NewZinoo: Universe Today latest news

Tech - Universe Today - 2 hours ago

The Universe's First Stars Were Shaped By Turbulence and Were Not As Massive as Thought

For a long time, astrophysicists thought that the Universe's first stars, called Population III stars, were uniformly massive. It seemed like the conditions they formed in were calm and serene, which favoured massive stars. But new research based on high-resolution simulations show that conditions were more chaotic than thought, and gas cloud turbulence means that Population III stars were not all massive. This affected the metallicity of the next stars to form.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 hours ago

A Star Dying by the Wrong Rules

Half the stars in the universe live in pairs and when one of them dies it can feed hungrily off the other in a slow, violent dance. Now a Korean team has caught a couple of stars breaking the rules, locked in an orbit so impossibly fast that our best theories of how stars grow old cannot account for it. So what is this dying star trying to tell us?

Tech - Universe Today - 11 hours ago

The Galaxy Living Too Fast

Twelve million light years away, a galaxy is living fast and burning bright, forging new stars ten times quicker than our own Milky Way in a frenzy that cannot possibly last. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has cut clean through its veil of dust to count an astonishing 16.5 million of its stars, one by one. So what is driving the Cigar Galaxy to burn so furiously?

Tech - Universe Today - 17 hours ago

Astronomers Find Stellar Evidence of an Engulfed Planet

A team of 14 researchers from the United States and Chile have found evidence of a subgiant star eating one of its planets. The star, called TOI-5882, was already known to astronomers because of its massive companion, a brown dwarf called TOI-5882 b. The companion may well have helped kick a planet onto a spiraling journey into the star.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 hours ago

That "Pink Planet" Astronomers Found Turns Out to be a Salty Customer!

Found in 2013, Pink Planet was too faint to study with ground-based telescopes. In new study, scientists used JWST and advanced processing methods to obtain its spectrum for the first time. Observations provided some of the first direct evidence for salt clouds in a cold object atmosphere. Pink Planet could be a giant planet or brown dwarf, so astronomers refer to it as a ‘planetary-mass companion’.

Tech - Universe Today - 22 hours ago

The JWST Spies Six Galaxies Becoming One

The JWST looked back in time and saw 6 galaxies merging into one. At the heart of the assembly, a supermassive black hole is lurking. It all happened when the Universe was only about 1.5 billion years old, and the red-shifted light is just reaching us now.

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

Finding Organics on Mars Isn't Enough. ExoMars Will Look for Their "Handedness."

We’ve known for a long time that there are organic molecules on Mars. Rovers and landers keep turning them up wherever they look. But, “organic” simply means a molecule is made up of carbon and hydrogen atoms, not that it was created by life - there are plenty of non-biological processes that can create organic molecules. But there is one feature of organic molecules that can point very strongly in the direction of life or not - its chirality, and a new instrument on the Rosalind Franklin rover,...

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

Hot Jupiter Endures Star-Powered Barbecue

You’re the grillmaster at the annual family 4th of July BBQ and you’re sweating bullets standing over the grill in the sweltering summer heat. You’re trying to stay cool by pressing a cold beer can on your forehead, but to no avail. You can’t go inside because, once again, you’re the grillmaster and need to watch the food simmering on your freshly cleaned grill. Your brother-in-law is a university astronomy professor and walks over asking how you’re doing. You say, “This heat is killing me. I fe...

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

The Long-Lived Chicxulub Hydrothermal System Lasted 8 Million Years

The asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs also created an underground environment suited to supporting new life, and new research suggests it lasted for millions of years longer than previously suspected. While previous research showed the buried hydrothermal system of porous rock, hot water, and chemical nutrients may have lasted 2 million years, new research says it lasted for 8 million years.

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

Did Gravitational Tides Cause Earth's Extinctions?

Many of Earth's mass extinctions await clear explanations. We know an impact wiped out the dinosaurs, but what about the planet's other extinction events? New research says flybys of planetary mass objects could've been responsible.

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

Radio Observations Reveal the Secret of Early Galaxy Growth

Astronomers have discovered a huge reservoir of cold molecular gas, the direct fuel for star formation, in REBELS-25, a massive, star-forming galaxy.The team, led from Leiden University, focused on REBELS-25, seen when the universe was only about 700 million years old, around 5% of its current age. Astronomers use “redshift” to describe this distance, which measures how much the universe’s expansion has stretched a galaxy’s light to redder wavelengths.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Ariane 6 Sets New Record for Europe with More Powerful Boosters

On 17 June at 09:21 local time (13:21 BST, 14:21 CEST) Ariane 6 flight VA269 soared to orbit from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. 36 satellites for Amazon’s Leo constellation were placed into their orbit just over an hour after liftoff – the eighth successful mission insertion in a row for Europe’s newest rocket.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

This is the First Pair of Sibling Supernova Remnants

Astrophysicists have found what is likely the very first pair of sibling supernova remnants. One is the well-known Jellyfish Nebula, and the other was long thought to be hidden in the bright glare from the Jellyfish. The pair are connected by a bright filament of gas.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

The Solar Gravitational Lens Could Map White Dwarfs and Black Holes

It feels like every few months we get to report on another academic paper coming out singing the praises of the Solar Gravitational SGL (SGL). Partly, this is due to Dr. Slava Turyshev’s astounding productivity in terms of pumping out academic articles, but partly because such a ground-breaking mission has lots of positive aspects, but also challenges that need to be addressed. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Turyshev, stresses an often overlooked feature of the SGL - how u...

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Happy Asteroid Day! Prize-Winning Plan Focuses on Space Infrastructure

A proposal to create a new network for monitoring cosmic threats to off-world infrastructure has won this year's Schweickart Prize, which recognizes bright ideas for planetary defense.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

A Quasar at Cosmic Dawn Flickers into View

Astronomers have detected a flickering quasar called J0439+1634 as it appeared only 850 million years after the Big Bang. That discovery raises fresh questions about black hole formation and activity in the early Universe. The flickering light of this distant cosmic lighthouse showed that black hole at the heart of the quasr has a flat, pancake-shaped accretion disk. That shape is more familiar in modern-day quasars, which leads astronomers to wonder how these objects formed so quickly in the in...

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Another Early Universe Surprise from the JWST: A Mature Galaxy Cluster

The JWST found a galaxy cluster from 10 billion years ago that's far more developed than it should be, according to cosmological models. The cluster is also the most distant strong gravitational lens that we know of. Detailed observations across the spectrum show that the cluster is still undergoing mergers.

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

Are Asteroid-Mass Black Holes Hiding in the Cosmic Gamma-Ray Glow?

There are multiple ways to form black holes. The one most commonly taught in high school physics classes is that they are created from the collapse of a dying star. But there are another class of black holes, known as Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) that could have been created immediately after the Big Bang by matter collapsing in on it. Or that’s the theory at least. Though long theorized, we’ve never actually seen one of them, though scientists have suggested that they might account for the mis...

Tech - Universe Today - 5 days ago

Making Sense Of Mars’ Tiny Moon Of Phobos

Understanding the Martian moon of Phobos’ origin hinges on decoding its interior. Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission due for launch in late 2026 should help.

Tech - Universe Today - 5 days ago

Using Plants, Astronauts Could Create Their Own Medicine

A new pharmaceutical production method could allow astronauts on long space missions to "grow" fresh medicines on demand using plants. The work could also bring low-cost pharmaceutical production to resource-limited areas on Earth.

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

Astronomers Want to Build a Swarm of Telescopes to Find LIFE

Current plans for flagship telescopes in the 2040s are focused on answering a simple question - are we alone? Our best telescopes to date, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have only given us tantalizing glimpses into the atmospheres or other worlds, but not enough to truly determine whether or not life as we know it exists there. Astronomers have been waiting for technology to catch up to their dreams of what is possible in terms of new types of telescopes, and recently the W.M. Kec...

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

Plutonium in Earth Rocks Signals Long-ago Cosmic Collision

A small lump of rock pulled up from the Pacific Ocean seafloor in 1976 is giving scientists new clues about an ancient cosmic event. More than a hundred million years ago, two neutron stars collided. The resulting energetic kilonova sent a rain of long-lived elements, such as isotopes of plutonium, through space. Eventually, this stellar "debris" settled onto Earth. Some sank to the bottom of the ocean and got incorporated into a chunk of ferromanganese rock. Hidden inside were a few hundred ato...

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 4: Black Hole Sun

Switch off fusion and, for ten thousand years, nothing happens. Then the Sun begins a slow, strange death: shrinking, briefly brightening, and coasting on gravitational heat for tens of millions of years. And the neutrinos give the whole thing away in just eight minutes.

Tech - Universe Today - 7 days ago

What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 3: The Photon Traffic Jam

A photon born in the Sun's core takes around 100,000 years to fight its way to the surface, bouncing through a random walk so inefficient that the light on your face is older than human civilization. Why the Sun's surface is a hundred-millennia-delayed broadcast.

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

'High-Res' is the Secret to Finding Alien Life with the Next Great Space Telescope

We’re still in the definition phase of the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), but it seems like every week a new research group comes out with a paper helping to contribute to what is shaping up to be one of the most important space telescopes of the 2040s. A new paper from a team of researchers led by Daniel Jaffe of the University of Texas at Austin contributes to this ongoing definition work by arguing that it’s time HWO adopted a high-resolution near-IR spectroscopy capability, - which soun...

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

Lava planet has hydrogen-rich, active atmosphere

It’s 2158, and you’re chugging away on your PhD in Planetary Volcanology from the University of Utopia Planitia on Mars. Graduate students still get paid a sub-living wage, so you’ve been stuck eating freeze-dried ramen for the past three years. You’ve completed studying Jupiter’s moon, Io, but now you have to leave the solar system for a good exoplanet analog. While Io’s volcanism is caused by tidal heating, you need an exoplanet whose volcanism is caused by extreme heat from its host star. You...

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 2: Kelvin and Helmholtz at the Ready

How can the Sun keep shining with its furnace switched off? Two nineteenth-century aristocrats, Helmholtz and Lord Kelvin, worked out the answer mostly by accident. It comes down to stored heat, gravitational shrinking, and the strange self-regulating thermostat of hydrostatic equilibrium.

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

The History and Scientific Impact of Hubble’s Deep Field Imaging

When someone asks me what originally got me interested in space exploration, my answer is always the same - the Hubble Deep Field. That image, taken in 1995, came out when I was in middle school, and had an everlasting impact on my sense of place in the universe. It’s since been improved upon by various other images, and even last week the Hubble team released yet another jaw-dropping image of the galaxy cluster MACS0329-0211 which recaptures some of the magic of that original image, and still p...

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

Future Martian Colonists Will Need a New Relativistic Clock

We think of atomic clocks as the definitive timekeepers. They are famous for being accurate down to the picosecond. Unfortunately, they are still subject to general relativity, so if you put them on a different planet, they will track time slightly faster or slower than on Earth, depending on the planet’s gravity. In Mars’ case, an atomic clock on its surface is sitting in a slightly shallower gravity well, meaning that time moves slightly faster there. Therefore, as we begin to expand our techn...

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

Are Alien Probes Hiding in Our Backyard? A New Study Says We’ve Barely Looked

Even at this early stage in our space faring age, humanity has already begun sending probes that will eventually reach other solar systems, even if that was not their original intention. Five robotic explorers - Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, and New Horizons - are all on escape velocities out of the solar system, and might someday enter another one. They will no longer be operational at that point, but they serve as a proof of concept that spacefaring civilizations do indeed build interste...

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

The Best Place to Look for Alien Megastructures Might Be Moon Dust

Our search for technosignatures - clear signs of advanced civilizations beyond Earth - takes many forms. Many are driven by the famous Drake equation, which attempts to estimate how many technological civilizations there are in the Milky Way. However, there’s a big fat question mark at the end of that equation in the form of a variable intended to account for the “longevity” of a civilization. And to be clear, that doesn’t mean how long the civilization itself survives. It simply means how long ...

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 1: The Infernal Reservoir

If the Sun's fusion shut off right now, you would not notice for a very long time. The first stop is understanding the Sun itself: a vast pile of gravitating matter where fusion is so absurdly inefficient that, pound for pound, a compost heap beats it.

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

LISA Could Double as an Asteroid Scale

One of the hardest things to calculate for an asteroid is its mass - but it is such a critical feature. It determines how much of an impact it would have if it hits something, or how many resources are potentially available on it. But to accurately measure it we typically use optical sensing and a guesstimate of its density based on its spectral profile. A new paper suggests a completely novel way to use the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) flagship mission to potentially provide highly...

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

Why Consciousness Might Not Belong to Us Alone

We have spent centuries being knocked off our pedestal. Earth isn't the centre of the Solar System, the Sun isn't the centre of the Galaxy, and we are not the point around which everything else turns. Now two philosophers want to take the demotion one step further and apply it to the thing we hold most precious of all, our own conscious minds. If they're right, awareness may be far more widespread, and far stranger, than we ever dared imagine.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

The Little Red Dots That Turned Out to Be Black Holes in Disguise

For three years they've been one of the strangest puzzles in astronomy. Tiny, mysterious red dots scattered across the early universe, so abundant and so bright that some researchers wondered if they had "broken" cosmology itself. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has captured the most detailed look yet at one of them, and the answer it reveals is as exotic as the name suggests: a star sized object that is, in fact, a black hole wearing a disguise.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

The Galaxy's Spin Is Hiding in the Hum of Gravitational Waves

We are used to thinking of gravitational waves as messengers from catastrophes in space, the ringing of spacetime after black holes collide for example. But our own Galaxy hums with a fainter, steadier signal, a chorus of millions of unseen binary stars. A new study has found that this hum carries a hidden fingerprint of the Milky Way's spin, and that if a future space mission ignores it, our picture of the Galaxy itself could come out subtly wrong.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

FAST Finds a Pulsar in an Almost Flawless Circular Orbit

Somewhere in the plane of the Milky Way, a dead star is spinning 220 times a second, and it's circling its companion in almost the most perfect orbit astronomers have ever measured. China's giant FAST radio telescope has just found it, and the shape of that orbit is a near flawless record of a billion year relationship between two stars.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

New Study Assesses Titan's Resources and their Potential Uses

In a recent NASA-supported study, researchers assessed Titan's resource base and how it could be leveraged for ISRU. Compared with other locations under study (the Moon, Mars, etc.), they concluded that there is unrivaled potential for human exploration and settlement.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Venus’ Strange Rotation Was Likely Triggered By A High Velocity Moon-Sized Impactor

Venus’ extraordinarily slow retrograde rotation was likely caused by a chance encounter with a moon-sized impactor. One that some 4.5 billion years ago likely slammed into our sister planet at a high angle and high velocity.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

JWST Finds Exoplanets Choked by Diesel Smog

It’s 2134, and humanity has finally embraced green technologies while ridding the Earth of harmful fossil-burning technologies, most notably gasoline, wood, coal, and oil. As a result, soot has been rendered obsolete, and all commercial products from soot, including shoes, wires, computer products, and eye products, are now produced from eco-friendly technologies. However, the uber-rich who still fancy non-eco-friendly products are willing to pay soot’s weight in gold for it. Therefore, the Exop...

Tech - Universe Today - 12 days ago

NASA Study Challenges Theories on Where the Ingredients for Life Came From

NASA-supported scientists have provided new information about how the early Earth may have acquired some elements necessary for the planet to become habitable. They also suggest a new role for Jupiter in the distribution of these elements throughout the young solar system. The study, published in Science Advances, examines this history by looking at the ratio of phosphorus to nitrogen in iron meteorites and in younger objects known as chondrites.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

The Universe is Still Running Away From Us

Last year, a study sent a quiet tremor through the field of cosmology. A team of researchers claimed that the universe's expansion might be slowing down, not speeding up, suggesting that dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be driving the cosmos apart, could be weakening. If true, it would have shaken the foundations of our understanding of the universe. Now, a new study including two Nobel laureates has looked carefully at the evidence and reached a clear verdict - crisis averted.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

The Smallest Window on the Sun

Every so often, the Sun hurls billions of tonnes of charged particles toward Earth in what are called coronal mass ejections and if a big one hits at the wrong moment, the consequences for satellites, power grids, and communications systems could be catastrophic. Our best defence is to predict them before they happen, and that means watching the Sun's magnetic fields constantly and precisely. Now, a component smaller than a shirt button could transform how we do exactly that.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

Reading the Galaxy's Past

Every galaxy you've ever seen in a photograph is hiding something. Beyond the glowing disc of stars and gas that the camera captures lies a vast, ghostly outer region called a halo, too faint to see easily but packed with clues about how that galaxy came to be. ESA has just formally committed to a mission designed to reveal those hidden haloes in unprecedented detail, and in doing so, finally answer one of the most fundamental questions in astronomy: how did galaxies like our own Milky Way form?

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

The Shape of a Black Hole

Black holes are already strange enough, regions of space where gravity is so extreme that not even light can escape. But physicists have long known there's another layer of weirdness, that black holes also behave like thermodynamic objects, with temperature, entropy, and phase transitions just like a gas or a liquid. Now, a new approach borrowed from pure mathematics is revealing hidden patterns in that behaviour and hinting at something fundamental about the nature of black holes themselves.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

Written in Rock

A small rock found in the African desert has just handed scientists an extraordinary window into one of the most violent and consequential periods in the history of the Solar System. Inside this lunar meteorite, a chunk of the Moon knocked to Earth by an ancient collision, researchers have found evidence of a massive impact event 3.5 billion years ago, one that matches the timing of known impacts on Earth and in the asteroid belt. Three worlds but one shared bombardment and a story that may have...

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

Titan's Hidden Blanket

Saturn's moon Titan has long fascinated scientists, it’s a world with rivers, lakes, and a thick atmosphere, all made not of water but of methane. Now, a new study suggests Titan is stranger than first imagined since beneath its surface lies a 9 km thick crust of methane laced ice that acts like a giant thermal blanket, warming the interior in ways nobody expected.

Tech - Universe Today - 13 days ago

Did Life Start When Impacts Created Vast Hydrothermal Systems in Earth's Crust?

Earth was bombarded by impactors in its first couple billion years. These impacts created a vast network of hydrothermal systems in the crust that could've spawned life. New research examines their extent.

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

Meet REMORA: The Autonomous Space Fleet Built to Tag and Track Asteroids

To truly understand what an asteroid is made up of, we need to send a probe to it. Remote sensing from ground-based telescopes, or even orbiting observatories, and only do so much. A new white paper submitted to the UK Space Agency’s 2035 Space Frontiers programme, pitches just such a mission architecture. Called the REndezvous Mission for Orbital Reconstruction of Asteroids (REMORA), the plan calls for a swarm of autonomous CubeSats to tag, track, and characterize multiple near-Earth asteroids.

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

Watch the Moon Occult Venus in the Daytime for North America on June 17th

If you’re like us, you’ve been following the close conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in the June dusk sky. Next week, the Moon enters the evening scene, and actually occults (passes in front of) the planet Venus in what promises to be one of the top skywatching events for 2026.

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

Astrochemical Model Digs Into the Universe's Missing Sulfur

Sulfur is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. If you peer into a diffuse interstellar cloud, you find loads of it - about the amount expected based on fusion patterns of the stars it was born in. However, if you look at a dense, cold, molecular cloud - the kind where those stars actually form - it seems like 99% of the sulfur that is expected to be there is missing. Scientists have puzzled over this “missing sulfur problem” for decades, though a leading theory is that the element ...

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

Building in Space With Laser "Origami"

University of Florida researchers are exploring how lasers could help astronauts build structures on the moon using materials already available there, including lunar soil transformed into glass. The work, led by Victoria M. Miller, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and researcher with the UF Astraeus Space Institute, recently completed a research phase focused on laser forming, a manufacturing process that bends materials without physical contact.

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

On The Hunt For Cosmic Dawn And The Universe’s Very First Stars

After decades of searches, cosmologists are within reach of finding cosmic dawn. A longtime observational cosmologist explains.

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

David Kipping Has a New Take on the Existence of Advanced Life in the Universe... and the Numbers are Not Encouraging!

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2606.04044

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

This is How Supermassive Black Holes Feed Themselves

Astronomers may have found the missing link in the SMBH feeding process. New observations with the JWST show that a galaxy's circumnuclear disk, which feeds gas into its black hole, is connected to a much larger network of filaments. Cool gas flows through these filaments into the SMBH's sphere of influence.

Tech - Universe Today - 15 days ago

NASA’s Proposed EVE Mission Aims to Solve the Radius Valley Mystery

A debate has been raging amongst planetary scientists for over a decade - why are there so few exoplanets with a radius of about 1.8 times that of the Earth? Exoplanets are currently largely grouped into two distinct groups - “super Earth” are below that size and have rocky interiors, whereas “Sub-Neptunes” are above that size limit and appear “puffier.” But we don’t really understand what about the path of planetary evolution forces this bifurcation. A new mission proposal, called the Early eVo...

Tech - Universe Today - 15 days ago

Where Not to Look in the Search for ET

When we scan the skies for signs of alien civilisations, where exactly should we be looking and perhaps more importantly, where should we not? A high school student from Ankara has just published a remarkably sophisticated answer to that question, building a filtering system that sifts nearly 1.75 million stars and identifies which ones are genuinely worth our attention. The result is a publicly available catalogue that could transform how the search for extraterrestrial intelligence allocates i...

Tech - Universe Today - 15 days ago

Reading the Moon in X-rays

We've walked on the Moon, driven rovers across its surface, and analysed every gram of rock the Apollo astronauts brought home, yet we still don't have a complete picture of what the Moon is actually made of. Now a team of researchers in Japan think they've found the answer, a compact X-ray telescope, small enough to sit on a single satellite, that could map the entire lunar surface in just two years. It's an elegant solution to one of planetary science's most stubborn problems and the implicati...

Tech - Universe Today - 15 days ago

Astronomers Find a Four-Carbon Sugar in Deep Space

The space between stars may seem like a barren desert, but over the past few decades scientists have been finding all sorts of interesting chemicals in it. From the precursors to proteins to the building blocks of cell membranes, there has been discovery after discovery of new molecules in the giant gas clouds between the stars. Now, a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv details the discovery of the first ever four-carbon sugar in the Interstellar Medium (ISM), and it is another brick on t...

Tech - Universe Today - 15 days ago

Why Can't the Universe Be Cyclic? Part 4: When a Good Idea Meets Bad Data

The ekpyrotic universe is a beautiful idea that runs headlong into the data. From hand-waved singularities and assumed dark energy to the killer blow from Planck and WMAP measurements of the cosmic microwave background, here is why nature has so far voted against it.

Tech - Universe Today - 15 days ago

Orbiting Stars Give Clues to a Quiescent Black Hole's Mass

How do you measure the mass of a dormant black hole in the early Universe? That's a question astronomers at University College London (UCL) and Carnegie scientists wanted to answer about a distant object that is invisible. So, they turned to James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) studies of the region around the black hole to find that answer.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

Magnetic Fields Help Binary Stars Form and Black Holes Merge

New simulations show that interactions with a magnetic field can work to decrease the distance between still forming binary protostars. These results can help explain the characteristics of the binary star systems observed in the Milky Way. These results can also be extrapolated to binary black holes, giving insights into how super massive black holes evolve.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

A Rare Meteorite Just Revealed a Lost, Mars-Sized Planet from the Dawn of the Solar System

Meteorites are (usually) gifts from the heavens. They provide unique insights to parts of the solar system that we couldn’t access otherwise - either because it's too expensive, or because the solar system itself has evolved since it was formed. A new paper from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder details how one particularly famous meteorite offers a window into just such a bygone age of the solar system - and the failed planet that was a part of it.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

Neptune’s Weirdest Moon Nereid Might Be the Lone Survivor of an Ancient "Moonpocalypse"

Neptune is definitely the odd one out of the gas giants. It’s tilted at a strange angle, and its moons are completely different from any other gas giant we know of. A new paper, published in Science Advances from researchers at CalTech, posits that might be because Triton, by far Neptune’s largest moon, absolutely obliterated the regular moon system it previously had, except for one particular exception - Nereid.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

Space Telescopes Are Now Overwhelmed by Satellite Trails

Unfortunately there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

Why Can't the Universe Be Cyclic? Part 3: The Ekpyrotic Universe and Its Bouncing Branes

The ekpyrotic theory tries to beat inflation with bouncing higher-dimensional branes, no singularity, and a universe that has always existed. A tour of the prettiest version of the idea and how it claims to handle flatness, dark energy, and the entropy that doomed earlier cyclic models.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

Catch Comet 220P McNaught in Outburst

We witnessed a surprise outburst late last week, from a lesser known periodic comet. Posts flashed across message boards late last week, alerting comet watchers to a dramatic change in brightness for periodic comet 220P McNaught. Though it wasn’t on our list for bright comets to watch for in 2026, Comet 220P is now in range of binoculars or a small telescope, low to the east at dawn as it heads towards perihelion this coming weekend.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

The Hidden Physics Complicating Interstellar Lightsails

If we’re to reach another star, chemical propulsion will not get us there in any reasonable time frame. We’re going to need a different propulsion technology, and one of the most promising seems to be a solar sail. These giant reflective surfaces form the basis of many interstellar missions. Combined with giant lasers pushing them, they can be accelerated to speeds unreachable by any other current technologies. However, according to a new paper available on arXiv from Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of t...

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

Student Astronomer Identifies Source of Mysterious Cosmic Signals

An international team led by astronomers at the University of Sydney has uncovered the clearest evidence yet for the origin of an unusual class of cosmic signals. In doing so, they have identified a rare stellar system that is providing scientists with a natural laboratory to study extreme physics.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

Why Can't the Universe Be Cyclic? Part 2: The Awkward Triumph of Inflation

Inflation is awkward, possibly not even a proper theory, and it has reigned over cosmology for forty years anyway. Here is what it claims, the flatness, horizon, and monopole problems it solves, the structure-formation prediction it nailed, and the deep problems it still cannot escape.

Tech - Universe Today - 18 days ago

The SETI Institute Releases Technosignature Report on 3I/ATLAS

Scientists at the SETI Institute searched for technological signals from 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object observed in our Solar System. Using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California, the team scanned a wide range of radio frequencies for signs of extraterrestrial technology and found none, as expected based on other astronomical observations showing that the object exhibits natural comet-like composition and behavior. “Eventually, our own...

Tech - Universe Today - 18 days ago

Why Can't the Universe Be Cyclic? Part 1: The Lure of the Eternal Universe

A look at why a cyclic, eternally repeating universe is such an appealing idea, and why the first serious attempt to build one, Richard Tolman's 1930s model of endless big bangs and big crunches, collapsed under the weight of entropy. The Big Bang keeps demanding a beginning.

Tech - Universe Today - 19 days ago

A “Green” Dual-Mode Engine is About to Give CubeSats the Best of Both Worlds

Rocket scientists have always faced a trade-off in propulsion technologies. Chemical rockets can provide lots of oomph, but burn through fuel so quickly they can only do so for a few minutes. Electric propulsion, on the other hand, can run for days, but the pushing power they provide is miniscule compared to their chemical cousins. A new paper in the Journal of Propulsion and Power from researchers at MIT describes a system that might be the best of both worlds - a propulsion system that include...

Tech - Universe Today - 19 days ago

SETI Panel Revises Recommendations for Dealing With 'Disclosure Day'

An international committee of experts says it has updated its rules for evaluating and revealing the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence. The revisions to the decades-old Declaration of Principles, created and maintained by the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Committee, come just days before the release of "Disclosure Day," a movie about alien visitation directed by Steven Spielberg.

Tech - Universe Today - 19 days ago

NASA Bids Farewell to MAVEN Mars Mission in Public Teleconference

The first mission devoted to observing the Martian atmosphere and its evolution, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), has ended after more than 11 years in orbit at Mars and a decade beyond its primary, one-year mission.

Tech - Universe Today - 19 days ago

Astronomers Make "Live" Observation of a Nearby Protoplanetary Disk's Rotation

Ever since the first protoplanetary disk was discovered in 1984 around the star Beta Pictoris, these objects have presented astronomers with laboratories to study the births and evolution of worlds around distant stars. A team at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Bordeaux, made a breakthrough in understanding these planetary birthplaces when they directly observed the rotation of a protoplanetary disk around the young star AB Aurigae.

Tech - Universe Today - 19 days ago

The Cosmic Web Like You've Never Seen it Before

Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside have produced the most detailed map of the cosmic web ever made, tracing the network of galaxies all the way back to when the universe was one billion years old.

Tech - Universe Today - 19 days ago

They've Been Searching for the Milky Way's Black Hole Wind for 50 Years and Finally Found It

According to theory, all active black holes should produce winds or jets. Astronomers have long searched for wind around the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole. New images reveal a vacant, cone-shaped region pointing to the black hole. According to new research, only a supermassive black hole could've created this region.

Tech - Universe Today - 20 days ago

What Happens to a Star That Captures A Primordial Black Hole?

Stephen Hawking predicted that stars can capture primordial black holes (PBH). The PBH find their way to the stellar core, creating a Hawking star. There are two possible outcomes, both deadly for the star. Either it explodes rapidly, or it's slowly consumed by the parasitic PBH.

Tech - Universe Today - 20 days ago

New Cloud-Detecting Method Will Help Astronomers Characterize Exoplanets

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 co...

Tech - Universe Today - 20 days ago

Even Without A Magnetosphere, Mars Can Still Deflect Some Solar Wind

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.

Tech - Universe Today - 21 days ago

The Unexpected Brightness 'Gap' in an Ancient Globular Cluster

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.

Tech - Universe Today - 21 days ago

Cosmic Tryst: Venus Meets Jupiter at Dusk