Universe Today
Scientists Detect Rare Type of Wood Alcohol in Space
As part of the ALMA COMPASS Large program, an international research team has detected a rare form of methanol in space for the first time.
Observing
Astronomy observing tips and guides
Recent Articles
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Orionid, Taurid Meteors Haunt October Skies
Fall meteor season has begun. Late October not only sees dusk falling ever earlier as ghouls and goblins walk the Earth on Halloween, but it also sees the peak of two fine annual meteor showers kicking off Halloween season: the Orionid and Taurid meteor showers.
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Webb Observes "Extreme Debris Disks," Providing a Window into the Early Solar System
In the early history of our solar system, scientists theorize that a Mars-sized object called Theia smashed into the infant Earth, creating the Earth-Moon system. Using Webb, astronomers are studying young star systems to learn more about the early Solar System's evolution.
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Thousands of Black Holes Could Be Lurking in Our Backyard—and You Can Help Find Them
According to stellar evolution models, there should be hundreds of millions of black holes floating around in our galaxy. But so far we’ve only found 70. That’s in large part because they are so hard to find, but a citizen science project from the University of Southampton is actively seeking out these hidden monsters with the help of tens of thousands of amateur astronomers through a project on Zooniverse called [Black Hole Hunters](https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/cobalt-lensing/black-hole-hunters).
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New Simulations Connect the First Galaxies to the Universe We See Today
In a recent study, researchers at the international MEGATRON project used some of the most detailed simulations of the early Universe to investigate how the first stars and galaxies formed.
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XRISM Makes First-Ever Detection of a Pulsar Feeding from a Companion's Stellar "Wind"
Using data from the Japan-led XRISM observatory, astronomers have directly observed a giant star’s stellar wind captured by its compact companion (triggering X-ray flares) for the first time.
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NASA's Hubble Marks its 200,000th Orbit by Watching Lensed Supernova
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope completed its 200,000th orbit around Earth on Sept. 19th and marked this milestone with observations that could help refine astronomers' measurements of cosmic expansion (aka. the Hubble Constant).
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Catch a Rare Lunar Occultation of Jupiter Plus Saturn at Opposition in Early October
It’s a busy skywatching month ahead. The first full week of October sees two top-notch skywatching events, with Saturn reaching opposition, and the Moon occulting Jupiter for North America on October 6th. This month’s occultation of Jupiter by the Moon is one of the best-placed and top skywatching events for 2026, while Saturn puts on a fine show near opposition.
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Measuring the Distance Between Quasar Pairs Just Got Easier
A new way to accurately measure the distance between quasar pairs is showing promise through University of Alberta research.
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Why the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope Had to Tweak Nature’s Perfect Sunflower Spiral
Scientists love taking inspiration from nature. The evolutionary processes that have created such a diverse panoply of life on Earth can be a great source of ideas in solving technical problems. One such example is the pattern of sunflower seeds - they are arranged in a mathematically optimized pattern known as a Vogel spiral, and the international team building the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in Australia decided to lay out their antennas in a similar pattern. But, as they report in a paper recently published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, when they did so they found a huge blind spot in the data which hints that maybe this particular natural pattern might need to be modified to work well for this particular application.
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JWST Finds Dynamic Structural Evolution in Chariklo’s Rings
When we think of asteroids, we often think of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that contains the majority of the known asteroids in our solar system. However, our solar system hosts several other populations of asteroids and icy rocks, including the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that orbit in Jupiter’s orbit, and the icy bodies and comets of the Kuiper Belt. But there’s one population of asteroids that often gets overlooked called Centaurs, primarily because their orbits are not in a fixed location and instead whose orbits cross the orbits of the outer planets.
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Following Neptune Through Opposition 2026
Never seen Neptune for yourself? Late September 2026 presents an ideal opportunity to cross the outermost ice giant off of your ‘life list,’ as the planet reaches opposition for 2026, rising opposite to the setting Sun and riding high to the south towards local midnight.
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Researchers Develop a Way to Check the Weather on a Exoplanet
Scientists from Trinity have developed a powerful way to unravel the changing weather patterns on distant worlds. Using this approach, they discovered that the weather on a well-studied brown dwarf, “SIMP 0136”, previously linked with Northern Lights-like phenomena, is largely shaped by just two dominant processes: changes in temperature and the vertical structure of its clouds.
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Catching 2026 Jovian Moon Mutual Eclipse Season
It’s that time of the decade again. Late 2026 going into early 2027 is a special time for the major Jovian moons, as they trade places passing one in front of another as seen from our Earthly point of view. We call this mutual transit-eclipse season, a favorable time to catch the complex interplay of Jupiter’s major moons.
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A New Catalog of Close to 3,000 Supernova Challenges Theories on Dark Energy
The most comprehensive catalogue of exploding white dwarf stars ever assembled has revealed new clues about dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.
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Earth From Orbit Is Unpredictable and Messy. Could 'Liquid' AI Clear the View?
Monitoring Earth from above is a messy, inconsistent business. Clouds can block a satellite view, the angle of the Sun can create huge shadows, and orbital paths might not take a system across the same general area for weeks. That inconsistency is hard to deal with for traditional software, and can even confuse standard deep learning algorithms. But, according to a new review paper by researchers Raul-Alexandru Gorgan and Dorian Gorgan of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, there’s a new type of frontier AI that could be able to help - bio-inspired Liquid Neural Networks.
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eROSITA's Second Data Release Catalog Delivering the Most Comprehensive High-Energy Census of the Cosmos to Date
The eROSITA Consortium has issued the survey's second data release (DR2), nearly doubling the previously known eROSITA X-ray sources to two million.
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New Revelations About the Origin of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS
UK astronomers have uncovered new clues about the origin of 3I/Atlas – only the third known object from beyond our Solar System ever spotted in our cosmic neighbourhood.
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New Research Says that Early Galaxies Could be Sending us Neutrinos
Those "Little Red Dots" discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, galaxies that existed during the very early Universe, could be sending neutrino particles that are reaching us today.
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How to Land a Rocket Launch ‘Space Jellyfish’
What used to be a rare sight gracing the twilight sky is now becoming strangely commonplace. If you live on either U.S. coast, you have to good chance at seeing what’s become a common sky scene in our modern technocene era: a space launch jellyfish.