NewZinoo: Universe Today latest news

Tech - Universe Today - 3 hours ago

Strange Signals Called Long-period Radio Transits Come From Cataclysmic Variables

Long-period Radio Transients are sources that emit repeating radio and x-ray signals. The signals are polarized and coherent, and are similar to pulsars in some respects. But the type of astrophysical object responsible for them has been vigorously debated. New research says that at least one of them comes from a cataclysmic variable, a binary star where a white dwarf and a red dwarf orbit closely.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 hours ago

New Solar System Models Show Earth Is No Fluke

Astrobiologists use new starting points to produce ‘organic’ models of our solar system’s formation.

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, With Some Help From a Korean Spacecraft

A SpaceX Falcon upper stage crashed into the Moon on August 5th. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of the crash site from different viewing angles and with different sunlight angles. The images showed that the crater is about 18 meters wide and about 3 meters deep. SpaceX says the crash was an accident.

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

Mars's Funky Moon Deimos was Shaped by an Impact

Mars' moon Deimos has a large crater on its southern pole. It's also covered by a layer of regolith so deep it buries many other, smaller craters. New research shows that an impact is responsible for both, and that the moon is rather fragile and porous, like a rubble pile asteroid.

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

How Gas Filaments and Interfilaments Feed Star Formation in Monoceros R2

Researchers studied gas flows in the Monoceros R2 star forming region to understand how gas is channeled into star forming hubs. By tracing the flow of carbon monoxide, they found that a system of hub-filaments and interfilaments are responsible for feeding gas into star-forming locations. The filaments move most of the gas, but the interfilaments play a role too, especially by feeding more gas into the main filaments.

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

Catching An 'Almost Total' Lunar Eclipse on August 28th

So, did you miss the August 12th total solar eclipse? Like lots of humanity, we sat out the celestial drama of this month's solar eclipse, both total and partial. But the good news is, a large swath of the world can still catch the eclipse season spirit, with a deep, nearly total partial lunar eclipse next week. The event is the last eclipse of four (two lunar and two solar) for 2026. This also marks the current end of the second eclipse season for 2026, which began with the total solar eclipse ...

Tech - Universe Today - 1 day ago

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 4: Looking For Us

Some signs of an alien civilization are easier to spot than signs of life itself. On technosignatures, from CFCs and industrial gases to the pandemic dip in pollution, and why Earth's most detectable moment might be right now.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Webb Captures the Treasure Chest at the Heart of the Carina Nebula

This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month takes us to a fantastical realm within our home galaxy, where piercing starlight and billowing winds sculpt dust clouds into inventive shapes. This scene is from the Carina Nebula, which lies just 7500 light-years away in the constellation Carina (the Keel).

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Pluto Planetary Science is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

Something's wetting the surface of dwarf planet Pluto along the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, and planetary scientists have found a good explanation for it. A recent study of new Horizons images taken during the 2015 flyby revealed evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising up through cracks in Sputnik Planitia. That's the giant heart-shaped glacial basin we see in all the Pluto images taken by the spacecraft.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

The Fastest Star in the Milky Way Will Test Relativity

Astronomers have discovered another S star, the population of stars that orbits the Milky Way's SMBH. This one is the fastest of them all, and also comes closest to the SMBH. It will let astronomers test relativity, especially the Lense-Thirring effect.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Interstellar Travel IV: Solar, Magnetic, and Directed-Energy Sails

In our fourth installment in the Interstellar Travel series, we'll examine solar sails, magnetosails, and directed-energy propulsion (DEP), which are currently the most plausible methods for reaching another star system within a human lifetime.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Are Mega-Constellations Sleepwalking Low Earth Orbit into Runaway Chaos?

It seems the overwhelming majority of the time when we write about satellite megaconstellations, it’s as a warning. That’s not because they aren’t useful, but because they hold the potential to completely destroy our access to space if not managed properly, and possibly cause a whole bunch of Earth-based devastation as well. So it probably won’t come as a surprise when there is yet another paper from a leading expert on space debris pointing out the potential hazards of the latest crop of satell...

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Racing to Build a Radio Telescope on the Moon

Remember the “Wow!” signal? That high energy radio signature happened in 1977, when the Earth was much “quieter” in the radio band. If it were to happen today, it probably wouldn’t even move the needle on the background noise of human radio chatter. Signals from satellites, radar, and other human technology have crowded out extraterrestrial radio signals, limiting our ability to monitor the heavens for signals like the still unexplained one received in 1977. What’s more, the ionosphere partially...

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Whoa! The JWST's Ancient Galaxies Are Much More Massive Than Thought

When the JWST peered into the ancient Universe, it found surprisingly massive galaxies. These galaxies were so massive they challenged our understanding of how quickly galaxies can assemble. But new research says that multitudes of low-mass stars are hiding in these galaxies, and they're actually even more massive than we thought. When will it end?

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 3: Reading the Face of a Planet

A single pixel of light holds astonishing detail. How ocean glint, rotational mapping, and the vegetation red edge let us read a distant planet's oceans, continents, and even forests, all without ever resolving it as more than a point.

Tech - Universe Today - 2 days ago

Life On Earth May Have Had A Cold Start

Nitrous oxide (otherwise known as laughing gas) is likely a key atmospheric component of life in the cosmos.

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

Even Near a Supermassive Black Hole, Stars Enrich the Interstellar Medium

Astronomers know that evolved AGB stars shed their outer layers, contributing to the makeup of the interstellar medium. But new JWST observations show this can happen even near a supermassive black hole, where powerful radiation could obliterate molecules.

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

Astronomers Finally See the Twisted Magnetic Fields That Drive Protostar Jets

For decades, scientists have theorized that young protostar jets are shaped and driven by complex, twisted magnetic fields. But they couldn't detect them. Now, thanks to ALMA, they've found them around a young binary protostar.

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

JWST Peeks at Callisto’s Ancient Scars

Of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, Callisto is the one that gets the least attention. Io is constantly being resurfaced by volcanoes. Europa has a giant liquid water ocean. And Ganymede has its own magnetic field that interacts with its parent planet in weird ways. Callisto, by comparison, seems sedate, with its ancient, crater-saturated surface seemingly frozen in time. But new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows that even this most benign of the Big Four moons is more active t...

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

A Quantum Trick for Spotting Gravitational Waves

Gravitational wave astronomy has seen plenty of improvements since the original signal was captured in 2015. Despite that, it remains an engineering challenge to actually create the detectors needed for the precise measurements that gravitational waves require. A new NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant is funding a concept from a team led by Paul Stankus at Brookhaven National Laboratory that could potentially solve some of those engineering problems - by using quantum mechanics.

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 2: A Machine to Find Another Earth

The Habitable Worlds Observatory is being built for one purpose: to directly image another living Earth. Inside the coronagraph that must block ten billion times the planet's light, the picometer-stable mirror we don't yet know how to build, and the messy problem of reading an atmosphere.

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

Mars Curiosity Rover Discovers Massive Field of Polygons

The surface of Mars is home to some of the most breathtaking and awe-inspiring landscapes in the solar system. This is primarily due to the Red Planet lacking several re-surfacing processes that Earth possesses, including plate tectonics, volcanism, and flowing water. While Mars does have dust storms, this has done little to reshape the planet’s surface, which has remained largely undisturbed for billions of years. However, this near-pristine landscape has enabled scientists to look back in time...

Tech - Universe Today - 3 days ago

MOTHRA Shows Us A Star Being Recycled in the Helix Nebula

Astronomers used new MOTHRA telescope in Chile to image the famous Helix Nebula. They found 22 glowing shock waves where stellar debris from a dying star collided with interstellar gas. After colliding with gas, stellar fragments remain intact for just 10,000 years, the team estimates. The observations show how dying stars are recycled and return material to the interstellar medium to form new stars and planets.

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

Webb Captures Clearest Image Yet of the Lion Nebula

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured images of NGC 2392 (also known as the Lion Nebula), which Hubble previously imaged in 2000.

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

Massive Exoplanets Could Form Around Supermassive Black Holes

Black holes aren't just engines of inexorable destruction. They're complex regions of space and time, and under the right conditions, giant planets can form in their AGN disks.

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

NASA's SkyFall Mars Helicopters Will Feature a Revolutionary Antenna Design

Engineers developed a unique fabric-based design for a ground-penetrating radar that will be a key instrument on NASA’s SkyFall Mars helicopters. The hardware will enable the SkyFall mission’s trio of planetary rotorcraft to use ground-penetrating radar to study the Martian subsurface.

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

The JWST Little Red Dots Could Be 'Black Hole Stars'

Little red dots have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in JWST data from the Universe’s deep past. Their ‘powering engines’ might resemble a newly discovered phenomenon dubbed a “black hole star”—an early, rapidly growing black hole wrapped in dense gas. This object, described in a study published today in Nature by researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and international collaborators, may help explain how billion-solar-mass black holes formed so soon afte...

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

Nuking An Asteroid on Short Notice Could Save Us

Readers of a certain age will remember a golden area of asteroid films, capstoned by two with very different endings. Deep Impact engrained the devastating consequences of letting a large piece of rock hit our planet, whereas Armageddon, though arguably the more kitschy of the two films, was an uplifting story about technical ingenuity and sacrifice. And now, the central crux of that movie’s storyline - essentially blasting an asteroid with a nuclear detonation - is taking center stage as our la...

Tech - Universe Today - 4 days ago

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 1: The Atmospheric Fingerprint

If an alien civilization could see Earth only as a single pale blue dot, what could they learn? We start with transit spectroscopy, the biosignature cocktail of oxygen, methane, ozone, and water, and why even the James Webb will struggle to find life.

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

The Planet That Lied About Its Own Spin

A new study warns that astronomers measuring the rotation of distant exoplanets may often be measuring atmospheric winds instead, since the clouds of Venus circle the planet roughly 60 times faster than Venus itself actually spins. Kane proposes using multi-wavelength observations to correct for this, work that will matter enormously once the European Space Agency's PLATO mission launches in 2027 and, researchers predict, discovers several hundred Venus like exoplanets.

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

The Sun Doesn't Care About Your Flight Schedule

New research shows that extreme space weather can significantly raise radiation exposure on commercial flights and increase electronic faults in aircraft systems. A severe 1956 scale solar storm could expose passengers to a year's worth of radiation in a single flight, and the researchers point to last year's Airbus A320 grounding, triggered by a solar radiation linked flight computer fault, as proof this isn't theoretical. To address the gap, the team has proposed a new aviation specific radiat...

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

The Brightened Night Sky Nobody Actually Wanted

A new study modelling Reflect Orbital's proposed constellation of giant orbital mirrors finds their light pollution would be severe. A single 54 metre satellite would appear four magnitudes brighter than the full moon to anyone in its beam, and its scattered glow would outshine moonlight across the sky from 14 kilometres away, remaining visible from over 30 kilometres out. With the pilot satellite already approved by the FCC despite astronomer objections, and up to 50,000 mirrors planned by the ...

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

Hubble Reveals that Star Formation is Slowing Down in the Andromeda Galaxy

A team of scientists led by the University of Washington has studied how star formation is declining in the Andromeda galaxy using highly detailed Hubble surveys.

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

The Tarantula That Lost Its Fire

A new composite image combining data from Chandra, Hubble, Webb and the retired Spitzer telescope has helped astronomers solve a long standing puzzle in the Tarantula Nebula, a star forming region 160,000 light years away. Young, massive stars there should be heating enough gas to emit X-rays, but observations showed far less X-ray emission than predicted.

Tech - Universe Today - 6 days ago

Upgraded Sardinia Radio Telescope To Continue Probing Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts

Largest Italian radio telescope located on an out of the way mountain plateau in southern Sardinia sheds light on the cosmos’ still misunderstood Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

Tech - Universe Today - 7 days ago

Another First for the JWST: It Detects Three Supermassive Black Holes in the Same Galaxy

Astronomers working with the JWST have found a galaxy only 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang that contains three black holes. Two are close to the galaxy's center and will merge soon. The third is more distant, and is expected to merge much later. The discovery shows that black hole mergers were an important contributor to the masses of the SMBH we find in galaxies today.

Tech - Universe Today - 7 days ago

Earth's Magnetosphere Might Not Protect Us From Superstorms After All

Science seems like a straightforward endeavour. You come up with a hypothesis, collect data to prove or disprove it, and analyze that data to see if the hypothesis is right. But anyone who actually does science will tell you many times it’s not that straightforward. And one of the most common complexities is in data analysis. A new paper suggests that one such complexity, known as regression to the mean, might be causing us to massively underestimate how severe solar storms can truly be.

Tech - Universe Today - 7 days ago

A Rare Extragalactic Stellar Stream Reveals Hidden Dark Matter

Scientists have discovered a rare star formation hidden in a distant galaxy, unlike anything seen before beyond the Milky Way. What’s more, the discovery offers a brand new way to measure the distribution of dark matter in distant galaxies.

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

The Rooms We Build To Survive In, And The Ones We Build To Live In

What does a home actually need to do for us, beyond keeping the weather out? Engineers at MIT have started mapping the answer for astronauts heading to the Moon and Mars, tracing exactly how the walls, layouts and lighting around a person shape their stress, their loneliness and their sense of belonging. It turns out the science of surviving a place and the science of living in one are not the same thing at all, and I have spent enough of the last year thinking about that difference to know how ...

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

The Ingredients For Planets Turned Up Astonishingly Early

Planet building was supposed to be one of the universe's slow projects, something that only got going billions of years after the Big Bang. New research suggests otherwise. The raw materials for rocky worlds, and perhaps even the water needed for life, may have been ready to go just 100 million years after the Big Bang, long before the first galaxies had even taken shape.

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

A Massive Stream of Gas Tilted This Planet-Forming Disk

Astronomers found evidence that a giant stream of gas flowing into the GW Orionis young triple-star system may have tilted its planet-forming disk, offering a new explanation for why some planetary systems are misaligned. The next step is to search for shock fronts in the system, and to search for more of these massive streams of gas in other systems.

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

NASA Wants to Float Microscopic 'Tracers' on Sunlight to Map the Edge of Space

The atmospheric is a dynamic place, and just how well we understand that dynamism depends on what part of the atmosphere it is. Low altitudes can be reached by traditional balloons, with full suites of sensing equipment. Higher reaches are the domain of satellites, with their zippy orbits allowing them to travel through the less dense regions. But there a section scientists call the “ignorosphere”, between 30-100 kilometers up that still plays a major role in global climate dynamics, but which a...

Tech - Universe Today - 8 days ago

Amazing Views of Wednesday's Total Solar Eclipse

It was an eclipse for the ages. This past week, many an eclipse chaser and the ‘eclipse curious’ made the journey to stand in the shadow of the Moon, for the only total solar eclipse of 2026. Viewers across northeastern Spain had thrilling views of a low to the horizon eclipse at sunset, while viewers to the north and across Iceland had dicier, cloudy skies to contend with. Here are amazing reader views of the eclipse, along with a few special ones from space.

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

Two Million X-Ray Sources, and One Cluster That Doesn't Fit

The eROSITA telescope has released its second great catalogue of the X-ray sky with close to two million sources across half the sky, roughly double what it published before. Buried in it is a result from Bonn that matters more than the headline number. A team there went after the faintest part of a massive galaxy cluster, the outer region where fresh material is still arriving along threads of gas stretching between clusters. Nobody had measured that emission before. The gas turns out to be hot...

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

Twenty Years of Watching One Galaxy, and It Made Less Sense

Blazars are galaxies with a jet aimed almost directly at us, and they flicker across every part of the spectrum at once. Almost everything we think we know about them comes from short observing campaigns just a handful of days, every year or two, in one narrow band of energy. A Polish and German team has now done the opposite, following a single blazar for nearly twenty years with two orbiting observatories and in two observations from 2012 they found something in the spectrum that nobody had pr...

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

Nine Hundred Telescopes and One Chance a Year

Reading the atmosphere of another world means catching starlight as it filters through that planet's air during a transit. The signal is about one part in a million and a true Earth twin transits only once a year, so you cannot simply repeat the measurement until the noise averages away. Each attempt has to work on its own. A team led from Shanghai has proposed the alternative to building an impossibly large mirror in space - nine hundred, one metre telescopes, flying together, watching the same...

Tech - Universe Today - 9 days ago

Solar Magnetic Field Braids May Have a Previously Hidden Cause

Scientists using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawai'i have found a mechanism occurring on the Sun's surface that they think is heating our star's outer atmosphere. The process, called a Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability (KHI), could well be the root cause of a phenomenon called flux braiding that builds up and moves around on the Sun and heats the coronasphere. This discovery may well also explain the fundamental physics of similar activity at other stars.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

How to Find Lunar Ice? Moonquakes to the Rescue!

The surface of the Moon is a bleak and forbidding place that might be hiding a lot of water ice on and under the dusty landscape. However, most possible ice deposits don't just stand out in an image. You need specialized mapping to find traces of water ice. So, scientists have devised another way to find the Moon's frosty hidden reserves. They use seismic waves from moonquakes as locator beacons.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

Europa's Interior Ocean Could be Harder to Reach Than We Thought

Lujendra Ojha, a planetary scientist, led a study suggesting that Europa’s icy shell may be a stronger barrier between the moon’s hidden ocean and its surface than previously thought.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

Every Snowflake Needs a Speck of Dust and So Do Planets

A snowflake cannot form out of nothing. Water vapour will sit in the air quite happily, supercooled and reluctant, until it finds a speck of dust to build on and then it crystallises around it. Cosmochemists have had a version of that problem for decades. The early Solar System was a furnace of gas, and the first solid grains had to condense out of it somehow, yet condensing from a perfectly uniform gas is slow and difficult work. New research from Caltech, analysing fragments of a meteorite tha...

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

The Dark Matter Detector in the Scottish Borders

Hunting for dark matter usually means building something enormous and burying it a tank of liquid xenon in a mine, a magnet the size of a lorry, decades of engineering and a great deal of money. A team in Japan have just done it differently. They realised that the Earth's own magnetic field is larger than any magnet we could ever construct, and that the gap between the ground and the ionosphere behaves as a natural resonating cavity, ringing at around eight cycles per second. If dark matter is w...

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

What If There's a Star Inside a Black Hole?

Ask what lies inside a black hole and the honest answer has always been a bit of a shrug and something about a singularity, a point where density becomes infinite and physics stops being able to tell you anything at all. It is the most unsatisfying answer in astrophysics, second only perhaps to what happened before the Big Bang. Now two theorists in China have produced a solution in which something else sits inside the horizon entirely, a neutron star, whole and intact, twelve kilometres across,...

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

Watching the First Moments in a Star's Death

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.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

The ESCAPE Mission Will Study the Evolution of Exoplanet Atmospheres

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.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

Percy Sees An 'Eclipse' of Earth, From Mars

Sure. It may not look like much. But sometimes, the 'wow' factor in an image lies in knowing just what you're seeing. While most of us are eagerly awaiting Wednesday’s total solar eclipse across the North Atlantic and Spain, robotic emissaries on the Martian surface have recently given us a look at an astronomical occlusion of a different sort, as Phobos crossed in front of Earth.

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

Robots Could Build Massive Metamaterial Radars in Orbit

Tracking the debris orbiting at high velocity in space is only going to get harder over time. We have ground-based radar systems, such as the Space Fence, designed to detect pieces down to around 10 cm. But finding objects smaller than that, which can still cause a lot of damage traveling at 17,000 miles per hour, requires completely new thinking. One potential solution is a new idea from Dr. David Smith of Duke University, who was recently funded for a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) P...

Tech - Universe Today - 10 days ago

NASA Funds 'Interworld Slingshot' Concept to Map Solar System Resources

In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is going to be a critical technical component of any human expansion out into the solar system. Our first challenge with utilizing those resources, though, is finding them. We know how, at least in theory - send a probe to an asteroid, or a particular part of the Moon, and take a sample, maybe analyze that sample with some spectrographs, or send it back to Earth to be poked and prodded. The problem with this methodology is simple - it’s expensive. Sending dedi...

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Seven Needles, 800,000 Haystacks

A quasar is a supermassive black hole in the act of feeding, and it’s so bright that it drowns out the galaxy it sits in. That is a nuisance if you want to weigh the galaxy and weighing it is exactly what you need to do to understand how black holes and the host galaxies grew up together. There is a way round it however, catch a quasar whose galaxy happens to be bending the light of something further away, and the bending betrays the mass. The catch is that such alignments are vanishingly rare,...

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

The Odds of Finding Water on Mars

Mars has plenty of water, and almost all of it is in the wrong place. The poles are rich in ice, the equator, where you would actually want to land, has none within reach. That leaves the mid-latitudes, and until now the honest answer about what lies beneath them has been a bit of a shrug. Two new studies from the Planetary Science Institute have changed the shape of that answer. Rather than simply asking whether the data are consistent with buried ice, they have started calculating the odds and...

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

The Telescope That Points Itself

Time on a large professional telescope is one of the scarcest resources in science. Astronomers wait months for a few hours, and every one of those hours is a running argument with the weather, the Moon and the atmosphere. Point at the wrong target at the wrong moment and the data comes back soft, washed out, or useless, with the next chance half a year away. A team has now handed that argument to a machine. Their system was trained not on the rules astronomers use but on what astronomers actual...

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Interstellar Travel III: Antimatter to the Rescue?

With the end of the Space Age and the winding down of the Cold War, scientists again returned to the question of interstellar flight. Having failed to realize a working concept that could be realized in the near term, more exotic ideas began to be considered, reflecting further breakthroughs in theoretical physics.

Tech - Universe Today - 11 days ago

Ancient Maltese Seafarers Likely Navigated By The Stars

Ancient Maltese seafarers had both a complex cosmology and likely at least rudimentary skills in celestial navigation. It's thought that they used stars in the southern constellation of Crux to make their way around the south-central Mediterranean.

Tech - Universe Today - 12 days ago

NASA's MAVEN Illuminates New Understanding of Auroras at Mars

NASA MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission scientists have uncovered a key puzzle piece in understanding certain types of auroras on Mars, finding that they form in a similar way to Earth-based auroras.

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

SpaceX Junk Hits the Moon. Not a Good Sign

The spent upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has struck the Moon, illustrating the hazard posed by debris in cislunar space. This problem will increase as launches to orbit and to the Moon become more common in the coming years.

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

Astronomers Find a New Object from the Early Universe Using Webb Data

Homer Dávila Gutierrez, director of SKYCR.ORG, has identified a gravitational arc candidate in the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645 from public data from the James Webb Space Telescope. The object had not been previously reported and is located at a photometric redshift close to 4.4. The preprint is available on arXiv and the manuscript is under review in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

Preview to Totality: A Resource Guide to August 12th Total Solar Eclipse

It’s almost show time. We’re just a few days away now, from the only total solar eclipse of 2026. While eclipses are a surety as the celestial gears of the Universe grind on, there are always a few unknowns leading up to eclipse day. We wrote a recent guide to the upcoming total solar eclipse featuring totality across Greenland, Iceland, the North Atlantic and Spain on August 12th. As that date is now only a few days away, it’s a good time to look at prospects and resources to have at the ready ...

Tech - Universe Today - 14 days ago

Scientists Watch as a Distant World's Atmosphere Shrinks and Thins

As dwarf planet Pluto moves along in its distant, high-obliquity 248-year orbit, its atmosphere is changing. That's because it's beginning to travel through colder, darker parts of the outer Solar System for the next 88 years. As a consequence, the mostly-nitrogen atmosphere is expected to grow gradually thinner and eventually freeze out over the coming decades. When that happens, the atmosphere will shrink.

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

Scientist Constructs "Big Picture" of Mars Water from Rover Data

Rover data from more than 20 years ago has revealed clues to the existence of liquid water on ancient Mars. The NASA Spirit Rover carried a specialized instrument called a Mössbauer Spectrometer that performed mineralogical analyses of soil, rock, and dust on the surface of the Red Planet at Gusev Crater. Individual measurements didn't always indicate definitive proof of water, but when scientist Paolo de Souza of Edith Cowan University in Australia examined years' worth of measurements together...

Tech - Universe Today - 16 days ago

Venus Isn't Dead After All

Simulations conducted by researchers at ETH Zurich suggest a strong likelihood that Venus’s rift valleys are still geologically active rather than being mere relics of a bygone era, as had been previously believed. This finding reshapes our understanding of Earth’s sister planet and will influence future missions to Venus.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

See the Perseid Meteors on a New Moon Year

You couldn’t ask for a better year for one of the top annual meteor showers. If skies are clear be sure to watch for one of the top skywatching draws of 2026: the August Perseid meteor shower. While the Perseids are a draw on any year, 2026 is special, and has a few things going for it in terms of the Moon phase, peak timing and prospects.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

Interstellar Travel: the Birth of Fusion Drives

During the Space Age and Cold War, fusion-powered spacecraft systems were investigated as a possible means of reaching another star system within a human lifetime. Many of the proposed ideas are still on the table today, waiting for future advancements to make them realizable.

Tech - Universe Today - 17 days ago

Interstellar Travel II: the Birth of Fusion Drives

During the Space Age and Cold War, fusion-powered spacecraft systems were investigated as a possible means of reaching another star system within a human lifetime. Many of the proposed ideas are still on the table today, waiting for future advancements to make them realizable.

Tech - Universe Today - 18 days ago

Zodiacal Dust in Exoplanetary Systems Could Hinder Our Search For Life On Other Worlds

Most exoplanetary systems have a plane of dust similar to the zodiacal dust of our solar system. This dust absorbs some of the very light we use to find biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres, and could make our search for life more challenging.

Tech - Universe Today - 20 days ago

The Asteroid That May Be Three Worlds

We have been watching asteroid (44) Nysa for well over a century without ever really knowing what it looks like. Now the sharpest images ever taken of it, from two of the largest telescopes on Earth, have revealed two deep valleys running right around its circumference and the team behind them think those are necks, joining three separate lobes into a single 75 kilometre body. If that holds up, Nysa is the first three lobed world we have ever found. And in the glare beside it the same observatio...

Tech - Universe Today - 20 days ago

Smashed Ice Worlds Formed Neptune's Inner Moons and Rings

The planet Neptune has 16 known moons, with its largest Moon, Triton, comprising more than 99.5 percent of the mass of all of them. Triton’s incredible size has led scientists to hypothesize it was a captured object originating from the Kuiper Belt, which wreaked havoc on Neptune’s original moon system upon its capture and subsequential elliptical orbit. Today, some remnants of these original moons are part of the dusty rings that orbit Neptune. But what did that original moon system consist of?...

Tech - Universe Today - 20 days ago

Charon’s Mountains Reveal Moon Once Spun 10x Faster

Pluto’s moon, Charon, is one of the most unexplored (and arguably underappreciated) planetary objects in the entire solar system. This is primarily because it’s only been visited once by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its famous Pluto flyby in July 2015. Despite this quick encounter, New Horizons beamed back troves of data regarding Charon that scientists continue to pour over with the goal of gaining insight into Charon’s formation and evolution. This is because Charon is the largest moo...

Tech - Universe Today - 20 days ago

Interstellar Travel: The Space Age and Nuclear Rockets

Given the state of our technology, it would take a spacecraft a ridiculously long time to reach even the nearest star in our galaxy. However, scientists continue to ponder ways in which we could achieve the dream of interstellar spaceflight. Here are a few of their best ideas.

Tech - Universe Today - 21 days ago

Astronomers Measure the Long Reach of a Quasar

There are a number of things in the Universe that could wipe out life as we know it, but for now, and for Earth a blast from our galaxy's supermassive black hole isn't one of them. That's not to say that Sagittarius A* doesn't pose a danger. If it wakes up someday and blasts out a strong wind, that definitely could affect Earth. It could well have powered a quasar in the past, and could do so again.

Tech - Universe Today - 21 days ago

The Star That Exploded Without Hydrogen

Twenty five years ago a star in the constellation Puppis blew itself apart and then vanished behind a curtain of its own soot. Astronomers knew only that the explosion contained no hydrogen at all, which for the most abundant element in the universe is a very strange absence. Now the dust has finally thinned, and the culprits have stepped into view, a white dwarf quietly stripping a rare helium star of its substance. But the emerging picture came with something nobody expected, clumps of gas tea...

Tech - Universe Today - 21 days ago

Astrobiologist Uses Apollo Lunar Samples As Mirror Onto Early Earth

A Tokyo-based astrobiologist is using an ingenious new way to garner insight into Earth’s 3.5-billion-year-old biosphere.

Tech - Universe Today - 21 days ago

NASA Wants to Toss 10,000 Tiny Probes Directly Into Saturn's Rings

Cassini, NASA’s last major mission to Saturn, famously plunged to its fiery death in the gas giant’s atmosphere at the end of its mission. It had captured more accurate in-situ data of the Saturnian system than any mission before or since. But there’s one particular part that it couldn’t directly approach - Saturn’s rings. But NASA very obviously wants to take a nice up-close look at them, as they have recently funded a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant to send a swarm of...

Tech - Universe Today - 21 days ago

What happens to a moon when its planet is stolen?

The galaxy is littered with rogue planets, worlds flung out of the systems that built them, drifting between the stars with no sun to call their own. But when a planet is torn away, does anything go with it? New simulations say yes, a passing star can rip a world out of its orbit and leave its moons still faithfully circling it, sailing off into the dark as a set. If our own Jupiter were evicted tomorrow, all four Galilean moons would go with it. And in that darkness, with no sunlight at all, on...

Tech - Universe Today - 21 days ago

It Took a Century, but Astronomers Imaged Betelgeuse's Companion