Evan Gough

Recent Articles

• 

  The Ice Giants' Magnetic Fields are Very Strange Compared to Earth's

  November 11, 2026

  Uranus and Neptune, the Solar System's ice giants, have interiors unlike the other planets. As a result, they also have magnetic fields unlike the others. They're messy and tilted, and Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to even flyby them, showed us how messy they are. New research uses models to try to understand what's going on with the pair of planets and their weird fields, and found that it's likely they change on very short timescales. They could already be much different than when Voyager 2 visited in the late 1980s.

• 

  The Chandra X-Ray Observatory Unmasks a Supernova Impostor

  November 11, 2026

  Some stars, called Luminous Blue Variables, can be confused with supernovae explosions. They exhibit similar outbursts, but unlike supernovae, which explode once and then are gone forever, these stars have periodic outbursts. New research found that one of these 'supernova impostors' is in a binary relationship with a black hole or a neutron star, and that explains its periodic outbursts.

• 

  Planets Don't Just Disappear, But They Can Wobble Out of Sight if Their Neighbour is Close Enough

  November 11, 2026

  TESS watched an exoplanet about 1,000 light years away as it repeatedly transited in front of its star for seven years. But astronomers were surprised to find that the hot Jupiter disappeared. Of course, planets don't just disappear. Something interrupted its transits from our point of view, and astronomers think they've figured out what happened. An unseen, nearby giant planet companion tugged on it until TESS couldn't see it anymore.

• 

  Automated Assembly in Space is the Future and NOM4D is Showing the Way

  November 10, 2026

  The ability to build large structures in space is maturing. The ISS, Mir, and Tiangong were built in space from pre-constructed modules, but a new program called NOM4D is taking space construction to the next level. It recently showed that a simple robot can create truss-like structures in space from premade components. Is the sky the limit for NOM4D?

• 

  Why Aging Stars Suffer A Sudden Luminosity Dip

  November 10, 2026

  When low-mass stars like our Sun age, they leave the main sequence and follow the Red Giant Branch. As they ascend this branch, their luminosity steadily increases. But there's a sort of hiccup in the path called the RGB luminosity bump, where their luminosity suddenly dips. Astrophysicists have struggle to explain this, but one astrophysicist might have the answer.

• 

  Mars' Molten Heart is Long Gone, but Some Magma Chambers May Persist

  November 09, 2026

  Mars may be more volcanically active than we thought, according to new research. The Trace Gas Orbiter detected HCl, a chemical associated with magma, at a time of year that's difficult except by volcanic origins. The new research also identified new surface fissures on Mars that could be the source of the chemical.

• 

  An Artificial CORTEX to Guide Satellite Rescue Missions

  November 09, 2026

  Thousands of so-called zombie satellites orbit Earth in the critical Low-Earth Orbit regime. They're either inactive or have stopped alerting other satellites to their presence. Researchers are building a system called CORTEX that can guide a repair satellite to autonomously dock with these zombies.

• 

  A Stellar Odd Couple at an Unusual Stage of Evolution

  November 09, 2026

  Millisecond pulsars are fascinating objects that serve as natural clocks in the Universe. They form by drawing material and angular momentum from a companion. This mass transfer can rapidly accelerate the companion's evolution to a white dwarf. Astronomers have detected a millisecond pulsar's white dwarf companion that appears to be observed just as the mass transfer completed. They can still see some of the debris.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.

• 

  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.