Evan Gough

Recent Articles

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

  November 06, 2026

  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.

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

  November 06, 2026

  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.

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  Asteroids' Oddball Shapes Make Deflecting Them Challenging

  November 05, 2026

  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.

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  A Mighty Wind Blew Away Gas and Made Early Galaxies Brighter

  November 05, 2026

  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 thereby making the galaxies appear brighter.

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

  November 05, 2026

  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.

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  Game Theory Helps SETI Search for Alien Civilizations

  November 04, 2026

  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.

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  Giant Impacts Help Rocky Planets Retain Their Atmospheres

  November 04, 2026

  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.

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  A Virtual Lifeless Earth Will Help Scientists Find Life on Exoplanets

  November 04, 2026

  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.

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  Stubborn Asteroids Around White Dwarfs Resist Becoming Dust

  November 03, 2026

  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.

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

  November 03, 2026

  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.

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  The JWST May Have Found Where Heavy Black Hole Seeds Formed

  November 02, 2026

  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.

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  Researchers May Have Solved a Puzzling Contradiction in the Ryugu Sample

  November 02, 2026

  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.

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  This Ancient Meteorite Hints at Mars' Warm, Wet Past

  October 30, 2026

  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.

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

  October 30, 2026

  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.

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

  October 29, 2026

  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.

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

  October 29, 2026

  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.

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

  October 29, 2026

  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.

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  NASA's New UV Space Telescope Will Launch in 2031

  October 28, 2026

  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.

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

  October 28, 2026

  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.

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  The Rubin Observatory Finds Its First Dwarf Planet Candidate

  October 28, 2026

  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.