Astronomers Identify an Object that Defies Astrophysics

Betelgeuse Isn't Alone. It Has A Very Dim Companion

Astronomers have discovered a companion star in an incredibly tight orbit around Betelgeuse using the NASA and U.S. National Science Foundation-funded ‘Alopeke' instrument on Gemini North, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the NSF and operated by NSF NOIRLab. This discovery answers the longstanding mystery of the star’s varying brightness and provides insight into the physical mechanisms behind other variable red supergiants.

New Horizons Could Find Its Way to Proxima Centauri if it Wanted

The New Horizons spacecraft is humanity's fastest-moving spacecraft and headed to interstellar space. Since its exploration of Pluto 10 years ago and subsequent flyby of Arrokoth in 2019, it's been traversing and studying the Kuiper Belt while looking for other flyby objects. That's not all it's been doing, however. New Horizons also has an extended program of making heliophysics observations. The mission science team has also planned astrophysical studies with the spacecraft's instruments. Those include measuring the intensity of the cosmic optical background and taking images of stars such as Proxima Centauri. As the spacecraft moves, the apparent positions of its stellar navigation targets have changed, but that hasn't bothered New Horizons one bit. It knows exactly where it is thanks to 3D observations of those nearby stars.

Are the JWST's Little Red Dots Actually Supermassive Black Hole Seeds?

What are the JWST's Little Red Dots? While they appear to be galaxies, there's no observational certainty. New research examines the idea that they're actually stars, suggesting that they're actually the progenitors for supermassive black holes.

How To Detect Magnetic Fields Around Exoplanets

Magnetic fields play an important, if sometimes underappreciated, part in planetary systems. Without a strong magnetic field, planets can end up as a barren wasteland like Mars, or they could indirectly affect massive storms as can be seen on Jupiter. However, our understanding of planetary magnetic fields are limited to the eight planets in our solar system, as we haven’t yet accrued much data on the magnetic fields of exoplanets. That could be about to change, according to a new preprint paper by a group of research scientists from Europe, the US, India and the UAE.

Scientists are Planning for Life After Finding Aliens

Just imagine it, the news stories are all over your phone when you wake! The day will surely come that we will discover that we are not alone in the Universe! What happens the day after though? A new research paper from the SETI Post Detection Hub at the University of St Andrews tackles this question, outlining how NASA and the global scientific community should prepare for the moment humanity detects signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Cold Weather Alloy Opens New Possibilities for Space Technology

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough that could revolutionise space exploration with a "smart" metal alloy that remembers its shape even in the bone chilling cold of outer space. This remarkable copper based material can be twisted and deformed when cold, then automatically snap back to its original form when heated, maintaining this mechanical "memory" at temperatures as extreme as -200°C. The discovery solves a critical challenge that has limited spacecraft design for decades, opening the door to more reliable satellites, space telescopes, and future missions to the frozen reaches of our Solar System and beyond.

Seeing the Exact Moment When New Planets Started Forming

Astronomers have seen exoplanetary systems at almost every stage, from extremely young to older than the Solar System. But now, they've spotted the exact moment when planet formation is initiated around a young star. Meteorites store a history of when the first minerals formed in the Solar System, and the ALMA telescope has seen the signal of these minerals forming in a protostellar system, about 1,300 light-years from Earth.

How Star Clusters Age: The Pleiades, the Hyades, and the Orion Nebula Cluster

Astronomers found evolutionary links that connect three well-known star clusters. The Orion Nebular Cluster, the Pleiades, and the Hyades are located roughly in the same region in space, but have different ages. New research shows that they're connected and have similar origins.

Lunar Regolith is a Surprisingly Good Resource for Supporting a Lunar Station

Lunar regolith is the crushed up volcanic rock that buries the surface of the Moon. Remote observations and sample analysis have shown there are trace amounts of water ice mixed in with the regolith, which can be extracted. By mixing this water with CO2 exhaled by astronauts, scientists have demonstrated this can be turned into hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. This can then be turned into fuels and oxygen to support the astronauts. Everything we need is there on the Moon. We just need to learn how to use it.

Deepening stirling engine analysis: optimized model offers more accurate performance predictions

A Chinese team presents a new model for accurately predicting the performance of Sterling engines, which are being investigated as a possible means of powering

Astronomers Spot Unusual Magnetic Field Around A Massive Young Protostar

This Ancient Pristine Galaxy Validates the Big Bang

If astronomers can find ancient, pristine galaxies with no metals, they will confirm our understanding of the Big Bang. Those galaxies have proven elusive, but a team of astronomers think they've found one. It may be the first Population 3 galaxy.

Gemini North Sees Brightening Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS in Detail

We’re getting better views of interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS, as it makes its speedy passage through the inner solar system. This week, astronomers at the Gemini North observatory located on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i turned the facility’s enormous 8.1-meter telescope on the object, with amazing results.

Watch the Moon Occult the Pleiades for North America on the Morning of July 20th

There’s a good reason for sky watchers to set their alarms this coming Sunday morning. If skies are clear, viewers across most of North America will have a rare chance to see the waning crescent Moon occult (pass in front of) the Pleiades open star cluster.

What has Webb Taught Us About Rocky Exoplanets So Far?

The JWST has pushed the boundaries of exoplanet characterization. But one thing it hasn't done yet is to determine if rocky exoplanets close to our Solar System can retain their atmospheres. The authors of a new study propose a new "five-scale height challenge" that will help astronomers obtain more precise atmospheric information on rocky exoplanets using Webb.

The Most Massive Black Hole Merger Ever

Astronomers using the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA gravitational wave detectors announced the most massive black hole merger ever seen. Two black holes crashed together, producing a final black hole with approximately 225 times the mass of the Sun. Designated GW231123, it was detected during the 2023 observing run, and appears to be from the collision of 100- and 140-stellar-mass black holes. Black holes this massive are hard to get through standard stellar evolution, but could be the results of previous mergers.

Supernova Cinematography: How NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Will Create a Movie of Exploding Stars

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope isn't due to launch until May 2027, but astronomers are preparing for its science operations by running simulated operations. One of those involves supernovae, massive stars the end their lives in gargantuan explosions. Research shows that the Roman could find 100,000 supernovae in one of its surveys.

This Planet's Death Spiral Could Teach Us A Lesson About Rocky Exoplanets

Macquarie University astronomers have tracked an extreme planet's orbital decay, confirming it is spiraling toward its star in a cosmic death dance that could end in three possible ways. It could cross the Roche line and be torn apart, it could plunge to destruction in its star, or it could be stripped all the way down to a rocky core.

To Find Another Earth, We Need to Understand Atmospheric Escape

Atmospheric escape shapes an exoplanet's future. Earth's exosphere is extended and detectable due to ocean-related atmospheric escape. If we can detect the same features on an exoplanet, it could suggest oceans and habitability. But we need to build the Habitable Worlds Observatory first.

Newly-Discovered Interstellar Comet is Billions of Years Older Than the Solar System

All eyes are on the newly discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, currently inbound to the inner solar system. Initial observations have revealed that it's rich in water ice, and it's believed that it originated from the Milky Way's thick disk, ancient stars that orbit above and below the galactic plane. This could mean that 3I/ATLAS is billions of years older than the Solar System, the oldest comet ever discovered. It should reveal more as it heats up and outgasses as it gets closer to the Sun.

A Lunar Base Could Start with a Dome over a Crater Made of Regolith

When astronauts live on the Moon permanently, they're going to need a safe habitat, ideally made out of local construction material. A new paper suggests that lunar astronauts could cover a 17-meter crater with a dome made from a lunar regolith-based geopolymer. A 3D printer would extrude a paste made of lunar regolith that would be sintered together into the shape of the dome. This would provide protection from radiation and could even maintain a pressurized habitat.

This Earth-sized Exoplanet is On a Death Spiral

An international team of astronomers have discovered an Earth-size exoplanet on a very tight orbit around its star. It completes an orbit in only 5 hours and 22 minutes. Unfortunately, the planet will either be torn to pieces or crash into its star in about 31 million years.

The Milky Way Could be Surrounded by 100 Satellite Galaxies

The Milky Way is surrounded by about 60 satellite galaxies. The famous ones are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. But according to a new simulation, the Milky Way could have 80 and even 100 satellite galaxies that we haven't detected so far. These galaxies will be hard to find. They've had most of their mass stripped by the gravity of the Milky Way's halo. But new telescopes like Vera Rubin should be able to spot them.

A Solar Gravitational Lens Telescope Is The Only Feasible Way To Get High Resolution Pictures Of A Habitable Exoplanet

Sometimes in order to support an idea, you first have to discredit alternative, competing ideas that could take resources away from the one you care about. In the scientific community, one of the most devastating ways you can do that is by making the other methods appear to be too expensive to be feasible, or, better yep, prove they wouldn’t work at all due to some fundamental limitation. That is what a recent paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev, the world’s most prominent proponent of a Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) telescope mission, does. He examines how effective alternative telescope technologies would be at creating a 10x10 pixel map of an exoplanet about 32 light years away. Unsurprisingly, there’s only one that is able to do so without giant leaps and bounds in technology development - the SGL telescope.

Scientists Unlock Secrets of Matter Under Extreme Conditions

Scientists have recreated the universe's first moments by smashing atomic nuclei together at near-light speeds, generating temperatures 1,000 times hotter than the Sun's core and briefly forming the same "soup" of fundamental particles that existed microseconds after the Big Bang. In this groundbreaking research, heavy particles act like tiny cosmic detectives, moving through this primordial matter and revealing how the chaotic early universe transformed into the structured reality we see today. By understanding how these massive particles behave under the most extreme conditions imaginable, researchers are essentially reading the universe's origin story written in the language of fundamental physics.

A Few Bright Buildings Light Up the Entire Night Sky

A 14year study of Hong Kong's Earth Hour participation has revealed that it's not the millions of apartment windows or office buildings that steal our night sky, but rather a small handful of brightly lit skyscrapers and LED advertising boards that have an outsized impact on darkness above cities. When these decorative lights and digital screens go dark, the night sky becomes up to 50% darker, offering a hopeful new strategy for tackling light pollution without requiring massive citywide changes. Could this be he the change that dramatically improve night sky visibility for stargazers, wildlife, and anyone hoping to reconnect with the the night sky above our urban landscapes?

Magnets Could Become the Next Generation of Gravitational Wave Detectors

When Einstein's predicted ripples in spacetime pass through magnetic fields, they cause the current carrying wires to dance at the gravitational wave frequency, creating potentially detectable electrical signals. Researchers have discovered that the same powerful magnets used to hunt for dark matter could double as gravitational wave detectors. This means experiments already searching for the universe's most elusive particles could simultaneously capture collisions between black holes and neutron stars, getting two of physics' most ambitious experiments for the price of one, while potentially opening entirely new windows into the universe's most violent events.

Hubble Images Used to Create a Beautiful Portrait of the Abell 209 Galaxy Cluster

Portrait of a galaxy cluster

Funding Astrobiology Challenges Can Bring Us Closer To Understanding the Origins of Life

Astrobiology can be split into two very distinct fields. There’s the field that astronomers are likely more familiar with, involving large telescopes, exoplanets, and spectroscopic signals that are pored over to debate whether they show signs of life. But there is another camp, collective known as the Origins researchers that focus on developing a scientific understanding of how life originally developed on Earth. A new paper from Cole Mathis at Arizona State and Harrison B. Smith at the Institute of Science in Tokyo suggests a new path forward to tackling those challenges - set them up as competitions and let a hefty prize motivate scientific teams and individuals to pursue them.

Ancient Rivers in Noachis Terra Reveal Mars' Long-Lived Wet Past

In the last couple of decades, evidence has accumulated showing that ancient Mars was a warm planet with abundant water flowing across its surface. The more scientists study the planet, the more evidence they find. New research examining Mars' Noachis Terra region adds to this evidence, showing that flowing water was once widespread across this less-often studied region.

Spotting New Interstellar Comet C/2025 N1 ATLAS

It’s the question of the hour. On the first day of the month July 1st, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) station at Río Hurtado, Chile spotted an interstellar interloper, which would receive the official designation C/2025 N1 ATLAS or 3I/ATLAS. The ‘I’ is a rare ‘interstellar’ designation, only the third such object known of after 1I/ʻOumuamua and 2/I Borisov. But can we see it? Such a spectacle as actually seeing an interstellar comet would be a true rarity to cross off your skywatching life list.

Observing the Dark Ages of the Universe from the Far Side of the Moon

Shortly after the Big Bang, after the CMB was released, there was a time that's tricky to observe called Cosmic Dark Ages. Clouds of hydrogen could be detected at that time using a specific frequency of radio waves, but Earth's radiation introduces too much noise. Researchers are proposing a CubeSat called Cosmo Cube that could orbit the Moon, observing when it's in the quiet radio shadow cast by the Moon. It could help detect the first structures coming together, leading to the formation of the first galaxies.

Binary Stars Out of Sync: One Hosts a Giant Planet, While its Companion is Still Forming Planet

A team of international researchers led by Tomas Stolker in the Netherlands has imaged a young gas giant exoplanet near a 12-million-year-old star. The planet is orbiting a star whose planet formation has finished, while a same-aged companion star in this double star system still has a planet-forming disk.

Where Does Cosmic Dust Come From? The JWST Provides an Answer

Cosmic dust does far more than float through space. It's the raw material from which stars, planets and possibly even life emerge. Yet astronomers have long puzzled over where this vast amount of dust comes from and what it's made of.

Giant Liquid Mirrors Could Revolutionise the Hunt for Habitable Worlds

A team of researchers has cracked the code for building space telescopes with mirrors the size of a soccer field, not from perfectly figured glass, but from liquid floating in zero gravity! The new research reveals how a 50-metre liquid mirror telescope could maintain its optical quality for decades despite the constant slewing motions needed to observe different stars, with deformations taking years to propagate from the edges toward the centre. The idea could enable the next generation of space telescopes capable of directly imaging Earth-like planets around other stars, potentially answering the ultimate question: are we alone in the universe?

NASA's Future Telescope Could Solve the Mystery of Life's Origins

A team of scientists are preparing to use NASA's upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory to answer one of the most profound questions of all time: How does life begin? Rather than searching for individual signs of life, the team plan to study patterns across dozens of exoplanets to test competing theories about the origins of life; from scenarios where life is so rare we might be alone within 33 light-years, to theories predicting that life emerges wherever basic conditions exist. This approach could transform perhaps our oldest question into testable science, potentially revealing whether our biosphere is an accident or part of a universe teeming with life.

This Planet Makes Its Star Flare and the Planet Suffers Because Of It

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of exoplanets on extremely short orbits of less than 10 days. Our Solar System has nothing like this, and these planets are so close to their stars that they can disrupt the stars' magnetic fields. Scientists think this can induce stellar flaring, and researchers have detected the first example of exoplanet-induced stellar flaring.

Finding An Ocean On An Exoplanet Would Be Huge and the Habitable Worlds Observatory Could Do It

The search for habitable exoplanets boils down to the search for water. Exoplanet scientists lack the technological capability to detect surface water on exoplanets from great distances, so instead they can only search for planets in habitable zones where surface water is likely. But what if we could directly detect the surface water itself?

High Frequency Gravitational Waves Could Be Detect By Changing The Angle Of A Mirror

Gravitational waves come in all shapes and sizes - and frequencies. But, so far, we haven’t been able to capture any of the higher frequency ones. That’s unfortunate, as they might hold the key to unlocking our understanding of some really interesting physical phenomena, such as Boson clouds and tiny block hole mergers. A new paper from researchers at Notre Dame and Caltech, led by PhD student Christopher Jungkind, explores how we might use one of the world’s most prolific gravitational wave observatories, GEO600, to capture signals from those phenomena for the first time.

How the Chemistry of Mars Both Extended and Ended Its Habitability

NASA's Curiosity Rover has been exploring Gale Crater and found that carbonate materials make up to 11% of rocks in the region. These are important because carbonates formed by pulling CO2 out of Mars's atmosphere. A new paper suggests that Mars once had a self-regulating climate system that created oases of liquid water on its surface over billions of years, keeping the planet barely habitable with alternating wet and dry periods. The atmosphere is thin because its CO2 was locked away in rocks.

What if you Threw a Paper Airplane from the Space Station?

Here's a thought experiment. What would happen if you were on the International Space Station, folded up a paper airplane, and threw it from the station? According to a new paper, it would fall from orbit in just 3.5 days, but still keep aerodynamic stability until about 120 km. Then it would heat up and combust at about 90-110 km altitude. It's a fun idea, but there are actual practical uses to probe the density of the atmosphere or test thin-film space technologies.

Quaoar's Atmosphere Doesn't Exist And Its Rings Shouldn't

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can tell us a lot about the subjects of its observations if it spends enough time with them. That includes lonely rocks on the edges of our solar system, such as the Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) Quaoar. Recent observations using the NIRCam on JWST and pre-published on arXiv by researchers at the University of Central Florida, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Kyoto University add a plethora of new data to our understanding of this enigmatic object, including insights into what might be causing its ring system and its hydrocarbon atmosphere.

Globular Clusters: The Vera Rubin Observatory is Just Getting Started

The long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory has delivered some preliminary observations of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae field. 47 Tuc is the Milky Way's second-brightest globular cluster, second to Omega Centauri. The Rubin Observatory's data demonstrates the telescope's promising scientific potential.

The JWST Shows Us How Galaxies Evolve

The Milky Way and other similar galaxies have two distinct disk sections. One is the thin disk section, and it contains mostly younger stars with higher metallicity. The second is the thick disk, and it contains older stars with lower metallicity. The effort to study these disks in more galaxies and in greater detail has been stymied. But now we have the JWST, and researchers used it to examine more than 100 distant, edge-on galaxies.

When Theia Struck Earth, it Helped Set the Stage for Life to Appear

Earth life is carbon-based, and without carbon, there would be no life. New research shows how Earth got its carbon from impactors, including a boost from Theia, the impactor that created the Moon. Jupiter also pitched in to help.

Primordial Black Holes Could Have Accelerated Early Star Formation

The search for dark matter requires all of the best models, theories, and ideas we can throw at it. A new paper from Julia Monika Koulen, Stefano Profumo, and Nolan Smyth from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) tackles the implications of the sizes and abundance of one of the more interesting dark matter candidates - primordial black holes (PBHs).

How To Use Fusion To Get To Proxima Centauri's Potentially Habitable Exoplanet

Proxima Centauri b is the closest known exoplanet that could be in the habitable zone of its star. Therefore, it has garnered a lot of attention, including several missions designed to visit it and send back information. Unfortunately, due to technological constraints and the gigantic distances involved, most of those missions only weigh a few grams and require massive solar scales or pushing lasers to get anywhere near their target. But why let modern technological levels limit your imagination when there are so many other options, if still theoretical, options to send a larger mission to our nearest potentially habitable neighbor? That was the thought behind the Master’s Thesis of Amelie Lutz at Virginia Tech - she looked at the possibility of using fusion propulsion systems to send a few hundred kilogram probe to the system, and potentially even orbit it.

Reviving SETI with High-Energy Astronomy

What new methods can be developed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? This is what a recent white paper submitted to the 2025 NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) Request for Information (RFI) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the Breakthrough Listen project and Michigan State University discussed how high-energy astronomy could be used for identifying radio signals from an extraterrestrial technological civilization, also called technosignatures. This study has the potential to help SETI and other organizations develop novel techniques for finding intelligent life beyond Earth.

Webb Refines the Bullet Cluster's Mass

One of the most iconic cosmic scenes in the Universe lies nearly 3.8 billion light-years away from us in the direction of the constellation Carina. This is where two massive clusters of galaxies have collided. The resulting combined galaxies and other material is now called the Bullet Cluster, after one of the two members that interacted over several billion years. It's one of the hottest-known galaxy clusters, thanks to clouds of gas that were heated by shockwaves during the event. Astronomers have observed this scene with several different telescopes in multiple wavelengths of light, including X-ray and infrared. Those observations and others show that the dark matter makes up the majority of the cluster's mass. Its gravitational effect distorts light from more distant objects and makes it an ideal gravitational lens.