On The Hunt For Cosmic Dawn And The Universe’s Very First Stars

After decades of searches, cosmologists are within reach of finding cosmic dawn. A longtime observational cosmologist explains.

David Kipping Has a New Take on the Existence of Advanced Life in the Universe... and the Numbers are Not Encouraging!

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2606.04044

This is How Supermassive Black Holes Feed Themselves

Astronomers may have found the missing link in the SMBH feeding process. New observations with the JWST show that a galaxy's circumnuclear disk, which feeds gas into its black hole, is connected to a much larger network of filaments. Cool gas flows through these filaments into the SMBH's sphere of influence.

Astronomers Find a Four-Carbon Sugar in Deep Space

The space between stars may seem like a barren desert, but over the past few decades scientists have been finding all sorts of interesting chemicals in it. From the precursors to proteins to the building blocks of cell membranes, there has been discovery after discovery of new molecules in the giant gas clouds between the stars. Now, a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv details the discovery of the first ever four-carbon sugar in the Interstellar Medium (ISM), and it is another brick on the path to understanding how life on Earth first developed.

Orbiting Stars Give Clues to a Quiescent Black Hole's Mass

How do you measure the mass of a dormant black hole in the early Universe? That's a question astronomers at University College London (UCL) and Carnegie scientists wanted to answer about a distant object that is invisible. So, they turned to James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) studies of the region around the black hole to find that answer.

Neptune’s Weirdest Moon Nereid Might Be the Lone Survivor of an Ancient "Moonpocalypse"

Neptune is definitely the odd one out of the gas giants. It’s tilted at a strange angle, and its moons are completely different from any other gas giant we know of. A new paper, published in Science Advances from researchers at CalTech, posits that might be because Triton, by far Neptune’s largest moon, absolutely obliterated the regular moon system it previously had, except for one particular exception - Nereid.

Space Telescopes Are Now Overwhelmed by Satellite Trails

Unfortunately there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.