University of Warwick astronomers have discovered an extremely rare, high-mass, compact binary star system only ~150 light years away. These two stars are on a collision course to explode as a type 1a supernova, appearing 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky.
A huge asteroid that was briefly feared to strike Earth now has a nearly 4% chance of smashing into the moon, according to new data from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Though wildly different in so many ways, Earth and Saturn’s moon Titan have something important in common. Among all the objects in the solar system, they’re the only two with liquids on their surfaces. There are parallels in how the liquids move in cycles on both worlds and a new mission proposal outlines how we can understand Titan better by studying these parallel processes.
A Michigan State University researcher saw X-rays coming from a black hole using the NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory telescope.
Sometimes, the best way to learn how to do something is just to do it. That is especially true if you’re learning to do something using a specific methodology. And in some cases, the outcome of your efforts is something that’s interesting to other people.
How can Uranus be used to indirectly study its moons and identify if they possess subsurface oceans? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated using passive radar sounding methods from Uranus to study its five largest moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of Uranus and its largest moons despite a spacecraft not currently visiting Uranus.
An international study led by the University of Eastern Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Institute has demonstrated that the formation and properties of lower-atmosphere clouds are highly sensitive to changes in atmospheric aerosol concentrations.
What are the dangers of going to space?
The great Russian physicist and Nobel laureate Lev Landau once remarked that “cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.” In studying the history of the universe itself, there is always a chance that we have got it all wrong, but we never let this stand in the way of our inquiries.
The same dirt that clings to astronauts’ boots may one day keep their lights on. In a study published in Device, researchers created solar cells made out of simulated moon dust. The cells convert sunlight into energy efficiently, withstand radiation damage, and mitigate the need for transporting heavy materials into space, offering a potential solution to one of space exploration’s biggest challenges: reliable energy sources.
A research team, led by Professor Sung-Deuk Choi from the Department of Civil, Urban, Earth, and Environmental Engineering at UNIST, has developed a novel assessment technique to accurately identify the sources and spatial-temporal distribution of atmospheric mercury. The study has been published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
A massive wave of solar wind that squished Jupiter’s protective bubble has been detected for the first time.
The Webb Space Telescope has captured pictures of the asteroid that caused a stir earlier this year when it topped Earth’s hit list.
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, which includes researchers from the University of Toronto, recently produced the clearest images yet of the universe’s infancy from the earliest cosmic time accessible to humans.
A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. There are two main types of black hole; stellar mass and supermassive black holes, and they differ in size, formation, and impact on their host galaxy. Stellar mass black holes, a few to dozens of times the mass of the sun, form from collapsing massive stars. Supermassive black holes, on the other hand, are millions to billions of times more massive and tend to live in the center of galaxies and grow through accretion and mergers.
A launch date is set for the first batch of what will be thousands of satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper as the company looks to play catch-up with SpaceX and its Starlink internet constellation.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently turned its watchful eye toward asteroid 2024 YR4, which we now know poses no significant threat to Earth in 2032 and beyond.
While life on Earth has been dramatic enough lately, there’s also been an unusual amount of news from space in the early months of 2025. So far, debris from SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets has landed in locations including the Bahamas, Florida, Poland, and Turks and Caicos and caused flight delays at airports in Florida. On February 18, NASA estimated that asteroid 2024 YR4 had a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032—the highest probability of impact ever recorded by the agency—although they later reduced that estimate to 0.004%.
Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius C stellar nursery in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has revealed ejections from still-forming protostars and insights into the impact of strong magnetic fields on interstellar gas and the life cycle of stars.
Sagittarius C is one of the most extreme environments in the Milky Way galaxy. This cloudy region of space sits about 200 light-years from the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Here, a massive and dense cloud of interstellar gas and dust has collapsed on itself over millions of years to form thousands of new stars.
