Universe Today

A New Version of the Sombrero Galaxy, Taken by Hubble

Sometimes an old telescope can still impress. That is certainly the case for Hubble, which is rapidly approaching the 35th anniversary of its launch. To celebrate, the telescope's operators are collaborating with ESA to release a series of stunning new photographs of some of the most iconic astronomical objects the telescope has observed. As of the time of writing, the latest one to be released is a spectacular new image of a favorite of millions of amateur astronomers - the Sombrero Galaxy.

Using Gamma-Ray Bursts to Probe Large Scale Structures

Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful events in the Universe, briefly outshining the combined light of their entire galaxies. A team of astronomers has figured out a clever technique to use the light from gamma-ray bursts to map out the large-scale structure of the Universe at different ages after the Big Bang. They found that the Universe might be less uniform at large scales than previously thought.

Flocks of CubeSats Can Efficiently Monitor Farms

The widespread use of low Earth orbit (LEO), especially by thousands of CubeSats, has opened up many opportunities in research and business applications. One particular field that has benefited from the data that CubeSats provide is farming. Precision agriculture (PA) is a technique that uses advanced sensors, including the remote ones on CubeSats, to determine the health and productivity of a farm. A recent review paper from Lamia Rahali and her co-authors at the Mediterranea University of Regg

An Interesting Solution to the Hubble Tension: The Universe is Slowly Spinning

Everything in the Universe spins. Galaxies, planets, stars, and black holes all rotate, even if just a bit. It comes from the fact that the clouds of scattered gas and dust of the cosmos are never perfectly symmetrical. But the Universe as a whole does not rotate. Some objects spin one way, some another, but add them all up, and the total rotation is zero. At least that's what we've thought. But a new study suggests that the Universe does rotate, and this rotation solves the big mystery of cosmo

The Most Metal Poor Stars are Living Fossils from the Beginning of the Universe

Our Sun, like all stars, is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. They are by far the most abundant elements, formed in the early moments of the Universe. But our star is also rich in other elements astronomers call "metals." Carbon, nitrogen, iron, gold, and more. These elements were created through astrophysical processes, such as supernovae and neutron star collisions. The dust of long-dead stars that gathered together into molecular clouds and formed new, younger stars such as the Sun. Stars r

Failing to Find Life Tells Us a Lot About Life in the Universe

The search for life involves the most sophisticated observational machines known to humanity. They peer out across the light-years, looking for some proof - any proof - that other life exists, out there. What if, despite all our efforts, those observations turn up NO evidence of life elsewhere in our Milky Way Galaxy?

New Comet SWAN Could Put On a Brief Show at Dawn

Newly discovered comet C/2025 F2 SWAN could put on a brief dawn display over the next few weeks. Discovered thanks to the hard work of online sleuths and amateur astronomers, the comet may brighten towards perihelion on May 1st.

The Search for Biosignatures in Enceladus' Plumes

What kind of mission would be best suited to sample the plumes of Saturn's ocean world, Enceladus, to determine if this intriguing world has the ingredients to harbor life? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the pros and cons of an orbiter or flyby mission to sample Enceladus' plumes. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners design and develop the m

A Hole Opened Up in the Sun's Corona and Vented Helium-3

What can Helium-3 (3He) being discharged from the Sun teach us about 3He creation and the Sun's activity? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated 3He-rich solar energetic particles (SEPs) emitted by the Sun in late 2023. This study has the potential to help astronomers better understand how solar activity could contribute to the production of 3He, the latter of which remains one of the most desired s

How Black Holes Can Emit Powerful Jets

We've long known that black holes can produce powerful jets of ionized gas. These jets stream away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light. Jets produced by supermassive black holes are so powerful they are seen as quasars from billions of light-years away. But when you think about it, jets are a bit counterintuitive. Black holes trap and consume material through their tremendous gravity, so how can they push streams of material away? A recent study in Publications of the Astronomical S

A New Technique to Find Hidden Black Holes

To the uninitiated, astronomers' interest in ancient black holes might seem like an obsession. Why spend so much time, energy, and resources looking back billions of years just to detect the nearly undetectable? They do it because ancient black holes hold unique clues to understanding the modern Universe.

More Greenhouse Gases Means Less Room for Satellites

Whether your views on climate change are informed by politics or science, it's getting harder to ignore it's effects on our lives down here on Earth. But a surprising study reports that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere could also be affecting the problem of space junk. As the heat energy stored in our atmosphere increases, its ability to scrub debris from Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) decreases, increasing the risk of satellite collisions and making it more likely that hum

Red Galaxies Aren't Necessarily Dead Galaxies

The human perception of stars is that they are largely unchanging although of course in reality stars and their host galaxies do change over time, just very VERY slowly. When galaxies deplete their star forming materials, they traditionally become redder as short lived stars die while long lived dwarf stars persist for trillions of years. However, recent research challenges this understanding.

Astronomers Think They've Found the Universe's Missing Infrared Light

One of the things about astronomy that captivates me is that for every question we answer, we open up a whole bunch of other questions. Dark matter and dark energy are one such phenomenon that rather continues to confound us. There's also the mystery of missing infrared light too but a team of astronomers think they may have found it! The team examined a region of sky using the Herschel Space Telescope and, by staking 141 images, found where individual dust-rich galaxies appeared blended togethe

Exploring the Moon with Biologically-Inspired Subsurface Robots

The Small Magellanic Cloud is Being Torn Apart

The two most prominent satellite galaxies of the Milky Way are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. A team of astronomers have recently tracked the movements of 7,000 stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and found that many of them are being pulled away towards the Large Magellanic Cloud! It seems the SMC is being pulled apart, perhaps leading to its eventual destruction as the tidal forces strip away its stars!

It's Time to Build a Space Telescope Interferometer. This Could be the First Step

The dream of finding life on an alien Earth-like world is hampered by a number of technical challenges. Not the least of which is that Earth is dwarfed by the size and brightness of the Sun. We might be able to discover evidence of life by studying the molecular spectra of a planet's atmosphere as it passes in front of the star, but those results might be inconclusive. The way to be certain is to observe the planet directly, but that would take a space telescope with a mirror 3–4 times that of W

Researchers Propose a New Way to Search for Evidence of Life

One of the challenges of searching for life in the Universe is that there is no single universal biosignature that could reveal its presence. Even if we could tell the difference between chemicals produced by living organisms and those from non-living sources like volcanoes, we're still making the assumption that alien life would resemble life on Earth. A new paper proposes that missions search for "energy-ordered resource stratification" which only happens when both self-replication and ecologi

Webb Investigates the Scene of a Planet's Destruction

Random flashes of radiation in the sky are not all that unusual. A few years ago, once such flash was detected coming from a star that at the time, was believed to be from a star consuming a planet! The exact mechanism was unsure though for example; was it the star bloating up as a red giant and engulfing the planet or did the planet spiral in toward the star? The answer was until now, a little elusive. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope showed the environment around the star didn'

Promoting Substainable Lunar Bases With Bio-Concrete