The JWST was built with the power to observe the red-shifted light from objects in the very early Universe. Once it got going, the telescope practically inundated us with surprising, theory-challenging observations from the Universe's earliest ages. Some ancient galaxies were much larger and fully-formed than thought. So were their supermassive black holes (SMBH).
With new technologies comes new discoveries. Or so Spider Man’s Uncle Ben might have said if he was an astronomer. Or a scientist more generally - but in astronomy that saying is more true than many other disciplines, as many discoveries are entirely dependent on the technology - the telescope, imager, or processing algorithm - used to collect data on them. A new piece of technology, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is exciting scientists enough that they are even starting to predict what kind of discoveries it might make. One such type of discovery, described in a pre-print paper on arXiv by Vito Saggese of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics and his co-authors on the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team, is the discovery of many more multiplantery exoplanet systems an astronomical phenomena Roman is well placed to detect - microlensing.
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was first detected on July 1st 2025 as it approached the Sun. Multiple telescopes, including the Very Large Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope have taken turns observing the comet as it continued on its hyperbolic trajectory out of the Solar System. It reached solar conjunction on October 21st, and on October 29th it came closest to the Sun.
In astronomy, there is a concept called “degeneracy”. It has nothing to do with delinquent people, but instead is used to describe data that could be interpreted multiple ways. In some cases, that interpretation is translated into exciting new possibilities. But many times, when that happens, other, more mundane explanations are ignored for the publicity that the more interesting possibilities provide. That seems to have been the case for many “sub-Neptune” exoplanets discovered recently. Some theories have described them as Hycean worlds - worlds that are filled with water oceans or ice. But a new paper from Robb Calder of the University of Cambridge and his co-authors, available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that, most likely, these planets are almost all made of molten lava instead.
For decades, science fiction writers have tried their best to prepare us for eventual contact with aliens. Their efforts are dominated by several recurrent tropes. There's the invasion by a warlike species, there's the highly-evolved species trying to communicate with our primitive species, there's the benevolent aliens come to save us from ourselves, and there's the mischievous anal-probers and medical experimenters.
The cosmos is populated with many puzzling, gigantic, and awe-inspiring objects. Supermassive black holes billions of times more massive than the Sun reside in the center of massive galaxies. Huge stars explode in cataclysmic collisions whose light reaches us from more than 10 billion light-years away. Enormous galaxies collide and merge, leading to tremendous bursts of star formation.
If you read enough articles about planets in binary star systems, you’ll realize almost all of them make some sort of reference to Tatooine, the fictional home of Luke Skywalker (and Darth Vader) in the Star War saga. Since that obligatory reference is now out of the way, we can talk about the new “super-Jupiter” that researchers from two separate research teams, including one at Northwestern University and one at the University of Exeter, simultaneously found in old data from the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI).
Chinese taikonauts have a new set of spacesuits that will enable future missions in orbit and beyond. The suits were recently tested (Tuesday, Dec. 9th) during a series of extravehicular activities (EVAs) aboard China's Tiangong space station. The Shenzhou-21 crew (Zhang Lu and Wu Fei) donned the newly delivered D and E spacesuits to conduct their inaugural spacewalks. The suits are essentially a second-generation version of the Feitian spacesuits ("flying into space" in Chinese) used for intravehicular activity (IVA), but specifically designed for station EVAs.
Although they are technically gas giants, Uranus and Neptune are referred to as "ice giants" due to their composition. This refers to the fact that Uranus and Neptune have more methane, water, and other volatiles than their larger counterparts (Jupiter and Saturn). Given the pressure conditions in the planets' interiors, these elements become solid, essentially becoming "ices." However, new research from the University of Zurich (UZH) and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS is challenging our understanding of these interior regions of these planets.
Every biologist knows how important the Great Oxygenation Event was. It took the first photosynthetic organisms hundreds of millions of years to enrich Earth's atmosphere with oxygen, leading to complex life like us. But before complex, multi-cellular life could appaer, oxygen had to enter the ocean first.
I've been fortunate enough to witness the aurora on several occasions over the years, and each sighting leaves an impression that never quite fades. There's something about watching the sky transform from gentle curtains of light into something far more dramatic that stays with you. Within minutes, the aurora can erupt into intense waves of green and red that ripple and dance across the sky. These spectacular events, called magnetospheric substorms, represent some of Earth's most powerful displays of atmospheric electricity and they're exactly the kind of experience that burns itself into memory.
Long before Earth existed, before the Sun ignited, the materials that would eventually become our Solar System drifted through the darkness between stars. These interstellar clouds, vast expanses of ice, gas, and dust stretching across light years, held within them the chemical seeds of everything that would follow; rocky planets, gas giants, and perhaps even life itself. Understanding exactly how those primordial materials transformed into worlds remains one of astronomy's most long standing mysteries.
A “House of Cards” is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It’s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.
The Sun is far more than a steadily glowing sphere as our ancestors once thought. Across its surface and atmosphere, countless tiny features flicker in and out of existence, magnetic loops hundreds of times larger than Earth, and plasma flows in ways that still puzzle scientists. Understanding this complexity requires more than just looking harder, it requires looking from multiple angles at once.
Omega Centauri dominates the southern sky as the Milky Way's largest and brightest globular cluster, a dense sphere containing roughly ten million stars. Earlier this year, astronomers found evidence that an intermediate mass black hole hides within the cluster's core, revealed by seven stars moving far too quickly to remain bound unless something massive holds them gravitationally. Now researchers have searched for the black hole itself using radio telescopes, and their discovery is what they didn't find.
The giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to their current positions. Exactly what triggered this chaos remains uncertain, but researchers at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux and the Planetary Science Institute now propose a close encounter with a wandering substellar object during the Sun's youth.
The universe is getting bigger, and there's a problem. Two different ways of measuring its expansion rate give two different answers, and nobody knows why. Now researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated a completely independent method that adds compelling evidence this discrepancy represents something real, not just measurement error.
Since it commenced science operations in mid-2022, the James Webb Space Telescope has made significant strides in detecting atmospheres around exoplanets. These included providing the first clear evidence of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet atmosphere (WASP-39b), atmospheric water vapor (WASP-96 b), and even heavier elements like oxygen and carbon (HD149026b). According to the latest release, researchers announced that they have detected the strongest evidence to date for an atmosphere around a rocky planet.
Carl Sagan famously said that “We’re all made of star-stuff”. But he didn’t elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been creative in massive supernovae explosions - hence the saying, and scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled - the isotopes created in the supernovae flew here on tiny dust grains (stardust) that eventually accreted into Earth, and later into biological systems. However, a new paper from Martin Bizzarro and his co-authors at the University of Copenhagen upends that theory by showing that much of the material created in supernovae is captured in ice as it travels the interstellar medium. It also suggests that the Earth itself formed through the Pebble Accretion model rather than massive protoplanets slamming together.
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