Rare Triple Conjunction Smiles at Dawn on September 19th

By David Dickinson - September 16, 2025 05:40 PM UTC | Observing
Sometimes, it seems as if the Universe is literally smiling down upon us. If skies are clear this coming Friday September 19th, be sure to wake up early to catch a bizarre celestial scene as Venus, Regulus and the slim crescent Moon huddle together in the eastern dawn. This triple play is a complicated one, evolving one of the best conjunctions for 2025.
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First Dark Matter Sub-Halo Found In The Milky Way

By Andy Tomaswick - September 16, 2025 11:32 AM UTC | Cosmology
There are plenty of theories about what dark matter is and how it might be gravitationally affecting the universe. However, proving those theories out is hard since it hardly ever interacts with anything, especially on “small” scales like galaxies. So when a research team claims to have found evidence for dark matter in our own galaxy, it's worth taking a look at how. A new paper from Dr. Surkanya Chakrabati and her lab at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) does just that. They found evidence for a dark matter “sub-halo” in the galactic neighborhood, by looking at signals from binary pulsars.
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New Bright Comet SWAN Could Perform a Surprise October Show

By David Dickinson - September 15, 2025 10:48 PM UTC | Observing
A new comet approaching from sunward could make a fine dusk appearance in October. There was chatter on the boards this past Friday September 12th, about a comet seen in the Solar Wind Anisotropies (SWAN) images near the Sun. Tentatively named SWAN25B and now formally designated as C/2025 R2 SWAN, this comet could put on a brief show in late September into October if it holds up.
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Astronomers Catch a Planet in the Act of Being Born

By Mark Thompson - September 15, 2025 10:22 PM UTC | Exoplanets
It’s rather strange to think about catching a planet in the act of being born given that the process takes millions of years but for the first time, astronomers have done just that! The evidence reveals a planet actively forming and feeding from its surrounding disk of gas and dust. The discovery of hydrogen emission from the protoplanet offers a new glimpse into the violent stages of planetary formation, revealing processes that shaped our own Solar System billions of years ago.
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“Black Hole Stars" Could Solve the Mystery of Little Red Dots

By Mark Thompson - September 15, 2025 04:34 PM UTC | Black Holes
A bizarre new type of object could solve one of astronomy's most puzzling mysteries. The James Webb Space Telescope spotted some “little red dots” and until now, it’s been thought they were galaxies. Now, a team of astronomers have come up with an alternative theory, supermassive black holes wrapped up in a thick envelope of gas and they are calling them ‘black hole stars!’
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A Rover To Mine Martian Volcanoes

By Andy Tomaswick - September 15, 2025 10:58 AM UTC | Space Exploration
Different parts of Mars have different advantages and disadvantages when it comes to their available resources, just like Earth. The polar caps are likely the most valuable in terms of their water content, which will be critical to any early stage crewed mission to the Red Planet. But to really unlock the fully potential of Mars, geologists think we’ll need to look to the volcanoes, where there is likely to be easily accessible valuable materials like nickel, titanium, and chromium, that were placed there when the volcanoes were active. Reaching those deposits on the side of some of the largest mountains in the solar system safely is a challenge, and one that is tackled in a new paper by Divij Gupta and Arkajit Aich, where they look at the necessary requirements to set up an effective mining operation on the slopes of Olympus and Elysium Mons.
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Ancient Floods and Rolling Rocks Boosts the Hunt for Life on Mars

By Mark Thompson - September 15, 2025 09:32 AM UTC | Planetary Science
David Bowie once sung ‘Is there life on Mars?’ and along with being a question in a hit song, its also a question that has driven decades of missions to the red planet. From early orbital surveys to rovers hunting for evidence that life once existed beyond Earth the search has become more and more sophisticated. Europe's upcoming Mars rover mission is one such mission and it has received an unexpected boost in its search for signs of ancient life, as two new studies reveal that natural Martian processes could deliver rich organic materials directly to the rover, eliminating the need for long distance travel to find the building blocks of life.
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A Spacecraft Could Explore 3I/ATLAS to Learn More About "Cosmic Noon"

By Matthew Williams - September 15, 2025 12:14 AM UTC | Observing
An examination of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS shows that it is likely to be a remnant of the Galaxy's “Cosmic Noon” period, ca. 9 to 13 billion years ago. An examination of the object by an active mission could provide clues about stellar and planetary formation, and maybe the emergence of life, during this early period of galactic history.
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Scientists Predict 90% Chance We'll See a Black Hole Explode Within a Decade

By Mark Thompson - September 14, 2025 10:22 PM UTC
Physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have calculated a more than 90% probability that we'll observe an exploding black hole within the next ten years. An event like this in our own celestial backyard may well be quite the spectacle but would revolutionise our understanding of physics and reveal the fundamental building blocks of everything in existence. Bold claims but a real possibility.
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Tying Theory To Practice When Searching For Dark Energy

By Andy Tomaswick - September 14, 2025 10:58 AM UTC | Cosmology
Science is a story of coming up with theories then doing our best to disprove them. That is especially true for theories on a grand, cosmological scale, though disproving them can be particularly hard. One of the most famous examples of a hard to disprove theory is that of dark energy and dark matter. In large parts of space we see unequivocal evidence that something is messing with general relativity. But down at the scale of our own solar system, there’s no evidence of it whatsoever, at least as far as we can see. A new paper from Slava Turyshev, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discusses a way scientists might be able to deal with this discrepancy - by being very, very selective with the way we test for evidence of dark matter and energy in our solar system.
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Sulphur Volcanoes on Mars May Have Warmed the Planet

By Mark Thompson - September 14, 2025 08:47 AM UTC | Planetary Science
Is it possible that Mars could have once been warm enough to support life? New research suggests that volcanic emissions billions of years ago may have created a greenhouse effect that made the red planet surprisingly hospitable, challenging our understanding of early Martian climate. The key lies in unusual sulphur compounds that ancient Martian volcanoes released into the atmosphere.
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Lasers Can Melt Through Extraterrestrial Ice Efficiently

By Andy Tomaswick - September 13, 2025 11:25 AM UTC | Space Exploration
Lasers aren’t just useful for entertaining cats or pointing out features of powerpoint slides. They can also drill holes on icy extraterrestrial bodies from comets to Mars polar caps. At least according to a new paper in Acta Astronautica by researchers at the Technical University of Dresden, who describe a new laser drill for use on icy surfaces throughout our solar system.
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This Trio Of Robots Could Explore Lunar Caves

By Evan Gough - September 12, 2025 06:59 PM UTC | Missions
Seeking refuge in caves is natural. Animals do it, and so did our ancestors. Future lunar astronauts may do the same when they visit the Moon. Lunar caves can provide protection from the harsh radiation that bathes the Moon, the wild temperature swings on its surface, and from meteorites that can damage spacesuits and equipment. But these caves need to be explored first, and new research outlines how a team of three diverse robots working together could do the job.
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A New Neutrino Detector In China Is Coming Online

By Andy Tomaswick - September 12, 2025 11:23 AM UTC | Physics
Neutrinos are one of the most enigmatic particles in the standard model. The main reason is that they’re so hard to detect. Despite the fact that 400 trillion of them created in the Sun are passing through a person’s body every second, they rarely interact with normal matter, making understanding anything about them difficult. To help solve their mysteries, a new neutrino detector in China recently started collecting data, and hopes to provide insight on between forty and sixty neutrinos a day for the next ten years.
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Predicting the Green Glow of Aurora on Mars

By Mark Thompson - September 12, 2025 08:11 AM UTC | Planetary Science
For the second time in history, the gentle glow of the aurora has been captured in Mars's night sky. It’s a phenomenon we enjoy here on Earth and we can, to a varying degree of success predict its appearance. Now a team of scientists are learning how to predict when these spectacular light shows will happen on Mars too. It's a breakthrough that could one day help protect future astronauts on the red planet while also helping us to understand these beautiful displays work in alien skies.
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Enceladus, The Life Signs That Weren't

By Mark Thompson - September 12, 2025 06:50 AM UTC | Planetary Science
I still remember the first time I saw Saturn through a 10 inch telescope when I was ten years old. It looked just like it did in pictures, a pale yellow disk circled by its stunning ring system. What I couldn't see then were Saturn's moons, including the small, icy world of Enceladus that has since become one of the most exciting targets in the search for life beyond Earth. This tiny moon shoots spectacular plumes of water from cracks in its frozen surface, plumes that contain organic molecules. But a new study suggests we shouldn’t get too excited about what these molecules actually tell us about the possibility of life.
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Rectangular Telescopes Could Find Earth 2.0

By Matthew Williams - September 11, 2025 10:49 PM UTC | Exoplanets
In a new study, a team led by [Prof. Heidi Newberg](https://faculty.rpi.edu/heidi-newberg) from the [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute](https://www.rpi.edu/) (RPI) recommended building a telescope with a triangular mirror rather than a traditional circular one. Such a telescope could greatly aid in the search for Earth analogs around nearby stars.
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Stellar Slingshots Launch the Galaxy's Fastest Stars

By Mark Thompson - September 11, 2025 10:07 PM UTC | Stars
It’s really quite reasonable to assume the stars don’t move! Indeed that was the opinion of our ancestors however we now know they are far from stationary. Imagine a star racing through space so fast it could travel from Earth to the Moon in just three minutes. These are known as hypervelocity white dwarfs and they have puzzled astronomers for years. Now, a team of researchers have finally cracked the mystery of how they get launched at such incredible speeds.
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Where Did The Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Come From?

By Evan Gough - September 11, 2025 07:48 PM UTC | Milky Way
When an interstellar object (ISO) travels through our inner Solar System, the immediate question is "Where did it come from?" There are only fleeing opportunities to study these, since their trajectories take them out of the Solar System pretty quickly. A new research effort aims to understand where the most recent ISO, 3I/ATLAS, originated.
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Hunting for Aliens in the Galaxy's Most Promising Neighbourhood

By Mark Thompson - September 11, 2025 04:08 PM UTC | Exoplanets
Are we alone in the universe? It’s a question that has, despite extensive and sometimes ingenious attempts, yet to be answered. In one of the most ambitious searches for extraterrestrial intelligence ever conducted, Chinese scientists have used the world's largest radio telescope to scan the famous TRAPPIST-1 star system for signs of alien technology. The Five hundred metre Aperture Spherical Telescope is the world's largest single dish radio telescope, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is one of its five key science objectives.
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JWST Finds An Exoplanet Around A Pulsar Whose Atmosphere Is All Carbon

By Andy Tomaswick - September 11, 2025 11:13 AM UTC | Exoplanets
Science advances through data that don’t fit our current understanding. At least that was Thomas Kuhn’s theory in his famous On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So scientists should welcome new data that challenges their understanding of how the universe works. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might just have found some data that can do that. It looked at an exoplanet around a millisecond pulsar and found its atmosphere is made up of almost entirely pure carbon.
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One Wrong Hit Could Send an Asteroid on a Collision Course with Earth

By Mark Thompson - September 10, 2025 01:47 PM UTC | Planetary Science
It was a chilly night when I peered through my 10” Meade LX200 telescope from Norfolk in the UK! I wasn’t completely convinced it would appear nor even be visible but bang on the prediction, asteroid 2002 MN drifted by my field of view and I was amazed at how accurately we could predict its path! That precision in tracking asteroid trajectories has become even more critical now that we're actively exploring how we can deflect them. A team of scientists have made a discovery about asteroid deflection that's both fascinating and sobering at the same time. Hit an asteroid in the wrong spot, and you might accidentally steer it through a "gravitational keyhole" that sending it back toward Earth years later.
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A Bi-Directional Plasma Thruster Could Deorbit Space Junk Safely

By Andy Tomaswick - September 10, 2025 11:29 AM UTC | Missions
There are plenty of labs working on solutions to Kessler Syndrome, where there’s so much debris in low Earth orbit that rockets are no longer capable of reaching it without being hit with hypersonic parts of defunct equipment. While we haven’t yet gotten to the point where we’ve lost access to space, there will come a day where that will happen if we don’t do something about it. A new paper from Kazunori Takahashi of Tohoku University in Japan looks at a novel solution that uses a type of magnetic field typically seen in fusion reactors to decelerate debris using a plasma beam while balancing itself with an equal and opposite thrust on the other side.
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Makemake's Secret Finally Revealed

By Mark Thompson - September 10, 2025 10:00 AM UTC | Planetary Science
As someone who has lectured for more years than I care to remember and written books about space, I've grown accustomed to constantly rewriting sections as new discoveries emerge. The discovery of the dwarf planet Makemake led to such rewrites, but until now we didn't know much about this elusive world. A team of scientists at the Southwest Research Institute has recently changed that with their detection of methane gas on Makemake using the James Webb Space Telescope. It's exactly the kind of discovery that sends authors like me back to the drawing board, because this finding doesn't just add another detail to Makemake's story, it fundamentally changes how we view these distant worlds.
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The Universe's Early Star Formation Wasn't Much Different Than Now

By Evan Gough - September 09, 2025 08:45 PM UTC | Stars
A team of Japanese astronomers has detected protostellar outflow jets in the outer regions of the Milky Way. This is the first detection of this type of jets in this part of the galaxy. Since this part of the galaxy is similar to the more ancient Universe, it's evidence that star formation in the modern Universe is similar to star formation in the ancient Universe.
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One Extremophile Eats Martian Dirt, Survives In Space, And Can Create Oxygen For Colonies

By Andy Tomaswick - September 09, 2025 11:44 AM UTC | Astrobiology
Extremophiles are a favorite tool of astrobiologists. But not only are they good for understanding the kind of extreme environments that life can survive in, sometimes they are useful as actual tools, creating materials necessary for other life, like oxygen, in those extreme environments. A recent paper from Daniella Billi of the University of Rome Tor Vergata , published in pre-print form in Acta Astronautica, reviews how one particular extremophile fills the role of both useful test subject and useful tool all at once.
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The Messy Habits Of Small Black Holes

By Evan Gough - September 08, 2025 11:03 PM UTC
Stellar mass black holes have only a few solar masses, and are much different from their gigantic counterparts, supermassive black holes. When these modestly-massive black holes are actively accreting matter, new research shows that the process is anything but orderly. Instead, it's characterized by different velocities, different ionization zones, and other complexities.
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