The Cygnus X star-forming region is about 4,600 light-years away. It contains a huge number of massive protostars, and one of the most massive star-forming molecular clouds known. With all of this activity, it's not surprising that it also hosts some objects that have puzzled astronomers.
Over the course of billions of years, the universe has steadily been evolving. Thanks to the expansion of the universe, we are able to “see” back in time to watch that evolution, almost from the beginning. But every once in a while we see something that doesn’t fit into our current understanding of how the universe should operate. That’s the case for a galaxy described in a new paper by PhD student Sijia Cai of Tsinghua University’s Department of Astronomy and their colleagues. They found a galaxy formed around 11 billion years ago that appears to be “metal-free”, indicating that it might contain a set of elusive first generation (Pop III) stars.
All of the proposals floating around out there for invoking dynamical dark energy are a little on the weak side. In many cases, they raise more questions than answers.
Human beings are pretty familiar with the concept of "ice ages." Not only is their ample physical evidence to suggest that glacial periods occurred during the Pleistocene epoch - which lasted from ca. 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, there are even Indigenous oral traditions that speak of lake formation and dramatic climate shifts in the distant past. Far from being mere myths, these traditions are considered preserved accounts that are corroborated by scientific findings. However, the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods that characterize the Pleistocene were merely the latest in a long line of historical shifts in Earth's climate.
One of the things the James Webb Space Telescope revealed to us is a class of small, distant galaxies in the very early Universe. Their light has been stretched into the red after billions of years travelling in the expanding Universe, and they've been dubbed Little Red Dots (LRD). Initially, the JWST couldn't reveal their true nature because LRDs are near the limits of the powerful telescope's observational power. But we know they're there; the genie's out of the bottle.
Hawking radiation has never been proved, but it's generally thought to be real. Essentially, the argument is that when you combine black hole event horizons with quantum fuzziness, thermal energy can escape a black hole. We don't have a fully quantum theory of gravity, but we do have several semi-classical models that support the existence of Hawking radiation. And if Hawking radiation is true, then the interaction of black holes is governed by the laws of thermodynamics.
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).
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.
All Rights Reserved. 2025. SpaceZE.com
