The Universe is Bending Light, and Astronomers Need Your Help to Find it

By Mark Thompson - April 26, 2026 10:07 PM UTC | Extragalactic
Einstein told us that massive objects bend light and he was of course, right. Across the universe, giant galaxies are acting as natural telescopes, warping and distorting the light of objects behind them into spectacular arcs and rings. Now the Euclid space telescope wants your help to find them and the scale of the hunt is unlike anything attempted before.
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Mining the Solar System to Build a New World

By Mark Thompson - April 26, 2026 09:56 PM UTC | Space Exploration
If humans are ever going to live permanently on Mars, someone is going to have to work out where all the raw materials, the food, they oxygen or the material for the structures to name just a few. A new study has tackled that unglamorous but absolutely critical question and the answer involves robots, asteroids, and one of the most complex supply chains ever designed.
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The Planet Haul That Changes Everything.

By Mark Thompson - April 26, 2026 09:43 PM UTC | Exoplanets
NASA's planet hunting telescope has been busy. A new study has just sifted through the light of over 83 million stars and emerged with more than 11,000 potential worlds, including a confirmed giant planet orbiting a distant star. The results don't just add to our catalogue of planets. They fundamentally change where we look for them.
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Another Instrument Shut Down on Voyager 1 to Extend its Interstellar Mission

By Matthew Williams - April 26, 2026 05:39 PM UTC | Space Exploration
On April 17th, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent commands to shut down an instrument aboard Voyager 1 called the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP. The nuclear-powered spacecraft is running low on power, and turning off the LECP is considered the best way to keep humanity's first interstellar explorer going.
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Webb Finds Water-Ice Clouds on Nearby Super-Jupiter

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - April 26, 2026 04:05 AM UTC | Exoplanets
The giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—have challenged our understanding of planetary formation and evolution. Specifically, their atmospheric formations and compositions have provided awe-inspiring images from spacecraft and given scientists key insights into the interior mechanisms of these massive worlds. But what about exoplanets? What can their atmospheres teach scientists about their formation, evolution, composition, and interior mechanisms? And how do longstanding exoplanet models stack up against the real thing?
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TOI-201 Planets Are Wobbling Out of Our Line of Sight

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - April 25, 2026 04:20 AM UTC | Exoplanets
It turns out that even after studying our solar system in depth and discovering more than 6,100 exoplanets across more than 4,500 exoplanetary systems, not all solar systems are created equal. The longstanding notion is that planets orbit almost entirely in the same orbital path, also called an orbital plane. But what if an exoplanetary system was found to have exoplanets that not only orbit in different planes, but also exhibits changing behavior regarding when they pass in front of their star?
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JWST Hunts for an 'Earth-Moon' Twin in a Habitable Zone, But the Star Has Other Plans

By Andy Tomaswick - April 25, 2026 02:08 AM UTC | Exoplanets
The Moon has played a huge role in the development of Earth. It stabilizes the planet, tempered dramatic climate swings, and possibly even provided the tidal heating that might have led to the first life forms. So it’s natural we would want to find a similar Earth/Luna system somewhere else in the cosmos. But astronomers have been searching for one for years at this point to no avail. And a new paper from Emily Pass and her colleagues at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Chicago describes using the James Webb Space Telescope to track some of the most promising exomoon candidates - only to be foiled by the star they were orbiting.
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See the Moon Occult Regulus for The Americas Saturday Night

By David Dickinson - April 24, 2026 02:18 PM UTC | Observing
Much of visual astronomy requires nothing more than clear skies, keen eyes, and patience. If you’re out skywatching Saturday evening and live in North or South America, watch for the waxing gibbous Moon pairing with Regulus at dusk. For a privileged region, the Moon will actually blot out or occult the star, in one of the best-placed lunar occultations of a bright star for 2026.
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This Bathtub Ring of Minerals is More Evidence for an Ancient Warm, Wet Mars

By Evan Gough - April 23, 2026 08:29 PM UTC | Planetary Science
NASA's MSL Curiosity rover found a bathtub ring-like deposit of zinc, manganese, and iron in Gale Crater. These metals precipitate out of water in the right conditions, and there's not really any other way they could've become concentrated here. Adding to the excitement, these deposits also form in lakes on Earth, where the concentrated metals are food for some types of bacteria.
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The Mechanics of Alien Waves

By Andy Tomaswick - April 23, 2026 02:02 PM UTC | Planetary Science
One of the most dramatic and memorable scenes from Interstellar comes from Miller’s planet - and if you don’t want a spoiler for an 11 year old movie, feel free to skip to the next paragraph. When the crew arrives on this potential new home for humanity, they are faced with a literal 1.2 km high wall of water bearing down on them quickly. It’s a great representation of how waves on other planets can act differently than on Earth. Admittedly, according to Kip Thorne, the scientific advisor for that movie, those waves are actually caused by the planet’s proximity to a local black hole rather than the wind that forms our waves here.
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Two Worlds Where the Sun Never Moves

By Mark Thompson - April 23, 2026 10:50 AM UTC | Exoplanets
One side is scorched to over 200 degrees, while the other is plunged into a darkness so cold it falls below minus 200. Welcome to TRAPPIST-1b and 1c, two rocky worlds that have just revealed the first ever climate maps of Earth sized planets beyond our Solar System. The James Webb Space Telescope has been watching, and what it found tells us something profound about where life might, and might not exist in our Galaxy.
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The Stars Feeding our Galaxy’s Monster

By Mark Thompson - April 23, 2026 10:42 AM UTC | Milky Way
At the heart of our Galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole four million times the mass of our Sun. For decades, astronomers have watched mysterious gas clouds drifting towards it on almost identical paths, wondering where they came from and why. Now, a team of researchers think they have finally cracked the puzzle and the answer involves two massive stars locked in a violent embrace!
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Exploding Stars, Black Holes, and the Forbidden Gap

By Evan Gough - April 22, 2026 10:32 PM UTC | Black Holes
An international team led by Monash University has uncovered evidence of a rare form of exploding star, helping to shed light on one of the most cataclysmic events in the universe. At the end of their lives, most massive stars collapse into black holes—objects with gravity so strong that not even light can escape. But some are completely destroyed in pair-instability supernova explosions. This can explain the so-named "Forbidden Gap" in black hole masses.
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