Did icy comets deliver water to the young Earth? That idea won't go away. Now, astronomers at Lund University in Sweden have found evidence of exocomets orbiting a young star named PDS 70. The observations suggest that these comets are delivering water to that system's inner regions.
What used to be a rare sight gracing the twilight sky is now becoming strangely commonplace. If you live on either U.S. coast, you have to good chance at seeing what’s become a common sky scene in our modern technocene era: a space launch jellyfish.
We know the universe is constantly expanding. We also know that gravitationally bound objects, such as solar systems and black holes, seem to be immune to that expansion. But a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by theoretical physicists Valerio Faraoni and Massimiliano Rinaldi challenges that assumption. They suggest that black holes can’t just ignore the expanding universe around them. Instead they have to expand along with it.
Say what you want about the changes to the space industry that’s happened over the past 10-20 years, but one thing is for certain - there are a lot more people that have access to space now than there ever has been before. Some of them have some absolutely crazy stories about how they got there, and plenty of those have written their own books about their experiences, before, during, and after their flight. Add to that list A Heart for Space by Dr. Eiman Jahangir - a cardiologist that officially became an astronaut when he crossed the Kármán line on a Blue Origin flight in August 2024. But the story of how an Iranian-American cardiologist made it all the way to space has lessons for anyone that hopes to follow in his footsteps.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again - space is hard. Another example, albeit lacking in the destructive displays of some past examples, is China’s recent delay of its Chang’e-7 lunar mission. The agency announced the mission would miss its late-August launch window with a very brief press release from the China National Space Administration and the China Manned Space Engineering Office. While that means a slight delay in China’s plan for the Moon, it’s only a matter of time before the cornerstone of the robotic lunar exploration program is back on the launch pad.
A new image from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory offers a spectacularly deep view into a famous region of sky known as the COSMOS field.
Gaia has discovered three stellar mass black holes, each with a small stellar companion. For two of these systems the companions orbit closer that we would expect. Just how these systems form is a bit of a mysteries, but there are clues.
