Universe Today Feed

All motion is relative. That simple fact makes tracking the motion of distant objects outside our galaxy particularly challenging. For example, there has been a debate among astronomers for decades about the path that one of our nearest neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), took over the last few billion years. A new paper from Scott Lucchini and Jiwon Jesse Hand from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics grapples with that question by using a unique technique - the paths of hypervelocity stars.

Let’s rewind the clock back…oh, I don’t know, let’s say a hundred years.

Observations of a supernova explosion have revealed its shape only one day after it was first detected. The exact nature of supernovae explosions are unclear and the subject of ongoing, detailed debate. These new observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope will advance the debate.

Astronomers have found more than 6,000 exoplanets in the Milky Way. They've even begun to characterize the atmospheres of some of them. But the Milky Way has consumed many of its dwarf satellites. How have exoplanets fared in these remnants? How are they different? To answer those questions, astronomers have to find some of these planets, and a new survey is poised to do just that.

At this point in history, astronomers and engineers who grew up watching Deep Impact and Armageddon, two movies about the destructive power of asteroid impacts, are likely in relatively high ranking positions at space agencies. Don’t Look Up also provided a more modern, though more pessimistic (or, unfortunately, realistic?), look at what might potentially happen if a “killer” asteroid is found on approach to Earth. So far, life hasn’t imitated art when it comes to potentially one of the most catastrophic events in human history, but most space enthusiasts agree that it's worth preparing for when it will. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Maxime Devogèle of ESA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Coordination Centre and his colleagues analyzes a dry run that happened around a year ago with the discovery of asteroid 2024 YR4.

In March of 2024 the [DESI collaboration](https://www.desi.lbl.gov/collaboration/) dropped a bombshell on the cosmological community: slim but significant evidence that dark energy might be getting weaker with time.

Swift observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have revealed the explosive death of a star just as the blast was breaking through the star’s surface. For the first time, astronomers unveiled the shape of the explosion at its earliest, fleeting stage. This brief initial phase wouldn’t have been observable a day later and helps address a whole set of questions about how massive stars go supernova.

So I got an email from Adam Reiss. You know, the guy who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt for discovering the rate of cosmic expansion is accelerating. He pointed out a few issues with the decelerating Universe paper, and with his permission I'd like to share them with you.

Keep an eye on the sky Sunday night and early Monday morning for the Leonid meteors, and a possible second auroral storm. Once every other generation, the Lion roars. If skies are clear Monday morning, keep an eye out for one of the best annual November showers, the Leonid meteors. Also as an extra treat, the skies may stream with aurora once again.

Most people interested in space exploration already know lunar dust is an absolute nightmare to deal with. We’re already reported on numerous potential methods for dealing with it, from 3D printing landing pads so we don’t sand blast everything in a given area when a rocket lands, to using liquid nitrogen to push the dust off of clothing. But the fact remains that, for any long-term presence on the Moon, dealing with the dust that resides there is one of the most critical tasks. A new paper from Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is enough of a polymath that our last article about his research was covering a telescope at the solar gravitational lens, updates our understanding of the physical properties of lunar dust, providing more accurate information that engineers can use to design the next round of rovers and infrastructure to support human expansion to our nearest neighbor.

The Shenzhou-20 mission's three-person crew has returned home after more than a week of delays caused by damage to their spacecraft, allegedly caused by an impact with a tiny piece of space debris.

Astronomers have discovered that the famous Pleiades star cluster, otherwise known as the "Seven Sisters" is actually the bright core of a sprawling family of stars spread across nearly 2,000 light years. By combining stellar spin measurements with precise motion tracking, researchers identified over 3,000 related stars and revealed the Pleiades is twenty times larger than previously thought.

Astronomers have discovered that our Solar System is moving through the universe more than three times faster than cosmological models predict, a finding that challenges fundamental assumptions about how the universe works. By analysing the distribution of distant radio galaxies using advanced statistical methods, the team detected motion so unexpectedly rapid it earned the rare five sigma statistical significance that scientists consider definitive evidence.

Carl Sagan, along with co-author Edwin Salpeter, famously published a paper in the 70s about the possibility of finding life in the cloud of Jupiter. They specifically described “sinkers, floaters, and hunters” that could live floating and moving in the atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet. He also famously talked about how clouds on another of our solar system’s planets - Venus - obfuscated what was on the surface, leading to wild speculation about a lush, Jurassic Park-like world full of life, just obscured by clouds. Venus turned out to be the exact opposite of that, but both of those papers show the impact clouds can have on the Earth for life. A new paper by authors as the Carl Sagan Institute, led by Ligia Coelho of Cornell, argues that we should look at clouds as potential habitats for life - we just have to know how to look for it.

The next few months are likely to bring a dramatic transition for NASA, under the leadership of a new administrator who has new ideas about changing the course of the space agency.

The JWST surprised when it detected very early galaxies that were extremely luminous. This suggested that they were more massive than researchers thought they could be. Not enough time had passed for them to grow so large. New research has an explanation.