NewZinoo: Universe Today latest news

Tech - Universe Today - 7 hours ago

Nearby Dwarf Galaxies Show Surprising Lack Of Oxygen, Says Paper

A new study of more than three dozen dwarf galaxies has surprised researchers with just how little oxygen they have been able to retain over cosmic time. The results reveal that we still have major gaps in our understanding of galaxy evolution.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Our Sun’s Undiscovered Stellar Nemesis Is Still Out There, Says Physicist

The decades old idea that our solar system’s Oort Cloud is continually perturbed by a heretofore undetected low mass Red Dwarf star remains the best explanation for periodicities found in Earth’s impact record. Or so says a well known physicist who has long championed this idea.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

The ELT Can Probe Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies and Their Dark Matter Mysteries

Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies are strange because they're as large as the Milky Way, but have far fewer stars. It's as if they're puffed up for some reason. Determining what's going on with them could help confirm the Lambda-CDM model. A new proposed instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope could give astronomers their best look yet at these strange galaxies.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

NASA's Twin Spacecraft Will Execute Powered Slingshot Maneuvers on Their Way to Mars

NASA's ESCAPADE mission features a pair of identical spacecraft on their way to Mars. They launched outside of the normal launch window, so they'll perform powered slingshot maneuvers to boost their speed. Once there, they'll "fly" in formation and study how the solar wind interacts with what remains of Mars ancient magnetosphere.

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

Earth's Gravity May Have Kept the Early Moon's Volcanic Heart Beating

We typically think of the Moon as a static, floating object that has remained the same for basically its entire lifetime, with an occasional asteroid impact serving as an exception. That understanding is grounded in physics - the Moon should have cooled rapidly after forming when a huge protoplanet hit the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. But, some lunar material returned from the Chang’e-5 mission was notably formed only around two billion years ago, yet appeared to be volcanic in orig...

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

'Big Bang' Fix Puts Voyager Across the 'One Light-Day' Mark

Flashback to 1977. Jimmy Carter was U.S. president, Star Wars was a box office hit, and the two Voyager spacecraft departed on an historic Grand Tour of the solar system. Now, teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are working to keep the missions active, as they push the boundaries of interstellar space beyond the solar system.

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

Asteroids' Oddball Shapes Make Deflecting Them Challenging

In a pinch, we could use a stand-off nuclear blast to redirect a dangerous asteroid on short notice. There's no atmospheric shock wave in space, but the x-ray pulse could still deflect the space rock. But asteroids aren't round and uniform, so their weird shapes make it difficult.

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

A Mighty Wind Blew Away Gas and Made Early Galaxies Brighter

When astronomers looked at photos of the early universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, they found something odd: an overabundance of bright galaxies about 400 to 500 million years after the Big Bang. But these galaxies should have been far less common so soon after the Big Bang. Researchers may have figured this out: Powerful ultraviolet (Lyman-alpha) radiation produced by dense clusters of young stars acted like a leaf blower, driving light-blocking gas and dust out of the galaxy and ...

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

Interstellar Visitor 3I/ATLAS Shows Water Ice Behaves the Same Across Alien Star Systems

Targets of opportunity sometimes happen in astronomy, and we got a major one when the third interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, was discovered in July 2025. And it just so happens that in the intervening years between the last known interstellar visitor (2I/Borisov in 2019), we got a major upgrade in our observational capabilities with the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). A new paper from a team of researchers led by Dr. Silvia Protopapa of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the S...

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

Exoplanets Can't Hide From The JWST's 'Digital Twin'

Finding dim exoplanets hidden in the glare of their stars is an ongoing challenge in astronomy. Telescopes use coronagraphs to block out starlight, but even they have their limitations. Researchers have developed a new technique with the JWST that can find dim exoplanets more easily than ever.

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

China Unveils Their Plan for a Crewed Moon Landing

Yesterday, on November 3rd, the deputy chief designer of China's crewed space program and chief designer of the lunar exploration program (Wang Xiang) unveiled an official statement detailing its [plans for a crewed mission to the Moon](https://english.spacechina.com/n17212/c4744561/content.html).

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

Game Theory Helps SETI Search for Alien Civilizations

SETI can be more effective the more the targets in the search are refined. SETI's newest survey effort uses game theory to inform its search. It's based on the idea that other ETIs would almost certainly use the transit method to detect habitable worlds like Earth.

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

Giant Impacts Help Rocky Planets Retain Their Atmospheres

For a long time, planetary scientists thought that giant impacts drove a young planet's atmosphere away into space with all the heat they generated. But it turns out the opposite could be true. The mass a young planet gains through a giant impact increases its gravitational hold on its atmosphere.

Tech - Universe Today - 5 days ago

A Virtual Lifeless Earth Will Help Scientists Find Life on Exoplanets

Researchers have created a model lifeless Earth that couples the atmosphere with interior planetary processes. The model can reproduce Earth's modern habitable state without including life, showing that a planet that appears habitable isn't necessarily inhabited. The tool will be useful when and if the Habitable Worlds Observatory is launched, by helping identify false positives.

Tech - Universe Today - 5 days ago

Students Test Prototype Landing Pad to Make Lunar Operations Safe

This summer, a team of students and researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville successfully conducted three rocket-motor firing tests on a prototype lunar landing pad. The tests showed the prototype’s ability to capture and redirect rocket exhaust through an integrated vent system, marking an important milestone in developing landing infrastructure for future Moon base operations.

Tech - Universe Today - 5 days ago

What Will Politics Look Like on Other Planets? It's Likely to Be a Mishmash

When we make our home on other worlds, who will be in charge? Will it be an emperor? A billionaire? A rebel alliance? Or none of the above? Astrobiologist Jacob Haqq Misra runs through the legal and political options.

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

Stubborn Asteroids Around White Dwarfs Resist Becoming Dust

Astronomers are finding more dusty disks around white dwarf stars, and some of them are home to asteroids. But how these rocky asteroids are turned to dust and form these rings isn't clear. New research shows that the white dwarf's gravity alone can't shred them to dust.

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

The Vera Rubin Has Found Two More of the Milky Way's Dim Satellites

The Vera Rubin Observatory has detected two more of the Milky Ways' dim, hard to see satellites. One is an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, and one is a globular cluster. Each one is a missing piece of the puzzle in the Milky Way's merger history. By finding more of these satellites, our understanding of galaxy growth, and the role dark matter plays in it, will improve.

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

The JWST May Have Found Where Heavy Black Hole Seeds Formed

Astrophysicists think that black holes grow through a hierarchical merger framework. But the elusive Intermediate Mass Black Holes are the missing link between stellar mass black holes, and the gargantuan supermassive black holes like the one at the center of the Milky Way. The JWST may have found the ancient sources of IMBH heavy seeds: young massive clusters in the high-redshift Universe.

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

Researchers May Have Solved a Puzzling Contradiction in the Ryugu Sample

Samples from the asteroid Ryugu, and from carbonaceous chondrites that have crashed on Earth, present an apparent contradiction. Their fine-grained matrices have widely varied compositions of their clay-like minerals. That suggests that there were widely different aqueous environments in the same parent bodies, which seems unlikely. But new research may have solved that contradiction.

Tech - Universe Today - 7 days ago

New Research Resolves the Mystery Behind Van Gogh's The Starry Night

The sky in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) matches, in both observation and shape, the pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy around 22 July 1889, when a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster appeared close together, according to a study published inScientific Reports.

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

Martian Polar Crater Ice Shifts with Seasonal Frost

The planet Mars shares many landforms and weather patterns with the Earth, including changing seasons, volcanoes, canyons, dust storms and dust devils, and water ice. But one feature that Earth and Mars share among the eight planets in our solar system are polar ice caps. Both are one of each planet’s striking features, but the major difference is while Earth’s polar ice caps are both comprised of water, Mars’ north polar ice cap is only comprised of water while its southern polar ice cap is car...

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

Ceres' Water Ice Can Mask Massive Surface Salt Deposits

The dwarf planet Ceres is arguably one of the most overlooked and underappreciated planetary objects in the entire solar system. This could be because while Ceres has the same dwarf planet designation as Pluto, Ceres is largely considered an “asteroid” since it resides the in main asteroid belt. However, along with being the largest object in the main asteroid belt, Ceres’ mass comprises between 25 to 30 percent of all the mass of the entire main asteroid belt. Despite its lack of recognition, C...

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

Space Outposts Beyond the Moon May Rely on Planetary AI

NASA plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface in 2028 for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. But the famed agency has no intention of stopping there, as they plan to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon through a slow and meticulous process involving power, resource extraction, and habitat technologies. However, with the soaring use of artificial intelligence (AI) in our everyday lives, how could this emerging technology be used to identify new landing sites for future ou...

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

Hera Probe Sees Asteroid Pair Separately for First Time

Planetary defense is a growing concern among the scientific community, as efforts have been made to design and implement missions meant to deflect incoming threats to the Earth well in advance. In 2022, NASA intentionally collided the Double Asteroid Redirection test (DART) planetary defense spacecraft into the smaller asteroid of the binary asteroid, Didymos and Dimorphos, with the latter being the smaller one. While the goal was to ascertain if deflecting an asteroid is feasible, how did this ...

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

What Could Split a Black Hole in Two?

We all know that black holes can collide. It has happened since black holes began to form, early in cosmic time. The result is always a clash that gives off gravitational waves and a giant bang. Since black holes have such strong gravity, it's almost impossible to imagine a way that any force could break one apart. Yet, that's the task that a group of scientists in Europe set for themselves.

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

Queen's University Belfast Students Find Neptune's Elusive Trojan Asteroids

Astronomers at Queen’s University Belfast have led an international team studying new solar system bodies near Neptune, helping to unravel the mysteries of our solar system’s evolution.

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

This Ancient Meteorite Hints at Mars' Warm, Wet Past

Ancient Martian meteorites are like time-capsules from the planet's past. They're delivered to us by impacts that launch them into space, where some of them find their way to Earth. One recently discovered meteorite found in the Sahara desert adds weight to the idea that Mars was once warm and wet, and possibly habitable.

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

This Gamma-Ray Burst Wasn't Dim, It Was Just Misunderstood

In March 2026, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a GRB with an unusual light signature. Its initial gamma radiation was dim, and the afterglow exhibited unusual, delayed peaks. As it turns out, we were seeing it from a side angle, and the GRB actually packed one billion years of the Sun’s energy output into a thin beam.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

Earth’s “Impenetrable” Space Radiation Shield Was Just Breached From Within

Remember the big solar storm back in May 2024? The one that caused auroras as far south as Florida and Mexico? Scientists are still parsing out the impacts that storm had on the local environment, and a new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters by Yoshizumi Miyoshi of Nagoya University and his co-authors shows it might have allowed some nearby electrons to accelerate to relativistic speeds using something called a chorus wave.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

How You Squeeze Planetary Minerals Changes Everything

Studying the interiors of planets is essential for understanding planetary formation, evolution, and their ability to potentially host life as we know it. To accomplish this, researchers use a combination of Earth as an analog, computer models, meteorites, and data collected from other planetary bodies for studying their interior compositions. As a result, scientists have determined that the elements of magnesium and silicon are the most abundant planetary building blocks. And, under extreme pre...

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

It's a Ghost! No, It's a Stellar Crèche!

Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) zeroed in on a wispy-looking region of the Carina Nebula and found a ghostly looking cloud seemingly floating in isolation among the other clouds of gas and dust. Just in time for Hallowe'en, although, it turns out that little cloud isn't the soul of departed stars. Instead, it's a region of the nebula has been actively engaged in creating batches of hot, young new stars.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

Examining the Cat's Head Nebula with the Hubble and JWST

Star formation is a complicated process. It involves metallicity, gas temperature and density, dust grains, and stellar feedback from existing stars. Sometimes, studying all these factors and how they work means studying some of Nature's most beautiful structures, like the Cat's Head nebula in the Carina Nebula.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

A Brief-ish History of METI. Part II: From Interplanetary to Interstellar

The latter half of the 20th century saw a major expansion of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), accompanied by corresponding advances in Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). A key development was the first interstellar SETI and METI experiments: Project Ozma and the Arecibo Message.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

No Comets Required? How the Growing Earth May Have Created Its Own Water

Earth may not have needed comets and asteroids to deliver its water after it formed and cooled. Instead, water creation could have been part of the planet's formation process. New research explains how, and even shows that water creation could be a part of every rocky planet's formation.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Colliding Dwarf Planets Created a 'Cat's Tail' 1,000 Astronomical Units Long

The Beta Pictoris system is only about 63 light years away. At only about 23 million years old, it's a sort of analogue for our Solar System when it was much younger. Observations show an elongated dust feature named the 'Cat's Tail' that has puzzled researchers. New research says it's the result of two colliding dwarf planets, something that was sure to have happened in our Solar System when it was young.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Astronomers Solve the Mystery of the Sun’s Spinning Plasma Jets

The torrent of corona related discoveries keeps coming. Lately we’ve covered a variety of potential solutions to the “coronal heating problem” - why the Sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface. Now, a paper led by a team of researchers from the University of Newcastle, Indian Institute for Astrophysics, and University of Sheffield, offers another answer - that we’ve been viewing the “spicules” that form in the lower solar atmosphere all wrong.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Moon Habitats May Use Layered Mylar to Block Extreme Heat

Living on the Moon, with either trained astronauts or regular civilians, could become a regular occurrence in the near future. However, it’s easier said than done, as scientists and engineers continue developing new and advanced ways for protecting humans in the harsh lunar environment, which contrasts the mild and habitable temperatures of the Earth. The most important aspect is focusing on keeping humans alive, and this includes temperature regulation within the habitats. However, how can you ...

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Virgin Galactic Flies Next-Gen Space Plane to New Home With New Name

Virgin Galactic is back in the spaceflight spotlight with the unveiling of a shiny new object: an updated Delta-class suborbital space plane with an exotic name.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

NASA's New UV Space Telescope Will Launch in 2031

NASA has committed to launching a new, more powerful UV space telescope. Named UVEX, the UltraViolet EXplorer, it will launch in 2031. It's about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, GALEX, whose mission ended in 2013. UVEX will perform a survey in UV that will complement infrared surveys by other telescopes.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Betelgeuse Is Disturbed By Its Companion Star

Betelgeuse has a close-orbiting companion that disturbs the red supergiant into an egg-like shape. New observations show how the two stars interact and how this could help explain the varying brightness of Betelgeuse.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Ancient Comets Carried Organic Compounds, But They Didn't Survive Crashing Into Earth

Perhaps the biggest mystery we face is life on Earth started. One hypothesis says that comets, which are known to carry important chemicals in abiogenesis, delivered these compounds to Earth, leading to the appearance of life. But new research concludes that that is highly unlikely.

Tech - Universe Today - 12 days ago

The Rubin Observatory Finds Its First Dwarf Planet Candidate

The Vera Rubin Observatory found a distant Solar System object before its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time even got started. The object is a dwarf planet candidate named 2026 ED138, and if confirmed, it will be one of the largest dwarf planets beyond Neptune. It may be up to 1500 km in diameter.

Tech - Universe Today - 12 days ago

The Leap Second is History. Long Live the 'Leap Hour'

Time and time-keeping is a hot topic once again, as many of us ‘fall back’ to Standard Time this coming weekend. Another time-related dilemma was also addressed this month, when a key conference did away with the leap second and the alignment of Universal Time (UT1) with Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). Somewhere off in the distant future, we’ll need to add minutes to the clock to come back into sync, up to and perhaps including a 'leap hour.' Accounting for time is fascinating (if a bit break-...

Tech - Universe Today - 12 days ago

Glowing Salt Crystals Tracked Radiation Aboard Artemis I

There weren’t any humans strapped into the bucket seats of the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission. But there were two anthropomorphic mannequins made to mimic human bone and soft tissue, but also equipped with hundreds of radiation sensors spread throughout their body as part of the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment. A recent paper led by Paweł Bilski of the Institute for Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and published in the journal Radiation Measurements, reports...

Tech - Universe Today - 12 days ago

NASA Systems Engineering Team Details HWO Mission Architecture

Finding an Earth-like world beyond the solar system is the Holy Grail of exoplanet research, and the field has experienced incredible technological advancements in searching for and identifying exoplanets since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995. This includes both ground- and space-based telescopes, specifically the powerful James Webb Space Telescope. However, directly imaging exoplanets remains elusive, primarily due to the enormous technological challenge of imaging a point of light ...

Tech - Universe Today - 12 days ago

Unveiling Starbirth Mysteries

In 1985, the physicist Heinz R. Pagels wrote, "Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the youung, but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event." In the decades since then, astronomers have drawn closer and closer to figuring out what actually goes in the veiled stellar nurseries throughout the Universe. The tale of starbirth we know today invokes collapse of clouds of gas and dust into prestellar cores, but it still has many unknowns, such as the role of magnetic fields...

Tech - Universe Today - 12 days ago

Dead Planets Orbiting a Dead Star

When a star like our Sun reaches its end, it becomes a kind of zombie star called a white dwarf. These bodies have left fusion behind and will radiate only remnant heat for a long, long time. Before they become white dwarfs, they expand, engulf, and destroy any nearby planets. Astronomers have spotted a debris disk around a white dwarf, made from the dust of destroyed planets. Observations show that two new resurrected planets have formed in this disk, creating dead planets orbiting a dead star.

Tech - Universe Today - 12 days ago

Massive Stellar Collisions Could Explain Early Supermassive Black Holes

Dense stellar environments were common in the early Universe. These environments fostered more numerous stellar collisions, and some of those would've been mergers that formed very massive stars. Those stars would've exploded as supernovae, becoming massive black holes, the potential seeds for today's supermassive black holes.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

This Oddbal Reflective Lava World is Challenging to Understand

Exoplanets extremely close to their stars are expected to have lost their atmospheres. But one of them, TOI-561 b, seems to have a thick atmosphere. Understanding how this super-Earth has an atmosphere is challenging.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

Hubble Will Give the Roman Space Telescope a Helping Hand

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will use gravitational microlensing to study dark matter. But it's a wide-field survey telescope, and the venerable Hubble Space Telescope can do things it can't do. That's why the Hubble is lending a hand.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

A Deep-Mantle Garnet Might Hold the Secret to Ancient Martian Magma

A history of a planet’s volcanic activity is contained in its rocks. And Mars’ rocks - or at least many of the meteorites that have made the journey from it to Earth - were telling a contradictory story. They appeared to be highly oxidized, but our understanding of the internal volcanic forces on Mars meant that they should have been formed in a reducing environment - the exact opposite of what the chemical makeup of the rocks themselves indicate. Now, a new paper published in the Journal of Geo...

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

Asymmetric space waves map pressure on Earth's magnetic shield

The Earth’s magnetic field is responsible for shielding us from harmful space weather, including solar radiation from the Sun but also cosmic rays originating from outside our solar system. Cosmic rays can include deep space supernovas, so the magnetic field takes the majority of the brunt from solar radiation. Without our magnetic field, the solar wind would slowly strip away our atmosphere, making life on our small, blue world impossible to exist. But where is the magnetic field doing the heav...

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

A Brief-ish History of METI. Part I: Early Ideas and Experiments

For as long as scientists have conducted SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) experiments, parallel efforts in Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) have also been mounted. In this series, we'll take a look at the major milestones in this field of study.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

A Huge and Powerful New Simulation Helps Explain the Universe's Reionization

Cosmologists have another powerful simulation to work with. Lumina is the one of the largest and most detailed cosmological simulations yet and runs on the Frontier supercomputer. It's larger and more detailed than Illustris TNG.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

Scientists Can Now Spot Hidden Sunspots on the Solar Far Side

Unlike the Moon, the Sun is constantly rotating from our perspective - but we still only see half of it at any given time. Since it takes 27 days to complete a full rotation, that leaves plenty of time for changes to happen to the side we can’t see that could directly impact Earth’s own space weather a few weeks later. Now a team of physicists led by Bibhuti Kumar Jha of the Southwest Research Institute has published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series that uses probability to...

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

Parker Solar Probe Spots Twisted Magnetic Braids Growing in the Solar Wind

The magnetic environment around the Sun is a jumbled mess of chaotic fields and streams of charged particles. Recently we’ve been getting at least slightly better at mapping out its complexity, thanks in large part to data collected by missions like the Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter. But there’s still a large grey area surrounding the interface between the large scale hydrodynamic properties of plasmas and the microscopic properties of individual ions, and scientists believe understanding...

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

A Merger Solves a Puzzling Paradox in Orion

Some of the Hubble Space Telescope's earliest observations were of the Orion Nebula. Those images showed proplyds, and subsequent observations uncovered a paradox centered on them. Given their rate of mass loss, those disks should have been destroyed long ago. Why weren't they?

Tech - Universe Today - 15 days ago

Rare Lunar Meteorites Could Fill Gaps In Moon’s Evolution

Almost all meteorites come from asteroids, not the Moon or Mars. But after decades of analysis of the Apollo samples, researchers still rely on lunar meteorites to better understand our anomalously large Moon.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

White Dwarfs Are Actually…Yellow, Green, Pink, and Purple?

The universe hosts a myriad of star types, including supergiants, giants, main sequence, red dwarfs, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, and neutron stars. What makes these stars stand out are just their sizes, but their colors, as each one hosts a distinct color based on their surface temperature, specifically orange, red, blue, and white based on cooler to hotter temperatures. While the correlation between star colors and surface temperatures has long been known throughout astronomy, what if star colo...

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

27 Exoplanet Targets for the World's First Private Space Telescope

Get ready for the age of private space telescopes. The Lazuli Space Telescope will launch in a few years and part of its mission is to observe exoplanets. New research presents a list of 27 exoplanet targets, some of which are very well-known and will certainly benefit from deeper observations.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

The Largest Canyon in the Solar System is Still Tectonically Active

Scientists at Imperial College London and Columbia University have found that the largest canyon system in the solar system is still active and shaping Mars today, billions of years after it first formed.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

Saudi Arabia Joins the Search for Alien Civilizations

Saudi Arabia is joining the search for alien signals coming from the cosmos. They're collaborating with SETI in the endeavour. SETI has announced that two LaserSETI instruments will be positioned in Saudi Arabia, adding to a growing network of optical sensors designed to detect laser pulses that could come from alien technological civilizations.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

Magnetic Field Reversals and Extinctions: The Correlation Won't Go Away.

Scientists have wondered about a connection between Earth's geomagnetic reversals, or pole flips, and mass extinctions. They've found correlations, but nothing convincing enough to remove healthy doubts. But new research found a period of time with a concentrated number of reversals that coincides with and extinction and Large Igneous Provinces. It's likely not definitive proof, but it's certainly intriguing.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

JWST Reveals a Lopsided Alien World with Blistering Evening Winds

Typically, when we think of exoplanets, we think of neat spheres floating directly in front of their star, which acts as a giant spotlight. From our vantage point, they would look more like two perfect two dimensional circles than spheres, though. But nature is almost never so clean-cut. A new paper published in Nature Astronomy from researchers at Cornell and the University of Bristol details the first-ever study of an exoplanet that is noticeably lopsided.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

Advancing Astronomy at MIT with X-ray Reverberation Mapping

Professor Erin Kara of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research is helping advance our understanding of the most extreme objects in the Universe by analyzing X-ray reverberations and other astrophysical data.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

Even the Rubin's Test Camera Produces Stunning Images

The Vera Rubin Observatory's Commissioning Camera operated for about 7 weeks in 2024, before the observatory released its well-known first look images. It's an engineering camera, and its job was to test the VRO's equipment and procedures. Now, the VRO has released the ComCam's image of the Seagull nebula. It's a pretty stunning image for an engineering camera.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

Two Disks in One: How Accretion Disks Drive Black Hole Jets

SMBH jets are driven by thick, hot accretion disks with powerful magnetic fields. But there's a bit of a paradox. Some SMBH produce jets, even though they appear to have thin, cold accretion disks. New research has solved this paradox, showing that disks can be truncated into an outer cold disk and an inner hot disk.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

New Evidence for an Old Prediction: Recoiling Supermassive Black Holes

Theory says that during some SMBH mergers, the merger remnant receives a recoil kick from gravitational waves. Instead of sitting placidly in the galactic center, these recoiled SMBH are sent on a pendulum-like motion, back and forth through the galactic center. New research has found statistical evidence supporting their existence.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

From Dusk, Towards Dawn: Venus Slides Past the Sun This Weekend