In recent years, the idea that galaxy mergers are responsible for quenching galaxies has grown in importance. This paradigm says that galaxies merge, their black holes form a powerful quasar, and that quasar stifles star formation. But new results from the IllustrisTNG simulations shows that this paradigm may not be accurate.
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Little Red Dots are among the most intriguing discoveries made to date by the infrared-sensitive James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). They are distant, small objects that appear red in the JWST observations and they've only been known since 2024. More than 300 of them have been found as part of JWST's infrared surveys of the early Universe.
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Where will you be on August 12th? Many an eclipse chaser and the ‘eclipse curious’ will make the journey to stand in the Moon’s shadow on that fast-approaching Wednesday date. This unique eclipse sees the pencil-thin shadow of our Moon curl around the Earth’s pole, before arcing across Greenland, Iceland and the Iberian peninsula towards a dramatic sunset over the western Mediterranean.
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Long before a human ever sets foot on the Red Planet, we already know how hard the environment is. Once one finally does, the only things protecting them from that harsh environment will be the infrastructure we’ve built up there, and the spacesuit that keeps that in a protective bubble. Unfortunately, modern space suits aren’t built with Martian gravity, which is 3/8ths of Earth’s, in mind. To prove that point, a team of NASA and industry engineers made a presentation at the 55th International Conference on Environmental Systems (ICES) that showed that the newest generation of spacesuits are simply too heavy to use on Mars.
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Jupiter’s moon, Io, is the most volcanically active planetary body in the solar system, boasting hundreds of active volcanoes spewing molten lava into space. This occurs from a process called tidal heating where Jupiter’s massive gravity constantly stretches and compresses the much smaller moon during the latter’s non-circular orbit. However, a lesser-known fact is that Io’s volcanic gases fuel Jupiter’s aurorae by traveling along Jupiter’s magnetic field lines, resulting in Jupiter’s bright aurorae observed by spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes. But what if this same phenomenon could be used to detect Io-like exomoons, also called exo-Ios, orbiting Jupiter-like exoplanets?
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The samples returned by the Chang'e-6 mission from the far side of the Moon reveal that the two hemispheres have had rather different experiences when it comes to space weather.
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Little Red Dots are one of the mysteries uncovered by the JWST. Astronomers have been trying to figure out what they are, and have come up with multiple possibilities. New research says they could be ancient Globular Clusters with supermassive stars in their centers.
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We’ve been covering the journey of the Habitable Worlds Observatory for some time now. Over the past few years, it's gone from a proposal to a relatively fleshed-out plan for how and what the next Great Observatory should do—in this case, look at and characterize potentially habitable exoplanets. Back in August 2024, NASA set up the HWO Technology Maturation Project Office (TMPO) to coordinate the technological and scientific development needed to make the mission a success. They recently released a comprehensive plan for the first steps of that process in pre-print form on arXiv, and it’s very clear on what needs to happen before the Mission Concept Review (MCR) at the end of the decade.
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A black hole merger is one of the Universe's most energetic and massive events. During such a collision, two black holes orbit closer and closer until they collide and become a much more massive black hole. The event also gives off radiation and, as it happens, gravitational waves. They help tell the story of the two objects involved in the collision.
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Scientists at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration have demonstrated how clouds in a sub-Neptune's atmosphere shape the interior structure of the planet.
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Through the Photonics-Enabled Exoplanet Spectroscopic System (PEEPSS) program, researchers are developing a technology that will assist NASA's planned Habitable World's Observatory (HWO).
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One of the challenges of searching for “technosignatures” (i.e. signs that intelligent life somewhere in the universe has created technology) is understanding what to look for. Technology is a very broad area, and different types would show up as different features. One of the most commonly cited is a Dyson sphere, which attempts to encapsulate a star and capture it’s outgoing light to produce energy. But while we’ve looked for the mid-infrared waste heat these structures would produce for decades, we haven’t found a definitive instance of one. According to a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Turkish high school student Sahin Torlakcik, that might be because we are looking for the wrong type of energy all together.
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Sub-Neptune exoplanets, exoplanets that are slightly smaller than Neptune, have been designated as the most common type of planet in the Milky Way Galaxy based on their vast discovery numbers, totaling almost 3,300 out of the more than 6,300 confirmed exoplanets to date. Despite these numbers, the characteristics of sub-Neptunes remain relatively unknown. This is primarily due to our own solar system not having its own sub-Neptune to use as an analog, along with their atmospheres being thick and hazy. As a result, this makes telescopic observations, even from powerful instruments like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, extremely difficult.
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Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They’re the sources of the strongest consistent gravitational fields, which allows us to test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to an extent that’s impossible with small objects. But we’re also reaching our limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eventually send a probe directly to a black hole to observe it up close. One of the most vocal of those authors is Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai - and he recently released a paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, about what it would take for us to send a gram-size probe to a nearby black hole.
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SpaceX's Starship super-rocket deployed operational next-generation Starlink satellites for the first time during its 13th flight test, which addressed snags that arose in the previous test.
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Researchers from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with international collaborators, carried out the first spatially resolved dual-frequency spectral study of the M87 black hole using observations obtained in 2018 with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA).
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In democracies, opinion polls are one of the most common ways to measure public and therefore political support for an issue. Because space exploration is still closely tied to the government policy and funding, public opinion can play an important role in shaping America’s space priorities. In May 2026, Global Strategy Group (GSG) surveyed 1,000 U.S. voters and found broad support for space exploration. The report, [The Next Frontier: Public Attitudes Towards Space and the Space Economy](https://globalstrategygroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/GSGs-The-Next-Fronter-Public-Attitudes-Toward-Space-and-the-Space-Economy.pdf), reveals an electorate that is enthusiastic about a future beyond Earth, but views it through a practical, Earth-focused lens.
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Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence has so far meant primarily focusing on one particular type of signal - and that signal has normally been based on what our own current cutting edge technology is. But what if that’s the wrong way to look for signs of an alien intelligence? What if a resource-conscious civilization decided it was too complicated to send femto-second lasers in high energy bursts out across the universe. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from researchers Dániel Apai, Chia-Lung Lin, and Kevin Wagner, suggest that might actually be what happens, and that we should start looking for long-duration pulsing interstellar beacons.
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Juno's Microwave Radiometer (MWR) was built peer deep down into Jupiter's massive atmosphere. But during the spacecraft's extended mission, it's been studying the Galilean moons. During two flybys of volcanic Io, the spacecraft its MWR to measure the heat flowing from deep within the moon.
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When we think of Mars as the “Red Planet”, the image that comes to mind is just that - a lot of red. That comes from the oxidization of the dust and rocks that cover the planet's surface, but there are some instances where the Red Planet still has a few visual tricks up its sleeve. One such trick was recently captured by the European Space Agency’s venerable Mars Express orbiter, which captured what seems to be a set of metallic waves inside a giant impact basin. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear they aren’t liquid metal or some sort of alien architecture, but a manifestation of Mars’ complex environment.
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Comets are known for providing breathtaking observations of their long and shiny tails when they travel too close to the Sun. This happens because comets are made of ice and primarily orbit far from the Sun, but as their icy core heats up it evaporates, resulting in the aforementioned breathtaking observations. But while evaporating comets make for great public photos, scientists who study comets are focused on these snowballs of gas and dust and how they are remnants of the origins of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
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The worlds of the Solar System offer up exciting and (so far) mostly pristine places for planetary scientists to study. As space missions continue to travel to Mars, Europa, asteroids, and other worlds, questions keep coming up about keeping them safe for continued exploration and observations.
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Combining over 20 years of archival data from Hubble with new data from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has found the first of the "missing" black holes.
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What do you call a Jupiter-like object that orbits the brown dwarf companion of a star? Is it a planet, a moon, or something new?
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The collapsing stars Eddington swore couldn't exist turned out to be everywhere, and half a century later the world handed Chandrasekhar his Nobel. How the 1.4 solar mass limit became one of the most important numbers in modern astronomy.
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Galaxies attract cold gas from the intergalactic medium and turn it into stars. But the JWST has found galaxies that aren't forming stars in the early Universe, long before they should've become quiescent. In at least one instance involving the Red Potato Galaxy, an AGN jet from a neighbouring galaxy is the likely culprit.
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Astronomers aren't certain where Fast Radio Bursts come from. But they still have utility. They can use them to find the Universe's "missing matter."
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The Milky Way has two disks, the thin disk where most of the stars dwell, and the thick disk, populated by much older stars. The ESA's Gaia mission showed us that the thick disk rotates more slowly than the thin disk. The culprit, according to powerful simulations, was a disk flip in the MW's past, driven by a merger.
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Driven from Europe by the feud, Chandrasekhar rebuilt his life in America and turned mastery-and-move-on into an art form. On his conviction that beautiful physics is true physics, and the two students he drove through blizzards to teach.
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Astronomers have conclusively identified a source of the highest energy cosmic ray protons in the Milky Way, solving a long standing puzzle near the star Altair. By combining gamma ray, radio, and X-ray data from three separate observatories, a Hiroshima University led team ruled out competing explanations and confirmed the object as a genuine “PeVatron”. These natural particle accelerators are far more powerful than anything humans have ever built and helps us in the hunt for similar sources across the Galaxy.
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Martian dust storms are some of the most fascinating and mysterious planetary surface processes ever observed, as Earth, Mars, and Saturn’s moon Titan are the only known planetary bodies to have active dust storms. However, the major difference for Mars is its dust storms can blanket the entire planet at once, resulting in the surface becoming completely unobservable and blocking out sunlight, with the scientific community concerned this might hinder robotic, and even human, space exploration. But what if covering the surface and blocking sunlight wasn’t the only issue Martian global dust storms pose for future missions?
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NASA's Psyche mission used a gravity assist maneuver at Mars to gain velocity and adjust its trajectory to its eventual target. The asteroid 16 Psyche is a metal-rich asteroid that may be the remnant rocky core of a protoplanet. The flyby not only shepherded the spacecraft on to its target, it was also an opportunity to test Psyche's science instruments and cameras. NASA has released a timelapse of the flyby.
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Spiral galaxies, including grand spirals like the Whirlpool galaxy, are plentiful. But it's still a mystery how their spiral arms form and persist for hundreds of millions of years, and why some galaxies have one, two, or three or more arms. New research based on Euclid data finds links between galaxy mass, star formation rate, and number of arms, and hints at their formation.
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Our ability to track and visualize small rocks in space is still improving. And occasionally we’ll find a space rock that will remind us of that fact. One such rock is detailed in a new paper, led by Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and recently published in Nature Astronomy, where the research team discovered what they thought was a normal, run of the mill asteroid, was actually a “dark comet”.
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On Earth, it’s hard to track events that reshape its surface, as the surface itself is being reshaped constantly by weather and tectonic or volcanic upheavals. However, the Moon is much more static, and scientists have been slowly unraveling a pattern that is noticeable in its craters - that something dramatic happened around 800 million years ago. A new paper by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), led by Dr. William F. Bottke, and accepted for publication in the Planetary Science Journal, suggests they might have found a culprit - the parent body of a family of asteroids now known as Eulalia.
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A low-number periodic comet is stalking our fair planet this summer, and putting on its best show of several generations. We’re talking about Comet 10P/Tempel. The comet is currently loitering in the early dawn sky, presenting a good target for large binoculars or a small telescope. But act fast, as the comet is taking the plunge southward in August, post-perihelion.
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In 1935 the most eminent astronomer alive stood up in a packed room and called Chandrasekhar's discovery "stellar buffoonery." The story of Arthur Eddington's years-long campaign against a result that everyone privately knew was correct.
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An international team of Earth scientists has narrowed down the class of impactor that caused the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. According to their findings, it was a rare type of rock that originated in the outer Solar System.
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Scientists have painted the most detailed portrait yet of the planetary system orbiting Barnard’s Star. Unfortunately, the picture is not encouraging, as all four planets appear to be "extremely uninhabitable."
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Astronomers have found four new white dwarfs within about 65 light years. Even though the sky has been studied thoroughly, these escaped detection. That's because they're tight binaries with red dwarf partners, and the much brighter red dwarfs hide the white dwarfs. The binaries used to share common envelopes.
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While simply finding exoplanets was an important first step in exoplanet science, more ambitious goals await. The ESA will launch PLATO in 2027 to search for rocky planets. But it will also find planets in the Venus Zone, a region bounded on its outer edge by a runaway greenhouse climate and on the inner edge by loss of atmosphere due to stellar flux. Understanding these planets will help scientists understand how Earth's path led to sustained habitability, while Venus, its sister planet, ended up with a runaway greenhouse climate.
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A Sun-like star orbits the supermassive black hole in our Milky Way so closely that it comes within the distance of Neptune's orbit of the Sun. It has a top speed of more than 8% of light speed. With such extreme motion the star gives astronomers the opportunity to test the limits of general relativity.
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The story of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who as a teenager on an ocean voyage worked out that white dwarf stars have a maximum mass of 1.4 Suns. A tour of degeneracy pressure, the relativistic insight everyone else missed, and the number that would define his life.
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Astronomers have solved a decades old puzzle about the Sun's missing silver, not by finding something new, but by modelling something old far more accurately. A revised, more realistic model of the Sun's atmosphere reveals it actually contains 55 per cent more silver than previously calculated, finally matching what meteorites have been telling us all along. It's a quiet reminder that some of the biggest revelations in astronomy come not from new data, but from asking familiar questions with sharper tools.
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Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky planet in another star's habitable zone for the very first time. It’s a milestone that brings us a step closer to answering whether life could exist beyond our Solar System. Predicted by a mathematical model before it was ever observed, and confirmed using a rare planetary alignment 48 light years away, this discovery does more than identify one intriguing world, it provides us with a whole new way to search for others like it.
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Old rocks exposed on the rim of Jezero Crater preserve a roughly 4-billion-year-old cosmic “weather report” from the solar system’s most dynamic era.
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Before Artemis astronauts land on the Moon’s surface in 2028, NASA will conduct the Artemis III demonstration mission in 2027, allowing teams on Earth and in orbit to practice rendezvous and docking operations between commercial human landing systems and the Orion spacecraft. Data from that mission, along with future uncrewed demonstration missions at the Moon,
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The Submillimeter Array's (SMA) new semi-automated alert system demonstrates how the radio interferometer quickly responds to discoveries from space-based telescopes.
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Finding microfossils of Earth’s oldest complex life is a bit like chasing an astrobiological rainbow. The eukaryotic pot of gold at rainbow’s end always seems just a bit out of reach.
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The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has a massive 570 megapixel camera, and its new image is of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. Corona Australis is one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth. It's not as well-studied as the Orion Molecular Cloud or Ophiuchus, but as DECam's new iage of Corona Australis shows, it's just as fascinating.
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