Way seems to be orbiting one of the most sought-after objects in astronomy. At the center of the “Tadpole’s” orbit, a team of astronomers saw precisely … nothing. And a nothing which attracts something simply screams ‘ black hole‘. Modeling suggests that this wouldn’t just

There’s a lot going on in the space between the stars. There, the tenuous dust and gas that fills the voids sometimes comes together to form dense clouds. It’s here that stars are born, forming from knots of material that collapse and ignite under gravity to light up the Universe. Cloaked in fog, the process

Roscosmos appears to be having some issues with a spacecraft again. In December, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft that delivered three crew members of Expedition 68 to the International Space Station (ISS) reported a leak in its coolant loop. On February 11th, engineers at the Russian Mission Control Center outside Moscow recorded a depressurization in Progress

Black holes could explain a mysterious form of energy that makes up most of the Universe, according to astronomers. The existence of “dark energy” has been inferred from observations of stars and galaxies, but no one has been able to explain what it is, or where it comes from. The stuff, or matter, that makes

A record-breaking gamma-ray burst detected in October 2022 has now been described as a one-in-a-thousand years event. It’s called GRB 221009A, and with up to 18 teraelectronvolts of energy packed in its emissions of light, it’s considered the most powerful gamma-ray burst on record. We’ve been waiting to learn more about this incredible explosion, and

The colossal explosion resulting from a merger between two neutron stars has an unexpectedly perfect shape. According to a new analysis of the aftermath of a historical neutron star collision observed in 2017, the kilonova explosion produced by the two stars was a completely symmetrical, almost perfect sphere. And astronomers just don’t know why. It

Novel propulsion ideas for moving around space seem like they’re a dime a dozen recently. Besides the typical argument between solar sails and chemical propulsion lies a potential third way – a nuclear rocket engine. While we’ve discussed them here at Universe Today before, NASA’s Institute of Advanced Concepts has provided a grant to a

A trail found in the gas surrounding a distant galaxy could be the smoking gun pointing to a runaway supermassive black hole. Based on an analysis of light that has traveled for more than 7.5 billion years to reach us, a team of astronomers has presented evidence of a colossal object ejected from its host

For just the seventh time ever, astronomers spotted an asteroid in space hours before it came falling down to Earth in a blaze. In images taken at 20:18:07 UTC on February 12, the asteroid 2023 CX1, also known as Sar2667, was spotted by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky of Konkoly Observatory’s Piszkéstető Station in Hungary. It appeared

Astronomers know that galaxies grow over time through mergers with other galaxies. We can see it happening in our galaxy. The Milky Way is slowly absorbing the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy. For the first time, astronomers have found evidence of an ancient mass migration of stars into another

The Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed that a new “spoke season” is kicking off at Saturn. These are the times of the Saturnian year, centered around the equinoxes, when mysterious radial smudge marks, like the spokes of a wheel, appear across the planet’s rings. What exactly causes the spokes is unknown, but their re-emergence, combined

If life is common in our Universe, and we have every reason to suspect it is, why do we not see evidence of it everywhere? This is the essence of the Fermi Paradox, a question that has plagued astronomers and cosmologists almost since the birth of modern astronomy. It is also the reasoning behind the

The global collaboration that delivered us not one but two pictures of supermassive black holes has now peered into one of the brightest lights in the Universe. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a telescope array comprising radio antennae around the world, studied a distant quasar named NRAO 530, whose light has traveled for 7.5 billion

Everyone loves taking pictures of the Moon. Whether it’s with their phones or through the wonders of astrophotography, photographing the Moon reminds us about the wonders and awesomeness of the Universe. But while we can take awesome images of the whole Moon from the Earth, it’s extremely difficult to get close-up images of its surface

In recent years, evidence suggests that there might be something lurking on the outskirts of the Solar System – something large, and possibly very dark. That large, dark thing has been named Planet Nine, its presence inferred by some peculiarly clustered orbits detected in small objects in the outer Solar System’s Kuiper Belt. Something, some

Rings in the Solar System are not exactly rare. Half the planets have them, and others may have in the past. Some asteroids have rings, as does the dwarf planet Haumea. Even the Sun has rings of a sort. Now astronomers have found an entirely new ring system. Only this one has left them scratching

A newly discovered structure located deep in the heart of a thick cloud of gas and dust more than 450 light-years away is the signature of a pair of baby stars in the throes of formation. A team of astronomers have identified a previously unseen bubble at the center of a stellar nursery called Barnard

Galaxies come in many different shapes and sizes, but the basic ingredients seem fairly consistent. There’s usually a big black hole at the center, a bunch of stars and gas, and a generous serving of dark matter that helps glue the whole thing together. While dark matter is, well, dark, the stars, gas, and swirling

For all that the Sun is a ubiquitous and vital part of our lives, a lot about it remains baffling. And now it’s done something decidedly peculiar. Material from a filament of plasma erupting from the Sun’s surface broke away and appeared to form a crown-like vortex over the solar north pole. Further analysis will

A green comet shooting past Earth for the first time since the Ice Age is about to skim right past Mars in the night sky. The green comet and the red planet will be visible side-by-side across the Northern Hemisphere on the nights of February 10 and 11. For US stargazers, the Moon will stay

A Russian KOSMOS 2499 satellite broke up last month – for a second time – according to the Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron. In a recent tweet, the Space Force said they are currently tracking 85 individual pieces of debris at an altitude of 1,169 km (726 miles). The breakup occurred on January 4,

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found wave-rippled rocks – evidence of an ancient lake – in an area of the planet expected to be drier, the US space agency said Wednesday. “This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet

One of the most interesting stars in the Milky Way is still serving up more than its fair share of intrigue. In October 2020, SGR 1935+2154, the magnetar responsible for spitting out radio signals never before detected in our home galaxy, unexpectedly slowed down. Now, scientists believe the rotational slowdown could be evidence of a

A bright infrared light blazing from two galaxies in the process of merging has just been yanked out of hiding. Using the JWST, astronomers have pinpointed the exact location of the light, behind a thick wall of dust obscuring it in other wavelengths. Whatever is producing the light is yet unknown, but narrowing down where

Failed observations of a specific target using the JWST have resulted in something way more interesting. In the belt of asteroids that drifts between Mars and Jupiter, the space telescope spotted a previously unknown, and exceptionally tiny, asteroid. The yet-unnamed chunk of rock measures just 100 to 200 meters (328 to 656 feet) across and

We’ve just found an exoplanet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting a tiny star not very far away at all. It’s called K2-415b, and its similarities (and differences) to our own home world might shed some light on how Earth-like planets form and evolve in different ways, in systems very different from our

MSL Curiosity is going about its business exploring Mars. The high-tech rover is currently exploring the sulphate-bearing unit on Mt. Sharp, the central peak in Mars’ Gale Crater. Serendipity placed a metal meteorite in its path. The meteorite is made mostly of nickel and iron, and it has a name: Cacao. (Chocolate comes from cacao.)

The battle for the most known moons in the Solar System is raging on. After losing its lead to Saturn in 2019, Jupiter has once again surged ahead. Astronomers have counted 12 previously unknown moons in orbit around our Solar System’s biggest planet, bringing the known total to 92, and leaving Saturn, with its measly

For the first time, astronomers have positively identified a binary system that is destined to one day end up as a kilonova – the explosive result of a neutron star collision. And, ironically, the key ingredient to this eventual fate is a pair of failed, fizzled supernovae. This phenomenon is thought to be so rare

You can now listen to the sounds of the space around one of the Milky Way’s most spectacular stars. RS Puppis, a Cepheid variable star around 6,500 light-years away, has gotten the data sonification treatment by the sci-art outreach project SYSTEM Sounds. They took a Hubble image of the star and transcribed the light into

Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. Their mass is so great it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself. And yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing

We have a new exoplanet to one day scour for potential signs of life. Just 31 light-years away, astronomers have identified an incredibly rare Earth-sized world orbiting at a distance from its star that should be hospitable to life as we know it. If, that is, the exoplanet itself has the right conditions to be

The Universe was simply different when it was younger. Recently astronomers have discovered that complex physics in the young cosmos may have led to the development of supermassive stars, each one weighing up to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun. We currently have no observations of the formation of the first stars in the

A green comet called C/2022 E3 (ZTF), or Comet ZTF for short, is nearing its closest approach to Earth for the first time since the ice age. Comet ZTF will come within 26 million miles (42 million kilometers) of our planet on Wednesday, about a third of the distance between Earth and the Sun. The

A ghostly blue spiral spotted in the sky over Hawaii could be related to a SpaceX satellite launch. The National Astronomical Observatory of Japan spotted the mysterious spiral through its Subaru Telescope on January 18, just after SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a large military satellite for the US Space Force. Ichi Tanaka,

A gargantuan effort by a huge international team of scientists has just given us the most precise map of the all matter in the Universe obtained to date. By combining data from two major surveys, the international collaboration has revealed where the Universe does and doesn’t keep all its junk – not just the normal

A new video shared on YouTube is one of the most amazing things we’ve ever seen in planetary science. The video shows four dots of light moving in partial concentric circles around a black disk at their center. What you’re actually looking at is a planetary system. The four dots are exoplanets, with the black

Jupiter isn’t alone along its orbital path around the Sun. Two giant swarms of asteroids have been snared in the gravitational interaction between the gas giant and our star, leading and trailing Jupiter as it treads its cosmic measure. Between these swarms, known collectively as trojans, we’ve identified more than 12,000 asteroids to date, but