The James Webb Space Telescope observed a large amount of methane around 3I/ATLAS, revealing just how different it is from comets from our solar system. Continue ReadingInterstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is blasting out a bunch of methane. Here’s why that’s weird
Looking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column. June 4: Jupiter passes south of Pollux Now that the Red Planet is rising roughly an hour before the Sun, let’s check in on Mars in the predawn sky. The nearby world now has time to climb well above the horizon, leadingContinue reading “The Sky Today on Friday, June 5: Check in on Mars” The post The Sky Today on Friday, June Continue ReadingThe Sky Today on Friday, June 5: Check in on Mars
Friday, June 5Standing some 50° high in the south by 10 P.M. local daylight time, M5 is a fabulous globular cluster well within the reach of any instrument, from binoculars to telescopes. It is even visible to some observers without optical aid at all on a clear, dark night, so if your southern horizon isContinue reading “The Sky This Week from June 5 to 12: Jupiter and Venus meet” The post The Sky This Week Continue ReadingThe Sky This Week from June 5 to 12: Jupiter and Venus meet
NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this color-enhanced view of Jupiter’s northern hemisphere during its 61st close flyby of the giant planet on May 12, 2024.
Astronomers have developed a technique that allows them to detect cloud cycles on distant exoplanets. Using data from the James Webb Sapce Telescope (JWST), the astronomers found that mornings and evenings on the gas giant WASP-94A b have extremely different weather patterns: mornings are riddled with sand clouds, while the skies are clear in the early evenings. By isolating the clouds, researchers can more accurately measure a planet’s atmosphere and provide a clearer picture of the planet’s composition. WASP-94A b, for example, has much less oxygen and carbon than astronomers perviously calculated, making its atmosphere much more like Jupiter than they had originally thought.
Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in spacetime. Their first direct detection in 2015 marked a revolutionary moment in astronomy. Today, we have a thorough understanding of signals that travel far from their sources through quiet, nearly empty space, such as those emitted when black holes merge. In this case, the wave can be considered a minor disturbance on a silent background. The distinction between “background” and “wave” is clear, and the quantity measured by the detector—a tiny stretching and squeezing—is clearly determined.
Waterlogged land areas such as marshes, bogs and fens are the world’s largest natural source of methane. Even the smallest of wetlands emit this powerful greenhouse gas. In a study from The University of Texas at Austin, researchers have identified tens of millions of easily overlooked small wetlands across the globe and found that they have a substantial collective impact, accounting for 24% of the world’s total non-forested wetland emissions of methane. This research is published in Nature Climate Change.
Euclid space telescope observations of ancient globular cluster NGC 6397 reveal a subtle gap in brightness distribution of red dwarf stars. Continue ReadingGlittering star cluster image reveals missing patch of stars: ‘We were not looking for the gap, but we found it’
When an asteroid struck Earth about 66 million years ago, it ended the age of dinosaurs and transformed life across the planet. The effects of that catastrophe are visible in the fossil record on land, but scientists know far less about what happened to fishes in the seas during the first few million years after the extinction.
New research shows how unmagnetized worlds like Mars can still deflect some of the Sun’s solar wind. Unlike magnetospheres that form around planet’s like Earth, this effect takes place in Mars’ ionosphere. It’s called the Zwan-Wolf effect, and it’s not clear how deep into the atmosphere it operates.
A deep partial lunar eclipse on August 27-28, 2026, will be visible in North America and will be the best lunar eclipse anywhere on Earth until New Year’s Eve 2028. Continue ReadingAugust 2026 lunar eclipse: Everything you need to know about the 96% ‘blood moon’
Marco Wong, taken from Sussex, U.K. The Milky Way’s bright star fields and dense dust lanes arch above the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head and the English Channel in this wide-field nightscape. The photographer used a Canon DSLR and a 28mm f/1.4 lens to take a tracked vertical panorama of five panels of stacked skyContinue reading “Milky Way over Beachy Head” The post Milky Way over Beachy Head appeared first on Astronomy Magazine. Continue ReadingMilky Way over Beachy Head
An artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander on the surface of the Moon. Graphic: Blue Origin In the wake of the catastrophic explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, NASA wants to find an alternative launcher for the first of the company’s Blue Moon landers. In an interview with FOX Business on Thursday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman described a “whole of government response” to the May 28 incident, which badly Continue ReadingNASA head urges new launcher for Blue Origin’s moon landers to meet Artemis mission deadlines
More than 50 new Starlink satellites are now in orbit after launches from California and Florida. Continue ReadingSpaceX launches back-to-back Starlink missions from both coasts 19 hours apart (photos)
NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft was in excellent shape when it disappeared behind Mars on December 6 of last year. The routine passage, called an occultation, was supposed to last less than an hour, but ground teams didn’t hear from the spacecraft when it was supposed to regain contact with Earth. The loss of communication triggered contingency plans for engineers to try to restore a link with MAVEN, which orbits Mars more than 200 million miles from Earth. To no avail, they listened for faint signals and uplinked commands in the blind. Hopes of saving the mission faded over time, and NASA Continue ReadingAfter 11 years at Mars, NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft went out with a whisper
The most distant, nearly invisible dormant black hole has been detected and “weighed” by an international team of astronomers that includes researchers from UCL. The study, published in Science, identified a dormant black hole at the heart of a galaxy known as MRG-M0138 located over 10 billion light years away. It is the most distant dormant black hole yet detected, 15 times farther away than the previous record.
Scientists using the Euclid space telescope found a red-dwarf brightness “gap” in the population of a globular cluster—an ancient, crowded collection of stars. A similar gap was detected by the Gaia observatory in nearby stellar populations, but it has never before been seen in a globular cluster.
By the power of… what the hell is that? If you thought the patrons of the Mos Eisley Cantina were strange, they’ve got nothing on He-Man and Skeletor’s entourages. Continue Reading12 of the weirdest ‘Masters of the Universe’ characters
Electrons around Jupiter have been caught in the process of being accelerated, revealing a potentially unified mechanism for particle acceleration. The findings, published in Nature, may help constrain how energetic particles are produced throughout the universe.
A chemical engineer noticed that the spectra of the hazy atmosphere of mini-Neptune planets looked like the soot produced by combustion engines. Continue ReadingMost exoplanets might be ‘soot factories,’ scientists say: ‘Like you have a natural diesel engine’
