Universe Today
New Study Examines How Extraterrestrial Civilizations Could Become "Stellivores."
A Screw-Driven Robot Could Autonomously Mine Rocky Worlds
How Life Could Live Under the Ice on Mars
NASA's JPL Lays Off Another 325 People
Lessons From Ancient Earth's Atmosphere: From Hostile to Hospitable
Astronomers Defy the Zone of Avoidance to Find Hundreds of New Galaxies
The Zone of Avoidance is a region of the sky that's obscured by the disk of the Milky Way. The gas and dust block our view in visible telescopes, but other wavelengths like radio and infrared can pierce it to see what's on the other side. Astronomers used the MeerKAT radio telescope to survey beyond the Zone, observing hundreds of galaxies, of which only 29% were already known. This is helping to map the Great Attractor galaxy cluster on the far side of the Milky Way.
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An Otherworldly Cloud Over New Zealand
Early Black Holes Fed 40x Faster than Should Be Possible
A Spider Stellar Engine Could Move Binary Stars Halfway Across a Galaxy
Scaling Propellant Production on Mars is Hard
Is an 'Off-Year' Leonid Outburst in the Cards For November?
There are good reasons to keep an eye on the Leonid meteors this year.
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Reaction Engines Goes Into Bankruptcy, Taking the Hypersonic SABRE Engine With it
Project Hyperion is Seeking Ideas for Building Humanity's First Generation Ship
How Did Supermassive Black Holes Get So Big, So Early? They Might Have Had a Head Start
A Mission to Triton and Neptune Would Unlock Their Mysteries
Good News, the Ozone Layer Hole is Continuing to Shrink
How Webb Stays in Focus
JWST's primary mirror consists of 18 individual segments, each of which can be moved on 6 different axes of freedom. This allows the telescope to maintain perfect focus, despite changing temperatures and micrometeorite strikes on its optics. The objective was 150 nanometers of wavefront error, but the current error is down to just 65 nanometers. In early October, engineers measured the telescope's jitter and refocused it again, bringing it to its perfect alignment
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A Trash Compactor is Going to the Space Station
Using Light Echoes to Find Black Holes
The speed of light gives astronomers a special trick when examining the tangled-up gravitational well around a black hole. Researchers have proposed that they can measure the spin of a black hole because of the bizarre path that photons take in their vicinity, released by accreting matter. Some photons blast straight out, while others are lensed indirectly, and some travel around the black hole twice before escaping, hinting at the black hole's rotation rate.
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Launching Mass From the Moon Helped by Lunar Gravity Anomalies
A Star Disappeared in Andromeda, Replaced by a Black Hole
eROSITA All-Sky Survey Takes the Local Hot Bubble's Temperature
An Explanation for Rogue Planets. They Were Eroded Down by Hot Stars
WST recently turned up hundreds of free-floating rogue planets in the Orion Nebula, 42 in binary configurations. How two Jupiter-mass objects could end up orbiting one another has puzzled astronomers, but now a team of researchers thinks they know it happens. Large, hot stars in the Orion Nebula blasted the outer layers of smaller stars, eroding them away and preventing them from gaining enough mass to ignite fusion in their cores - even binary stars.
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CODEX Coronagraph Heads to the ISS on Cargo Dragon
A new space-based telescope aims to address a key solar mystery.
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Flowing Martian Water was Protected by Sheets of Carbon Dioxide
Japan Launches the First Wooden Satellite to Space
You Can Build a Home Radio Telescope to Detect Clouds of Hydrogen in the Milky Way
A Space Walking Robot Could Build a Giant Telescope in Space
New Report Details What Happened to the Arecibo Observatory
We Understand Rotating Black Holes Even Less Than We Thought
The theory of black holes has several mathematical oddities. Recent research shows our understanding of rotating black holes might not be as strong as we thought.
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Habitable Worlds are Found in Safe Places
New Glenn Booster Moves to Launch Complex 36
How Many Additional Exoplanets are in Known Systems?
NASA's TESS mission has turned up thousands of exoplanet candidates in almost as many different star systems. But if one or two planets show up in a system, that means it's aligned with Earth, and that means we should be able to see even more in the same system. In a new paper, astronomers calculate which planetary systems have room for more exoplanets, creating a list of priority targets for further study.
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Hubble and Webb are the Dream Team. Don't Break Them Up
Scientists Have Figured out why Martian Soil is so Crusty
Another Way to Extract Energy From Black Holes?
Black holes are incredible powerhouses, but they might generate even more energy thanks to an unusual effect known as frame dragging.
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Plastic Waste on our Beaches Now Visible from Space, Says New Study
Future Space Telescopes Could be Made From Thin Membranes, Unrolled in Space to Enormous Size
As we saw with JWST, it's difficult and expensive to launch large telescope apertures, relying on origami techniques to unfold the full mirror. A new paper proposes that telescope mirrors could be made out of a thin polymer that's only 200 micrometers thick. It could be rolled up inside a rocket fairing and then unrolled once it gets to space. This could allow apertures vastly larger than anything currently in space, with several working together as an interferometer.
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Voyager 1 is Forced to Rely on its Low Power Radio
Webb Confirms a Longstanding Galaxy Model
The spectra of distant galaxies shows that dying sun-like stars, not supernovae, enrich galaxies the most.
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The Aftermath of a Neutron Star Collision Resembles the Conditions in the Early Universe
New View of Venus Reveals Previously Hidden Impact Craters
Multimode Propulsion Could Revolutionize How We Launch Things to Space
China Trains Next Batch of Taikonauts
NASA Focusses in on Artemis III Landing Sites.
The Connection Between Black Holes and Dark Energy is Getting Stronger
Will Advanced Civilizations Build Habitable Planets or Dyson Spheres
Freeman Dyson proposed that advanced civilizations might eventually harvest all the energy coming from their stars by surrounding them with a swarm of solar-collecting satellites. But other astronomers have proposed that we might see all that rock go into the construction of artificial planets instead, surrounding a star with dozens of habitable worlds and captured rogue planets. If we detect a star system with a surprising number of planets, they could be artificial.
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This is What it Sounds Like When the Earth's Poles Flip
Orbital Debris is Getting Out of Control
Webb Reveals a Steam World Planet Orbiting a Red Dwarf
