Evan Gough

Recent Articles

• 

  Watching the First Moments in a Star's Death

  August 11, 2026

  Astronomers were fortunate when the Einstein Probe detected the difficult-to-observe initial shock break out (SBO) from a supernova. The SBO is the first electromagnetic indication that a star is going to explode, and by observing it and the aftermath, researchers were able to determine what type of progenitor star exploded, and what it's pre-explosion environment was like.

• 

  The ESCAPE Mission Will Study the Evolution of Exoplanet Atmospheres

  August 11, 2026

  Exoplanets need to be habitable for a long time for complex life to develop. To sustain habitability, exoplanets need to retain their atmospheres. But many exoplanets are exposed to extreme ultraviolet light and coronal mass ejections that can strip atmospheres away. A new mission aims to understand these processes and help exoplanet scientists identify exoplanets that can stay habitable for meaningful lengths of time.

• 

  Primordial Black Holes Can Trigger Type Ia Supernovae, and Astronomers Should be Able to Find Them

  July 30, 2026

  Primordial black holes (PBH) remain hypothetical, but that isn't stopping astrophysicists from figuring out how they could interact with other stellar objects. New research shows how PBHs, formed in the early Universe from collapsing pockets of dense subatomic matter instead of from stars, can enter white dwarfs. In some cases, that could've triggered a Type Ia supernova with particular chemical fingerprints, which should be detectable.

• 

  Radio Astronomy is Getting a Big Boost from the VLA's New Sky Survey

  July 29, 2026

  The National Radio Astronomy Observatory has completed a new survey with the updated Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. It's called the VLASS, the Very Large Array Sky Survey, and it's the most detailed radio survey of the sky ever completed. The VLA used the power of its 28 movable dishes to complete the survey.

• 

  White Dwarfs Eat More Planetary Debris Than Thought, But Magnetic Fields Hide It

  July 29, 2026

  Planetary debris disks around white dwarfs appear to be more plentiful than thought. That's because some white dwarfs are magnetic, and those magnetic fields create patches of metallic debris near the stars' poles, where it's more difficult to detect. This leads to an underestimation of debris, something new research is trying to correct.

• 

  Probing Binary Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud with the JWST

  July 29, 2026

  Astronomers want to know how universal the initial mass fraction (IMF) of galaxies is. To do they that, they need to discern binary stars in other galaxies, a difficult task. Researchers used the JWST to study the Small Magellanic Cloud and determine how many binary stars are there, since they can confuse measurements of the IMF.

• 

  Galaxy Mergers May Not Stifle Star Formation After All, According to Illustris TNG

  July 28, 2026

  In recent years, the idea that galaxy mergers are responsible for quenching galaxies has grown in importance. This paradigm says that galaxies merge, their black holes form a powerful quasar, and that quasar stifles star formation. But new results from the IllustrisTNG simulations shows that this paradigm may not be accurate.

• 

  Little Red Dots Could Be Ancient Globular Clusters, Each Dominated by a Super-Massive Star

  July 27, 2026

  Little Red Dots are one of the mysteries uncovered by the JWST. Astronomers have been trying to figure out what they are, and have come up with multiple possibilities. New research says they could be ancient Globular Clusters with supermassive stars in their centers.

• 

  Juno Measures the Heat Below Io's Restless Surface

  July 24, 2026

  Juno's Microwave Radiometer (MWR) was built peer deep down into Jupiter's massive atmosphere. But during the spacecraft's extended mission, it's been studying the Galilean moons. During two flybys of volcanic Io, the spacecraft its MWR to measure the heat flowing from deep within the moon.

• 

  The Red Potato Galaxy and its Stifling Neighbour

  July 23, 2026

  Galaxies attract cold gas from the intergalactic medium and turn it into stars. But the JWST has found galaxies that aren't forming stars in the early Universe, long before they should've become quiescent. In at least one instance involving the Red Potato Galaxy, an AGN jet from a neighbouring galaxy is the likely culprit.

• 

  Probing the Universe's Missing Matter With Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts

  July 23, 2026

  Astronomers aren't certain where Fast Radio Bursts come from. But they still have utility. They can use them to find the Universe's "missing matter."

• 

  The Milky Way Flipped its Disk Billions of Years Ago

  July 22, 2026

  The Milky Way has two disks, the thin disk where most of the stars dwell, and the thick disk, populated by much older stars. The ESA's Gaia mission showed us that the thick disk rotates more slowly than the thin disk. The culprit, according to powerful simulations, was a disk flip in the MW's past, driven by a merger.

• 

  NASA's Psyche Spacecraft Captured a Time-Lapse Video of its Mars Flyby

  July 21, 2026

  NASA's Psyche mission used a gravity assist maneuver at Mars to gain velocity and adjust its trajectory to its eventual target. The asteroid 16 Psyche is a metal-rich asteroid that may be the remnant rocky core of a protoplanet. The flyby not only shepherded the spacecraft on to its target, it was also an opportunity to test Psyche's science instruments and cameras. NASA has released a timelapse of the flyby.

• 

  Astronomers Are Still Trying to Understand How a Galaxy's Spiral Arms Form

  July 21, 2026

  Spiral galaxies, including grand spirals like the Whirlpool galaxy, are plentiful. But it's still a mystery how their spiral arms form and persist for hundreds of millions of years, and why some galaxies have one, two, or three or more arms. New research based on Euclid data finds links between galaxy mass, star formation rate, and number of arms, and hints at their formation.

• 

  Meet Our Newest Stellar Neighbours That Hid in the Glare of Other Stars

  July 20, 2026

  Astronomers have found four new white dwarfs within about 65 light years. Even though the sky has been studied thoroughly, these escaped detection. That's because they're tight binaries with red dwarf partners, and the much brighter red dwarfs hide the white dwarfs. The binaries used to share common envelopes.

• 

  Finding Venus Zone Planets with PLATO Will Show Us How Habitable Planets Evolve

  July 20, 2026

  While simply finding exoplanets was an important first step in exoplanet science, more ambitious goals await. The ESA will launch PLATO in 2027 to search for rocky planets. But it will also find planets in the Venus Zone, a region bounded on its outer edge by a runaway greenhouse climate and on the inner edge by loss of atmosphere due to stellar flux. Understanding these planets will help scientists understand how Earth's path led to sustained habitability, while Venus, its sister planet, ended up with a runaway greenhouse climate.

• 

  The Dark Energy Camera's New Image is Reminiscent of van Gogh

  July 17, 2026

  The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has a massive 570 megapixel camera, and its new image is of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. Corona Australis is one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth. It's not as well-studied as the Orion Molecular Cloud or Ophiuchus, but as DECam's new iage of Corona Australis shows, it's just as fascinating.

• 

  The Roman Space Telescope Will Find Ancient Black Holes By Watching How They Eat Stars

  July 17, 2026

  When supermassive black holes (SMBH) in a certain mass range eat a star, they first tear it apart in a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). By detecting TDE across cosmic time, astronomers can chart the growth of SMBH as the Universe aged. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help, by finding about 100 TDEs every year.

• 

  This Exoplanet Hid for 10 Years Before Astronomers Finally Found It

  July 16, 2026

  A team of astronomers have discovered a third planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. The new planet, Beta Pictoris d, is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b — the first planet discovered in the same system — and is among the lightest exoplanets ever to be imaged from the ground. After spotting the planet using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), the team found it had been hiding in archive observations spanning more than a decade.

• 

  Spiral Arms and Bars are Galactic Fuel Pumps for Star Formation

  July 15, 2026

  Astronomers thought that early galaxies were messy, clumpy, and turbulent from mergers. That means their gas was all stirred up. So what could explain the rapid star formation during the Cosmic Noon? New research shows that galaxies had well-ordered morphologies earlier than thought, and that their spiral arms and bars allowed gas to flow freely, forming more stars.