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.
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.
The case for habitability in Enceladus' warm, ice-capped ocean is growing. Ever since Cassini found evidence of hydrothermal activity in the moon's ocean, and detected life's building blocks in the plumes of material ejected from the ocean, scientists have worked to put this data into context.
Last time I wrote about new data that overturns the standard cosmological model. Before anyone starts dusting off their fringe cosmological models, we should note what this new study doesn't overturn. It doesn't say the Big Bang model is wrong, nor does it say that the Universe isn't expanding or that Hubble's redshift-distance relation needs to be thrown out. It really only says that our Hubble constant model is wrong. But we already knew that thanks to a little thing known as the Hubble tension. These new results could solve that mystery as well.
At this point in history, astronomers and engineers who grew up watching Deep Impact and Armageddon, two movies about the destructive power of asteroid impacts, are likely in relatively high ranking positions at space agencies. Don’t Look Up also provided a more modern, though more pessimistic (or, unfortunately, realistic?), look at what might potentially happen if a “killer” asteroid is found on approach to Earth. So far, life hasn’t imitated art when it comes to potentially one of the most catastrophic events in human history, but most space enthusiasts agree that it's worth preparing for when it will. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Maxime Devogèle of ESA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Coordination Centre and his colleagues analyzes a dry run that happened around a year ago with the discovery of asteroid 2024 YR4.
While the Universe may appear serene and inspiring at first glance, it is actually filled with particles traveling at nearly the speed of light that possess immense energy. These consist primarily of atomic nuclei and subatomic particles, such as protons, electrons, and neutrinos, which constantly bombard Earth. The origin of these particles remains one of the longest-standing mysteries in modern astrophysics. A leading theory is that they are created by extreme events, such as supernovae and tidal disruption events (TDEs), which occur when stars are ripped apart by black holes.
Getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the dream of many astronomers. The most powerful space telescope currently in our arsenal, the JWST has been in operation for almost four years at this point, after a long and tumultuous development time. Now, going into its fifth year of operation, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the science and mission operations centers for the JWST has received its highest number ever of submission for observational programs. Now a team of volunteer judges and the institute's scientists just have to pick which ones will actually get telescope time.
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