Universe Today Feed

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is coming in hot and heavy at this point, with various data streams from multiple instruments being reported in various papers. One exciting one will be released shortly in the Astrophysical Journal from researchers at the University of Kansas (KU), where researchers collected mid-infrared images of a part of the sky that holds galaxies from the time of the "cosmic noon" about 10 billion years ago. Their paper describes this survey and invites citizen scientists to help catalogue and classify some of their findings.

How can we turn the sun into a telescope?

At some early point in Earth's history, a collection of increasingly complex chemicals performed a new trick. They transformed themselves somehow into an energy-producing and self-replicating cell. The timing of this critical moment in Earth's history is hidden behind the haze of billions of years.

It’s a cosmic shame, that we tend to only see flat-looking, 2-dimensional views of deep-sky objects. And while we can’t just zoom out past the Andromeda galaxy for another perspective, or see the Crab Nebula from another vantage point in space, we can use existing data to simulate objects in 3D. A recent collection released by Marshall Space Flight Center’s Chandra X-ray Center and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows us familiar objects in a new way.

When China's DRO-A and B satellites were launched, their rocket failed to deliver them to their planned orbit. Even worse, the satellites were spinning out of control, unable to properly charge their solar panels. Engineers realized that there was still a way to put them on course again. They executed a series of gravitational slingshots over 123 days, using the Sun, Earth, and the Moon to raise the spacecraft's orbits and put them into their proper trajectory.

The weather gets a little wild and weird on Jupiter. How wild? Spacecraft instruments have measured strong winds, tracked fierce lightning, and found huge methane plume storms rising from deep beneath the clouds. How weird? Think: mushballs raining down like hailstones. They're made of ammonia and water encased in a water ice shell. According to planetary scientists, these mushballs plunge through the Jovian atmosphere. What's more, they probably form on the other gas and ice giants, too.

The evidence is building that the surface of Mars was warm and wet for its early history. But what form did this water take? In a new study, geologists propose that Mars has very similar features to places like Utah on Earth, where precipitation from snow or rain formed the patterns of valleys and headwaters that have been mapped from space. Some of these features would require meters deep of flowing water to deposit large boulders.

Let’s turn the sun into a telescope. In fact, we don’t have to do any work – we just have to be in the right spot.

Studying the Sun is becoming increasingly important as more and more of our infrastructure moves off the surface and into the realm where coronal mass ejections and the solar wind can begin to affect them. Scientists recognize this problem and have started devoting more and more resources to studying the Sun, specifically the "space weather" that might affect us. Recently, one of the newest members of the group of satellites focused on studying the Sun hit a milestone when the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission took on its first light.

Planetary scientists have plenty of theories about Mars and its environmental past. Two of the most widely accepted are that there was a carbon dioxide atmosphere and, at one point, liquid water on Mars' surface. However, this theory has a glaring problem: Where should the rocks have formed from the interactions between carbon dioxide and water? According to a new paper by scientists at several NASA facilities using data collected by the rover Curiosity, the answer is right under the rover's metaphorical feet.

The exoplanet K2-18b is generating headlines because researchers announced what could be evidence of life on the planet. The JWST detected a pair of atmospheric chemicals that on Earth are produced by living organisms. The astronomers responsible for the results are quick to remind everyone that they have not found life, only chemicals that could indicate the presence of life. The results beg a larger question, though: Can the JWST really ever detect life?

On any clear, moonless night, the light from the billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy can be seen arching across the sky. A large spiral galaxy, the Milky Way we see today is the result of billions of years of galactic evolution. A team of astronomers have announced the discovery of a galaxy very similar to our own but this one is less than a billion years old! Typically galaxies like the Milky Way with a developed central bulge and spiral arms are only seen in nearby galaxies suggesting it’s a process that takes time. This latest discovery challenges that theory!

The planets in our Solar System orbit the Sun along a plane extending from the solar equator. That’s typically the case for exoplanets too but just recently, a team of astronomers have found a system where a planet is in a perpendicular orbit around a binary pair! The brown dwarf system with its strange planetary companion is likely the result of three-body interactions between the stars and planet, tweaking it into the crazy orbital configuration we see today.

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft made a successful flyby of the second asteroid on its must-see list over the weekend, and sent back imagery documenting the elongated object’s bizarre double-lobed shape. It turns out that asteroid Donaldjohanson — which was named after the anthropologist who discovered the fossils of a human ancestor called Lucy — is what’s known as a contact binary, with a couple of ridges in its narrow neck.

After spending 220 days on board the International Space Station, astronaut Don Pettit is back on Earth. He returned to Earth on Sunday, April 20th, which coincides with his 70th birthday.

Where did the water we believe is on the Moon come from? Most scientists think they know the answer - from the solar wind. They believed the hydrogen atoms that make up the solar wind bombarded the lunar surface, which is made up primarily of silica. When that hydrogen hits the oxygen atoms in that silica, the oxygen is sometimes released and freed to bond with the incoming hydrogen, which in some cases creates water. But no one has ever attempted to replicate that process to prove its feasibility. A new paper by Li Hsia Yeo and their colleagues at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center describes the first experimental evidence of that reaction.

Just how powerful is the world’s most powerful telescope?

Scientists are still trying to understand the origin of multicellular life. It emerged about 1.2 billion years ago (or even earlier, according to some debated evidence). The timing of multicellular life's appearance on Earth is not the only thing being debated; so are the mechanisms behind it. New research supports the idea that multicellular life began when single-celled bacteria started grouping together.

A team of NASA scientists proposed a new initiative at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (2025 LPSC). Known as the Commercial Hall Propulsion for Mars Payload Services (CHAMPS), the

How can you fairly compare one telescope to another? It’s all in the (angular) resolution.