The Hubble Mission Team has released another image of the space telescope's study of star formation. This image shows the dark cloud Lupus 3, a star-forming region about 500 light-years away. Lupus 3 contains bright young T-Tauri stars, and 2 hot young stars that are creating a beautiful nebula.
Back in 2014, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) captured an image of a young protoplanetary disk around a young star named HL Tauri. The image showed gaps and rings in the disk, substructures indicating that young planets forming there. This meant that planet formation began around young stars a lot sooner than thought. ALMA is continuing its investigation of protoplanetary disks in its ARKS survey (ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures).
Material science plays an absolutely critical role in space exploration. So when a new type of self-healing composite is announced, it’s worth a look–especially when the press release specifically calls out its ability to repair microtears associated with micrometeoroid impacts on satellites. It sounds like just such a composite material was recently invented at North Carolina State University - and it’s even already been spun out into a start-up company.
How can scientists estimate the pH level of Enceladus’ subsurface ocean without landing on its surface? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a team of scientists from Japan investigated new methods for sampling the plumes of Enceladus and provide more accurate measurements of its pH levels. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the subsurface ocean conditions on Enceladus and whether it’s suitable for life as we know it.
Newly developing stars shrouded in thick dust get their first baby pictures in these images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble took these infant star snapshots in an effort to learn how massive stars form. Protostars are shrouded in thick dust that blocks light, but Hubble can detect the near-infrared emission that shines through holes carved in the gas by the young stars themselves.
The Ring Nebula is a well-studied planetary nebula about 2,570 light-years away. Nnew observations of the nebula with a new instrument have revealed a previously unseen component. The William Herschel Telescope used its WEAVE instrument to detect a massive 'iron bar' inside the nebula's inner layer.
Astronomers at the University of Warwick have discovered that black holes don’t just consume matter—they manage it, choosing whether to blast it into space as high-speed jets or sweep it away in vast winds.
Hydrogen Cyanide, which is toxic, may have played an important role in the emergence of life. Its unique properties, especially in frigid environments in space, may have helped generate the complex molecules necessary for life to appear.
Deep beneath the surface of distant exoplanets known as super-Earths, oceans of molten rock may be doing something extraordinary: powering magnetic fields strong enough to shield entire planets from dangerous cosmic radiation and other harmful high-energy particles.
Humans have always been fascinated with space. We frequently question whether we are alone in the universe. If not, what does intelligent life look like? And how would aliens communicate?
The early stage of giant telescope development involves a lot of horse-trading to try to appease all the different stakeholders that are hoping to get what they want out of the project, but also to try to appease the financial managers that want to minimize its cost. Typically this horse-trading takes the form of a series of white papers that describe what would be needed to meet the stated objectives of the mission and suggest the type of instrumentation and systems that would be needed to achieve them. One such white paper was recently released by the Living Worlds Working Group, which is tasked with speccing out the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), one of the world’s premiere exoplanet hunting telescopes that is currently in the early development stage. Their argument in the paper, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that, in order to meet the objectives laid out in the recent Decadal survey that called for the telescope, it must have extremely high signal-to-noise ratio, but also be able to capture a very wide spectrum of light.
Inside the cores of ice giant planets, the pressure and temperature are so extreme that the water residing there transitions into a phase completely unfamiliar under the normal conditions of Earth. Known as “superionic water”, this form of water is a type of ice. However, unlike regular ice it’s actually hot, and also black. For decades, scientists thought that the superionic water in the core of Neptune and Uranus is responsible for the wild, unaligned magnetic fields that the Voyager 2 spacecraft saw when passing them. A series of experiments described in a paper published in Nature Communications by Leon Andriambariarijaona and his co-authors at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Sorbonne provides experimental evidence of why exactly the ice causes these weird magnetic fields - because it is far messier than anyone expected.
A new census of more than 8,000 galaxies finds active black holes rising in frequency with galaxy mass, jumping sharply in galaxies similar in mass to the Milky Way.
This collection of new images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope showcases protoplanetary disks, the swirling masses of gas and dust that surround forming stars, in both visible and infrared wavelengths. Through observations of young stellar objects like these, Hubble helps scientists better understand how stars form. These visible-light images depict dark, planet-forming dust disks […]
Young protostars populate the cloudy regions in the Orion Molecular Cloud complex in these images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Three of the telescope's new images are part of a scientific effort to understand the gaseous, dusty envelopes around protostars. Scientists know that these young stars have powerful stellar winds and jets that carve caverns and bubbles out of the surrounding gas, but they have unanswered questions about that process.
Additive Manufacturing, more commonly known as 3D printing, will be an absolutely critical technology for any long-term settlement on another world. Its ability to take a generic input, such as plastic strips or metal powder, and turn it into any shape of tool an astronaut will need is an absolute game changer. But the chemistry behind these technologies is complicated, and their applications are extremely varied, ranging from creating bricks for settlements to plastics for everything from cups to toothbrush holders. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Zane Mebruer and Wan Shou of the University of Arkansas, explores one specific aspect of a particularly important type of 3D printing, and realized that they could save millions of dollars on Mars missions by simply using the planet’s atmosphere to help print metal parts.
As NASA moves closer to launch of the Artemis II test flight, the agency soon will roll its SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft to the launch pad for the first time at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin final integration, testing, and launch rehearsals. NASA is targeting no earlier.
New research shows that complex life is unlikely to ever exist around cool, dim red dwarfs. About 33% of the Milky Way's stars are late M dwarfs, which are the smallest, coolest stars, and are the easiest stars to detect Earth-like planets around. The stars aren't bright enough for photosynthetic organisms to create a Great Oxygenation Event, which led to complex animal life here on Earth.
Every second, a trillion ghost particles stream through your body unnoticed, invisible messengers carrying secrets from the hearts of distant stars. Astrophysicists at the University of Copenhagen have now mapped exactly where these neutrinos originate across our Milky Way Galaxy and how many reach Earth, creating the most comprehensive picture yet of these elusive particles.
How solid is our understanding of exoplanet habitability? Are the ideas of an Optimistic Habitable Zone and a Conservative Habitable Zone sufficient to advance our understanding? New research introduces an expanded exoplanet 'temperate zone,' highlighting planets that are amenable to atmospheric study by the JWST.
Brief, brilliant flashes of blue light occasionally appear across the universe, burning hundreds of times brighter than ordinary supernovae before fading within days. Astronomers have puzzled over these luminous fast blue optical transients for years, unable to determine whether they were unusual stellar explosions or something else entirely. Observations of AT 2024wpp, the brightest example ever detected, have finally solved the mystery.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured stunning new image of HH 80/81, a pair of objects created when supersonic jets from a newborn star slam into previously expelled gas clouds, heating them to extreme levels. These jets, powered by a protostar 20 times more massive than our Sun, stretch over 32 light years through space and travel at speeds exceeding 1,000 kilometres per second, making them the fastest outflows ever recorded from a young star.
A disparate collection of young stellar objects bejewels a cosmic panorama in the star-forming region NGC 1333 in this new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. To the left, an actively forming star called a protostar casts its glow on the surrounding gas and dust, creating a reflection nebula. Two dark stripes on opposite sides […]
Betelgeuse is the star that everybody can't wait to see blow up, preferably sooner than later. That's because it's a red supergiant on the verge of becoming a supernova and there hasn't been one explode this close in recorded human history. It's been changing its brightness and showing strange surface behavior, which is why astronomers track its activity closely. Are these changes due to its aging process? Do they mean it's about to blow up? Probably not.
Mars Was Half Covered by an Ocean susannakohler33808 Mon, 01/12/2026 - 12:00 Mars Was Half Covered by an Ocean https://ift.tt/EW2pXgI
The oceans' check engine light is on and is starting to flash violently. For the eighth year in a row, the world’s oceans absorbed a record-breaking amount of heat in 2025. That means more powerful storms for us, and changing ocean chemistry that could spell the end for some living things.
Supernovae play a crucial role in the formation and evolution of new stars. But where they occur is nearly as important as when. A new study looks at where supernovae will occur in the Andromeda Galaxy, which will help astronomers understand the role of supernovae in more detail.
Gas and dust flowing from stars can, under the right conditions, clash with a star's surroundings and create a shock wave. Now, astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) have imaged a beautiful shock wave around a dead star—a discovery that has left them puzzled. According to all known mechanisms, the small, dead star RXJ0528+2838 should not have such a structure around it. This discovery, as enigmatic as it's stunning, challenges our understanding of how dead stars interact with their surroundings.
Combining data from different telescopes is one of the best ways to get a fuller picture of far-off objects. Because telescopes such as Hubble (visible light), the James Webb Space Telescope (infrared), and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (radio) each collect data in different wavelengths, they are able to capture distinct features of objects like galaxies that other telescopes cannot observe. A new paper by a large group of authors, headed by Andreas Faisst of Caltech, presented at the American Astronomical Society Meeting last week and published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement tracks eighteen early galaxies in as broad of a spectrum as those instruments can collect, and most significantly found that they seem to “grow up” faster than expected.
Beginning in the 1980’s, another physicist, Roger Penrose, came up with what he called the Triangle of Reality, which sounds like the nerdiest cult in history (and when later I get to talk about the Pythagoreans you’ll see that I’m right).
NASA has announced that it and SpaceX will return the Crew-11 mission team to Earth from the ISS (due to medical concerns with a crew member) no earlier than 5 p.m. EST (2 p.m. PST) on Wednesday, Jan. 14th.
Astronomers have uncovered a barred spiral galaxy that existed over 2 billion years after the Big Bang, potentially making it the earliest barred spiral galaxy ever observed.
Like, it shouldn’t be this easy. Yeah I know physics is kind of hard, and it has taken us centuries to reach our present level of knowledge, and we know we’re still a long way from complete knowledge of time and space.
Scientists are a step closer to solving one of the universe's biggest mysteries as new research finds evidence that dark matter and neutrinos may be interacting, offering a rare window into the darkest recesses of the cosmos.
One of the best things about being able to see thousands of exoplanetary systems is that we’re able to track them in different stages of development. Scientists still have so many questions about how planets form, and comparing notes between systems of different ages is one way to answer them. A new paper recently published in Nature by John Livingston of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and his co-authors details one particularly interesting system, known as V1298, which is only around 30 million years old, and hosts an array of four “cotton candy” planets, which represent some of the earliest stages of planet formation yet seen.
Imagine you walk into a parking lot full of cars. You have in your pocket one single key. It’s the key to your car. The same key you’ve always used, the same key you’ve always trusted, the same key that you always manage to realize that you’ve lost right when you’re rushing out the door.
The supermassive black hole in the Milky Way's galactic center, Sagittarius A-star, is known for being quiet and dim. But that wasn't always the case. The powerful XRISM x-ray telescope shows that it flared brightly at least once in the very recent past.
But we’re not going for one thing or another, are we? We’re here to explore ideas – that’s most of the fun anyway. And there’s one more aspect of physics that takes part in the free will discussion, and that’s the concept of emergence.
Mars has a curious past. Rovers have shown unequivocal evidence that liquid water existed on its surface, for probably at least 100 years. But climate models haven’t come up with how exactly that happened with what we currently understand about what the Martian climate was like back then. A new paper, published in the journal AGU Advances by Eleanor Moreland, a graduate student at Rice University, and her co-authors, has a potential explanation for what might have happened - liquid lakes on the Red Planet would have hid under small, seasonal ice sheets similar to the way they do in Antarctica on Earth.
All of physics rests on causal determinism. It’s like…how we do physics. It IS physics.
New research shows that Jupiter's moon Europa, one of the prime targets in the search for life, may not have the conditions required after all. The research shows that the moon lacks the type of active seafloor faulting needed to create habitability. Deep sea vents created by the faulting introduce nutrients into the water that organisms use to harness energy, and without those nutrients, the moon's subsurface ocean is likely dead.
A study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters demonstrates that decaying dark matter (DDM) can potentially be detected in unidentified X-ray emission lines in the spectra of galaxy clusters.
A new survey of K-type stars in the Sun's neighbourhood reveals important information about their ability to sustain their habitable zones. These stars are less massive, cooler, and dimmer than the Sun, but stay on the main sequence for many tens of billions of years. Their long lives can create the stable conditions necessary for life to develop on exoplanets.
Astronomers found a handful of unusual objects in JWST survey data. These 9 point sources are being called 'Astronomy's Platypus' because, like the animal, they seem to defy categorization. They're not like active galactic nuclei, and they're not like star-forming galaxies. What are they?
A team using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new type of astronomical object —a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud that is considered a “relic” or remnant of early galaxy formation. Nicknamed “Cloud-9,” this is the first confirmed detection of such an object in the Universe. The finding furthers the understanding of galaxy formation, the early Universe, and the nature of dark matter itself.
It feels like every week now we’re writing a new article about how 3I/ATLAS is not an alien technology. But it’s worth re-iterating, and perhaps taking a look at the methodology we used to prove that statement. A new paper, available in pre-print form on arXiv from Sofia Sheikh of the SETI Institute and her co-authors, details how one specific instrument - the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) - contributed to that effort.
Stars and planets are linked together in their formation, evolution, and even in their demises. But many of the details behind this are yet to be revealed. New research outlines an observing strategy that could uncover more critical details.
Without a better grasp of stellar flaring, our understanding of exoplanet habitability is at an impasse. Red dwarfs are the most numerous type of star in the galaxy, and they host many rocky exoplanets in their habitable zones. The problem is, they're known to flare so violently that it may negate their habitable zones. A group of researchers propose a new telescope designed solely to study stellar flaring.
There is a strong relation between the size of a galaxy's black hole and the motion of stars in the galaxy's core, known as the M-sigma relation. It turns out this relation doesn't work well for galaxies with ultramassive black holes.
arXiv:2512.15858v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite numerous search campaigns based on a diverse set of observational techniques, exomoons - prospective satellites of extrasolar planets - remain an elusive and hard-to-pin-down class of objects. Yet, the case for intensifying this search is compelling: as in the Solar System, moons can act as proxies for studying planet formation and evolution, provide direct clues as to the migration history of the planetary hosts and, in favourable cases...
The first results on the iconic active galactic nucleus MCG–6-30-15 captured with the XRISM mission show the most precise signatures yet of its supermassive black hole’s extreme gravity and the outflows that shape its galaxy.
