Light Pollution is Out of Control
Concern over global light pollution is growing. Astronomers are noticing its growing effect on astronomical observations, just as predicted in…
Virgin Galactic Flies Italians to Edge of Space for Its First Commercial Trip
After almost two decades of ups and downs, Virgin Galactic sent its first customers to the edge of space aboard…
Nancy Grace Roman and Vera Rubin Will be the Perfect Astronomical Partnership
The Vera Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope are two powerful astronomical instruments due to come online in…
860 Million-Year-Old Quasar Had Already Amassed 1.4 Billion Times the Mass of the Sun
It wasn't long after the Big Bang that early galaxies began changing the Universe. Less than a billion years later,…
Good News! Astronauts are Drinking Almost all of Their Own Urine
Thanks to a new subsystem, called the Brine Processor Assembly (BPA) astronauts aboard the ISS can now recover most of…
After Decades of Observations, Astronomers have Finally Sensed the Pervasive Background Hum of Merging Supermassive Black Holes
We've become familiar with LIGO/VIRGO's detections of colliding black holes and neutron stars that create gravitational waves, or ripples in…
NASA and LEGO Continue Brick-Solid Partnership with Perseverance and Ingenuity LEGO Models
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL) are busy keeping the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter functioning in Jezero Crater…
The Mars Sample Return Mission is Starting to Look Expensive
We say it all the time here at UT - getting to space is hard. It's even more hard to…
How Close Can a Planet Get to a Star and Still Be Habitable?
In exoplanetology, the ring around the star is often called the "Goldilocks zone," in reference to the 19th-century fairy tale…
A Feline in the Heavens: The Smiling Cat Nebula
A stellar nursery sounds like a placid place where baby stars go about their business undisturbed. But, of course, a…