Space News & Blog Articles

One of the confounding things about astronomy is that simple dust is an obstacle that astronomers must work hard to overcome. In a Universe that contains beguiling things like supermassive black holes, amino acids on the surface of comets, and puzzling, powerful bursts of extragalactic radio waves, it's somewhat humbling that simple dust particles require so much effort to deal with. One of the reasons the powerful JWST was built is to deal with this dust.

Jupiter is well-known for the massive aurorae that occur near the planet's polar regions, the brightest and most powerful in the Solar System. Much like aurora here on Earth, these shimmering lights are the result of interaction between the planet's magnetic field and solar wind. Unlike Earth's, though, Jupiter's largest moons - Io, Europa, and Ganymede (aka. the Galileans) - leave their own auroral signatures in the planet's atmosphere. These induced aurorae are known as "satellite footprints" and track how each moon interacts with Jupiter and the local space environment.

Observers from Europe to Australia will see the final lunar eclipse of 2025 this weekend.

Large exoplanets are more easily detected than small ones. It's axiomatic. While large planets block out more starlight during transits, small planets block out much less, letting them hide in the overpowering glare from their stars. To help detect sub-Jupiter mass exoplanets, astronomers search for the effect these planets can have on their surroundings.

One of the most difficult parts of astronomy is understanding how time affects it. The farther away you look in the universe, the farther back you look in time. One way this complicates things is how objects might change over time. For example, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the early universe might appear one way to our modern telescopes, but the same supermassive black hole might appear completely differently a few billion years later. Understanding the connection between the two objects would be difficult to say the least, but a new prerint paper on arXiv from researchers at the University of Science and Technology in South Korea describes one potential parallel, between the recently discovered “Little Red Dots” of the early universe and “BlueDOGs” of the slightly later universe.