The "Anti-Weather" Of Venus

By Andy Tomaswick - November 07, 2025 10:39 AM UTC | Planetary Science
Conditions on Venus’ surface have largely remained a mystery for decades. Carl Sagan famously pointed out that people were quick to jump to conclusions, such as that there are dinosaurs living there, from scant little evidence collected from the planet. But just because we have little actual data doesn’t mean we can’t draw conclusions, and better yet models, from the data we do have. A new paper from Maxence Lefèvre of the Sorbonne and his colleagues takes what little data has been collected from Venus’ surface and uses it to valid a model of what the wind and dust conditions down there would be like - all for the sake of making the work of the next round of Venusian explorer easier.
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Astronomers Observe a Black Hole in Another Galaxy Tearing a Star Apart

By Matthew Williams - November 07, 2025 02:08 AM UTC | Black Holes
New study reveals, for the first time, a tidal disruption event (TDE), where a black hole tears apart a star, occurring outside the center of a galaxy that produced exceptionally strong and rapidly evolving radio signals. This rare discovery shows that supermassive black holes can exist and remain active far from galactic cores, challenging current understanding of where such black holes reside and how they behave. The event’s delayed and powerful radio outbursts also suggest previously unknown processes in how black holes eject material over time.
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The JWST Puts Io's Volcanic Nature In The Spotlight

By Evan Gough - November 05, 2025 07:59 PM UTC
Trapped in a gravitational push and pull between Jupiter and other Jovian moons, Io is constantly being stretched and compressed. Heat generated by these contortions has melted pockets of the moon's interior so much that Io is our solar system's most volcanically active body. New research shows how its atmosphere is shaped both by volcanoes and by Jupiter's overpowering magnetosphere.
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Taking The Moon's Temperature With Beeswax

By Andy Tomaswick - November 04, 2025 10:55 AM UTC | Space Exploration
Sometimes space exploration doesn’t go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might not have succeeded, allowing them to try again. A group from MIT’s Space Enabled Research Group, part of its Media Lab, recently released a paper in Space Science Reviews that describes the design and testing results of a pair of passive sensors sent to the Moon on the ill-fated Rashid-1 rover.
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Trying To Find Baby Planets Swaddled In Dust

By Evan Gough - November 03, 2025 11:12 PM UTC | Planetary Science
With unprecedented detail, a team of astronomers led by MPE have imaged the youngest disks around new-born stars. Astronomers used to think that planet formation followed star formation. But these glowing, chaotic disks are hotter and heavier than expected, hinting that planets may start forming much earlier than previously thought.
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A Red Dwarf Star with a Brown Dwarf Companion is Changing our Perception of How Stars and Planets Form

By Matthew Williams - November 03, 2025 10:15 PM UTC | Stars
An international team of astronomers using the combined powers of space-based and ground-based observatories, including the W.M. Keck Observatory and Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, have discovered a brown dwarf companion orbiting a nearby red dwarf star, providing key insight into how stars and planets form.
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Want To Find More Supernovae? Follow The Light

By Evan Gough - November 03, 2025 08:57 PM UTC | Stars
Before a supernova finally explodes, its progenitor ejects massive amounts of gas into its surroundings. When the doomed star finally explodes, its blast wave slams into this material. This is one of a supernova's signatures, and researchers have figured out how to detect it.
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Magnetic Forces Funnel Gas And Dust Into Young Stars

By Andy Tomaswick - November 03, 2025 05:16 PM UTC | Stars
Star formation has a lot of complex physics that feed into it. Classical models used something equivalent to a “collapse” of a cloud of gas by gravity, with a star being birthed in the middle. More modern understandings show a feature called a “streamer”, which funnels gas and dust to proto-stars from the surrounding disc of material. But our understanding of those streamers is still in its early stages, like the stars they are forming. So a new paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Pablo Cortes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his co-authors is a welcome addition to the literature - and it shows a unique feature of the process for the first time.
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