Friday, May 15, 2026

Bizarre Venus Surface Formations Puzzle Planetary Scientists

Venus image made with data made available by NASA shows the planet  from the Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Enigmatic crownlike surface formations on Venus hold keys to understanding our twin planet’s deep interior. Or so says a new paper presented at the recent European Geosciences Union 2026 general assembly in Vienna.



Turbulence in the Milky Way's ISM Distorts Light from Distant Quasars

The left-hand side of this artist's illustration shows the distant quasar TXS 2005+403 as it really appears, with its bright accretion disk and its powerful astrophysical jets blasting radiation into the cosmos. The right-hand side shows how intervening turbulent gas blurs and distorts the light. New research has figured out exactly how that turbulence affects images of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole. Image Credit: Melissa Weiss/CfA

We may be getting better images of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole in the future. Astronomers used 10 years of observations of a distant blazar to detect turbulence in the Milky Way's interstellar medium. This turbulence makes images of Sagittarius A-star blurry.



NASA Captures Volatile Changes in Earth's Artificial Light

Some parts of the planet are shown to brighten (gold) and some dim (purple) in an analysis of nearly a decade of nighttime lights data from NASA's Black Marble product. NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

A study of NASA's Black Marble data reveals a pattern of regional volatility in nighttime illumination across the planet.



Thursday, May 14, 2026

We've Been Listening for Ten Years. Here's What We Heard

A study has listened to 70,000 stars and planetary systems for signs of life! (Credit : ESO/Y. Beletsky)

For ten years, astronomers at UCLA have been pointing one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes at the stars and listening. Not for pulsars or gas clouds, or the hiss of the cosmic microwave background, but for something far more extraordinary. A signal from another civilisation. The result of a decade's work, 70,000 stars, and 100 million candidate signals is now in and every single one of them was us! But far from being a disappointment, the findings are among the most rigorous and revealing in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.



UC Student Gets a Closer Look at Lonely Gas Giant

Artist's rendering of the exoplanet TOI-2031A b, a "Hot Jupiter" 901 light-years from Earth. Credit: NASA

University of Cincinnati astrophysicist Paul Smith is part of an international team studying TOI-2031Ab, a gas giant orbiting a star 901 light years from Earth. Smith and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope to study its atmosphere.



The Roman Space Telescope is Ahead of Schedule, and the Hubble is Giving it a Jump Start

This is a near-infrared image from the ground-based VISTA VVV Survey.  It shows the Milky Way's galactic bulge, with the location of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey superimposed over the regions the Hubble surveyed with its instruments. The Hubble's survey was completed in order to give astronomers a leg up in understanding and interpreting the Roman's results. Image Credit: NASA, Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Acknowledgment: VISTA, Dante Minniti (UNAB), Ignacio Toledo (ALMA), Martin Kornmesser (ESO)

One of the core community surveys of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, is expected to locate over a thousand exoplanets that orbit far away from their stars, beyond the orbital distance of Earth from the Sun. Although Roman hasn’t launched yet, astronomers already are gathering useful supporting data by utilizing NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which could assist astronomers in analyzing Roman data.



We've Been Wasting 99% of Our Supernova Data

SN 1994D (bright spot on the lower left), a Type Ia supernova within its host galaxy, NGC 4526 (Credit : NASA/ESA)

Every time an astronomer points a telescope at a distant supernova, they're trying to measure how far away it is. But the light from these stellar explosions arrives tangled up with interference from dust, the age of the host galaxy and the chemical make up of the original star . Unpicking it all has always been a painstaking business. Now a team of researchers has used artificial intelligence to cut through the noise in a single step, potentially making cosmological measurements four times more precise. In a universe full of unanswered questions, that's a very significant leap forward.