Universe Today

Studying the interiors of planets is essential for understanding planetary formation, evolution, and their ability to potentially host life as we know it. To accomplish this, researchers use a combination of Earth as an analog, computer models, meteorites, and data collected from other planetary bodies for studying their interior compositions. As a result, scientists have determined that the elements of magnesium and silicon are the most abundant planetary building blocks. And, under extreme pre

Astronomers using the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) zeroed in on a wispy-looking region of the Carina Nebula and found a ghostly looking cloud seemingly floating in isolation among the other clouds of gas and dust. Just in time for Hallowe'en, although, it turns out that little cloud isn't the soul of departed stars. Instead, it's a region of the nebula has been actively engaged in creating batches of hot, young new stars.

Star formation is a complicated process. It involves metallicity, gas temperature and density, dust grains, and stellar feedback from existing stars. Sometimes, studying all these factors and how they work means studying some of Nature's most beautiful structures, like the Cat's Head nebula in the Carina Nebula.

The latter half of the 20th century saw a major expansion of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), accompanied by corresponding advances in Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). A key development was the first interstellar SETI and METI experiments: Project Ozma and the Arecibo Message.

Earth may not have needed comets and asteroids to deliver its water after it formed and cooled. Instead, water creation could have been part of the planet's formation process. New research explains how, and even shows that water creation could be a part of every rocky planet's formation.

The torrent of corona related discoveries keeps coming. Lately we’ve covered a variety of potential solutions to the “coronal heating problem” - why the Sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface. Now, a paper led by a team of researchers from the University of Newcastle, Indian Institute for Astrophysics, and University of Sheffield, offers another answer - that we’ve been viewing the “spicules” that form in the lower solar atmosphere all wrong.

Living on the Moon, with either trained astronauts or regular civilians, could become a regular occurrence in the near future. However, it’s easier said than done, as scientists and engineers continue developing new and advanced ways for protecting humans in the harsh lunar environment, which contrasts the mild and habitable temperatures of the Earth. The most important aspect is focusing on keeping humans alive, and this includes temperature regulation within the habitats. However, how can you

Virgin Galactic is back in the spaceflight spotlight with the unveiling of a shiny new object: an updated Delta-class suborbital space plane with an exotic name.

NASA has committed to launching a new, more powerful UV space telescope. Named UVEX, the UltraViolet EXplorer, it will launch in 2031. It's about 100 times more powerful than its predecessor, GALEX, whose mission ended in 2013. UVEX will perform a survey in UV that will complement infrared surveys by other telescopes.

Betelgeuse has a close-orbiting companion that disturbs the red supergiant into an egg-like shape. New observations show how the two stars interact and how this could help explain the varying brightness of Betelgeuse.

Perhaps the biggest mystery we face is life on Earth started. One hypothesis says that comets, which are known to carry important chemicals in abiogenesis, delivered these compounds to Earth, leading to the appearance of life. But new research concludes that that is highly unlikely.

The Vera Rubin Observatory found a distant Solar System object before its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time even got started. The object is a dwarf planet candidate named 2026 ED138, and if confirmed, it will be one of the largest dwarf planets beyond Neptune. It may be up to 1500 km in diameter.

Time and time-keeping is a hot topic once again, as many of us ‘fall back’ to Standard Time this coming weekend. Another time-related dilemma was also addressed this month, when a key conference did away with the leap second and the alignment of Universal Time (UT1) with Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). Somewhere off in the distant future, we’ll need to add minutes to the clock to come back into sync, up to and perhaps including a 'leap hour.' Accounting for time is fascinating (if a bit break-

There weren’t any humans strapped into the bucket seats of the Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission. But there were two anthropomorphic mannequins made to mimic human bone and soft tissue, but also equipped with hundreds of radiation sensors spread throughout their body as part of the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment. A recent paper led by Paweł Bilski of the Institute for Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and published in the journal Radiation Measurements, reports

Finding an Earth-like world beyond the solar system is the Holy Grail of exoplanet research, and the field has experienced incredible technological advancements in searching for and identifying exoplanets since the first exoplanet was discovered in 1995. This includes both ground- and space-based telescopes, specifically the powerful James Webb Space Telescope. However, directly imaging exoplanets remains elusive, primarily due to the enormous technological challenge of imaging a point of light

In 1985, the physicist Heinz R. Pagels wrote, "Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the youung, but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event." In the decades since then, astronomers have drawn closer and closer to figuring out what actually goes in the veiled stellar nurseries throughout the Universe. The tale of starbirth we know today invokes collapse of clouds of gas and dust into prestellar cores, but it still has many unknowns, such as the role of magnetic fields

When a star like our Sun reaches its end, it becomes a kind of zombie star called a white dwarf. These bodies have left fusion behind and will radiate only remnant heat for a long, long time. Before they become white dwarfs, they expand, engulf, and destroy any nearby planets. Astronomers have spotted a debris disk around a white dwarf, made from the dust of destroyed planets. Observations show that two new resurrected planets have formed in this disk, creating dead planets orbiting a dead star.

Dense stellar environments were common in the early Universe. These environments fostered more numerous stellar collisions, and some of those would've been mergers that formed very massive stars. Those stars would've exploded as supernovae, becoming massive black holes, the potential seeds for today's supermassive black holes.

Exoplanets extremely close to their stars are expected to have lost their atmospheres. But one of them, TOI-561 b, seems to have a thick atmosphere. Understanding how this super-Earth has an atmosphere is challenging.