Space News & Blog Articles

Tracking down black holes at the center of dwarf galaxies has proven difficult. In part that is because they have a tendency to “wander” and are not located at the galaxy’s center. There are plenty of galaxies that might contain such a black hole, but so far we’ve had insufficient data to confirm their existence. A new paper from Megan Sturm of Montana State University and her colleagues analyzed additional data from Chandra and Hubble on a set of 12 potential Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) galaxy candidates. They were only able to confirm three, which highlights the difficulty in isolating these massive wanderers.

To be fair, all scientific models are in some sense wrong. They’re all approximations of reality. They’re all mathematical models that we use to describe and understand our observations and measurements. And like I said, the LCDM model has, over the course of almost a quarter century, proven to be enormously resilient, flexible, and powerful when describing broad swaths of nature.

All motion is relative. That simple fact makes tracking the motion of distant objects outside our galaxy particularly challenging. For example, there has been a debate among astronomers for decades about the path that one of our nearest neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), took over the last few billion years. A new paper from Scott Lucchini and Jiwon Jesse Han from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics grapples with that question by using a unique technique - the paths of hypervelocity stars.

Let’s rewind the clock back…oh, I don’t know, let’s say a hundred years. It was 1917, and Einstein had just developed his general theory of relativity. It was a masterpiece, giving us our modern day view of the gravitational force. And like anybody curious about gravity, Einstein decided to apply his new equations to the evolution of the universe.

Astronomers know that mergers play a huge role in galaxy growth. Right now, the Milky Way is slowly consuming the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The evidence is a stream of gas called the Magellanic Stream that's about 600,000 light-years long. The Milky Way (MW) is stripping this gas from the clouds, which don't have enough mass to retain it. They're losing the gravitational tug-of-war with the much more massive MW.

Our search for exoplanets is focused on Milky Way stars. It's been successful, with more than 6,000 detected so far. Scientists are even beginning to move beyond mere detections, and working on characterizing other characteristics of these planets, especially their atmospheres.

The details of a supernova explosion are still clouded in mystery and subject to vigorous debate. What exactly happens when they explode? What underlying mechanisms are involved? New observations of a supernova with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope are removing some of the mystery.

In March of 2024 the DESI collaboration dropped a bombshell on the cosmological community: slim but significant evidence that dark energy might be getting weaker with time. This was a stunning result delivered after years of painstaking analysis. It’s not a bullet-proof result, but it doesn’t have to be to make our lives more interesting.

Conventional wisdom has it that stars keep their spherical shape because of the careful balance between gravitational pressure and the internal pressure caused by the nuclear fusion happening in their cores. When they run out of nuclear fuel, they undergo gravitational collapse at their core while the outer shell falls inward and rebounds. For particularly massive stars, this triggers a massive explosion (a supernova) that blows off the outer layers of the star, dispersing material into space and filling the interstellar medium (ISM).

This is Part 4 of a series on a recent study claiming the Universe is decelerating. You can read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 here.

Keep an eye on the sky early Monday morning for the Leonid meteors, and a possible second auroral storm.

Most people interested in space exploration already know lunar dust is an absolute nightmare to deal with. We’re already reported on numerous potential methods for dealing with it, from 3D printing landing pads so we don’t sand blast everything in a given area when a rocket lands, to using liquid nitrogen to push the dust off of clothing. But the fact remains that, for any long-term presence on the Moon, dealing with the dust that resides there is one of the most critical tasks. A new paper from Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is enough of a polymath that our last article about his research was covering a telescope at the solar gravitational lens, updates our understanding of the physical properties of lunar dust, providing more accurate information that engineers can use to design the next round of rovers and infrastructure to support human expansion to our nearest neighbor.

Yesterday, on Nov. 14th, 2025, the crew of Shenzhou-20 has returned to Earth from China's Tiangong space station after a week's delay. The delay was imposed by damage inflicted on their spacecraft, allegedly caused by an impact with space debris. This impact cracked the window aboard the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft, forcing the crew to depart the station using the newly arrived Shenzhou-21 spacecraft. The three-person crew, consisting of Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui, and Wang Jie, was originally scheduled to return to Earth on Nov. 5th.

The Pleiades ranks among humanity's most culturally significant celestial object, appearing in the Old Testament, celebrated as Matariki in New Zealand, and even inspiring Subaru's corporate logo. But astronomers have long suspected this tight cluster of bright stars represents only a fragment of something larger. The challenge lay in proving it.

Measuring the Solar System's velocity through space sounds straightforward, but it represents one of the most challenging tests of our cosmological understanding. As our Solar System travels through the universe, this motion creates a subtle asymmetry, a "headwind" where slightly more distant galaxies appear in our direction of travel than behind us. The effect is extraordinarily faint and requires sensitive measurements to detect.

Carl Sagan, along with co-author Edwin Salpeter, famously published a paper in the 70s about the possibility of finding life in the cloud of Jupiter. They specifically described “sinkers, floaters, and hunters” that could live floating and moving in the atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet. He also famously talked about how clouds on another of our solar system’s planets - Venus - obfuscated what was on the surface, leading to wild speculation about a lush, Jurassic Park-like world full of life, just obscured by clouds. Venus turned out to be the exact opposite of that, but both of those papers show the impact clouds can have on the Earth for life. A new paper by authors as the Carl Sagan Institute, led by Ligia Coelho of Cornell, argues that we should look at clouds as potential habitats for life - we just have to know how to look for it.

NASA is facing increasingly sharp challenges as it pursues its goal of landing astronauts on the moon again before this decade is out — and as the space agency braces for another leadership change, it’s clear that the year ahead will also bring further challenges. How will NASA fare?

The James Webb Space Telescope didn't need much time to show us how wrong we were about the early Universe. Mere weeks after it began observations, it found galaxies in the very early Universe that were far more massive than our theories showed. These confounding images required an explanation.

Quasars acting as strong gravitational lenses are among the rarest finds in astronomy. Out of nearly 300,000 quasars catalogued in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, only twelve candidates were identified, and just three confirmed. These systems are exceptionally valuable because they allow astronomers to precisely measure the mass of a quasar's host galaxy, something that is normally impossible given that the overwhelming brightness of the quasar itself drowns out its surroundings.

Nestled on a hillside in Guangdong Province near Zhaoqing City, the Jinlin crater managed to hide in plain sight until researchers identified it as an impact structure. Only about 200 confirmed impact craters exist worldwide, making each discovery scientifically valuable. But this one stands out for its exceptional size and youth.

So if the standard model of cosmology is wrong, what alternative is there?