A record-breaking space explosion that lit up the sky with the most power we’ve ever seen was caused by a structured jet carrying massive amounts of exploded star guts pointing directly at Earth, scientists have determined. The gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A, detected in October of last year, was so bright that our instruments struggled to

Wind that blows from close to the surface of the Sun has now been traced back to its source by a daredevil solar probe rivaling Icarus in its audacity. In November 2021, the Parker Solar Probe skimmed within a more-than-hair-singeing 8.5 million kilometers (5.3 million miles) of the Sun, a feat enabling it to detect

Life on Earth owes its existence to photosynthesis – a process which is 2.3 billion years old. This immensely fascinating (and still not fully understood) reaction enables plants and other organisms to harvest sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide while converting them into oxygen and energy in the form of sugar. Photosynthesis is such an integral

Solar power is the fastest-growing form of renewable energy and currently accounts for 3.6 percent of global electricity production today. This makes it the third largest source of the renewable energy market, followed by hydroelectric power and wind. These three methods are expected to grow exponentially in the coming decades, reaching 40 percent by 2035

In a galaxy hanging out in the early Universe less than 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, the James Webb Space Telescope has made an astonishing detection. From light that traveled for over 12 billion years from a galaxy known as SPT0418-47, astronomers teased out the spectral signal of complex molecules – the polycyclic

Say you’re an alien civilization with advanced technology looking to communicate with other civilizations throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Where would you be setting up your beacon? Probably close to home, right? The galactic center – that crowded, fascinating region around supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* – is one of the best spots in the

An investigation into the mystery filaments hanging in space around the heart of the Milky Way has turned up an entirely new population of them, aligned along the galactic plane and pointing in the direction of the galactic center. The magnetized strands are likely the remnants of an outflow from the supermassive black hole Sagittarius

According to a famous theory by Stephen Hawking, black holes evaporate over time, gradually losing mass in the form of a strange kind of radiation as the event horizon plays havoc with surrounding quantum fields. But it turns out that the dramatic cliff of an event horizon may not be as critical to this process

Since the Cassini spacecraft discovered plumes of water vapor erupting from geysers on Enceladus nearly 20 years ago, Saturn’s ice-covered ocean moon has been a hot topic. The James Webb Space Telescope has now caught sight of the largest plume yet. The telescope’s astonishingly sensitive eye measured an eruption of water vapor punching at least

For most of us, this would be a nightmare. Imagine being curled up inside a 90 centimeter (36 inch) fabric sphere with a small window and a small air tank while dangling from the Canadarm. As your tiny sphere shifts, you’d see Earth out your tiny window, then the Space Shuttle, damaged by some accident

It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see why M64 is better known as the Evil Eye galaxy. Sitting in the abyssal vacuum of space it seems to cast a sinister glare across the cosmos, a cloud of dust framing its visible periphery like a dark bruise. The galaxy is even stranger than

Astronomers studying black holes have serendipitously found another rarity: A dead star rocketing away from its birth supernova, leaving a comet-like trail of radio emission in its wake. Named PSR J1914+1054g, the star is just the fourth known of its kind: a radio pulsar kicked at high velocity across space, for which astronomers have observed

Tigers may not change their stripes, but Jupiter sure does. The giant planet’s surprisingly neat, alternating bands of dark and light clouds periodically change their appearance, but the reason for these cyclic variations is a mystery. Now, after studying data on Jupiter’s magnetic field collected by the Juno probe, a team of scientists from Japan,

Uranus takes 84 years to orbit the Sun, and so that last time that planet’s north polar region was pointed at Earth, radio telescope technology was in its infancy. But now, scientists have been using radio telescopes like the Very Large Array (VLA) the past few years as Uranus has slowly revealed more and more

Astronomers have found a planet a mere 87 light years away that is almost exactly the same size as Earth, orbiting its star at a distance that is neither roasting nor frozen. Sounds perfect for Earth 2.0, right? Not so fast. The exoplanet known as LP 791-18d has been tugged so far out of an

At the heart of a glob of stars drifting through the Milky Way lurks a beast. Located some 6,000 light-years away, a globular cluster known as Messier 4 appears to be clumped around a black hole some 800 times the mass of our Sun. That’s no featherweight, but it’s far from a colossus either. In

We don’t know what the first stars in the Universe were like. Peering into the distant reaches of the early Universe, we’ve seen only traces of their presence. But a new line of evidence traced in images from the James Webb Space Telescope seems to agree with a recent idea that is gaining traction: that

A sunspot four times the size of Earth is lined up with the Sun right now and it’s so big that an astronomer said it could be seen with the naked eye – provided you’ve got the right equipment to observe it safely. Astronomer Bum-Suk Yeom from South Korea advised amateur astronomers to reach for

Since what has come to be known as the Great Dimming that took place in the latter half of 2019 and early 2020, the red giant star Betelgeuse just will not stop with the wackiness. The dying star’s regular cycles of brightness fluctuation have changed, and now Betelgeuse has grown uncharacteristically bright. At the time

There’s a fair amount of water in the Solar System. Several moons and planets are loaded with it, while comets from the far reaches are packed with the stuff. Where it warms in the heat of the Sun, it sublimates into a gas that drifts into the vacuum of space. While water ice has been

The largest and most powerful solar telescope on Earth has just given us breathtaking new views of the surface of the Sun. In a series of new images, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope’s observations reveal the intricate details of sunspot regions, the roiling convective cells, and the motion of plasma in the solar atmosphere

Typically when you think of a satellite, you think of a metal box with electronic components inside it. But that is simply because most satellites have been made that way throughout history. There is nothing against using other materials to build satellites. Now, a team of researchers from Japan has completed testing on another type

How thick is the crust of Mars? This question is what a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters attempted to answer as it reported on data from a magnitude 4.7 marsquake recorded in May 2022 by NASA’s InSight lander, which remains the largest quake ever recorded on another planetary body. As it turns out,

All the planets in our Solar System with global magnetic fields have radiation belts, donut-shaped regions confined by magnetic fields where particles are trapped and accelerated, glowing in radio light. This all suggests that there should also be radiation belts wherever there is a stable, global magnetic field. Detecting the faint emission from an extrasolar

When Oumuamua travelled through our Solar System back in 2017, people around the world paid attention. It was the first Interstellar Object (ISO) astronomers had ever identified. Then in August 2019, Comet 2I Borisov travelled through our Solar System, becoming the second ISO to cruise through for a visit. Together, the visiting ISOs generated a

A closer look at an intriguing star just 25 light-years away has revealed a much more complex architecture of debris than earlier observations had suggested. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found that the star named Fomalhaut – home to one of the first asteroid belts discovered outside the Solar System – is

When stars like our Sun die, they tend to go out with a whimper and not a bang – unless they happen to be part of a binary (two) star system that could give rise to a supernova explosion. Now, for the first time, astronomers have spotted the radio signature of just such an event

It is as inevitable as the rising of the Sun and the turning of the tides. Someday another large rock from space will crash into the Earth. It has happened for billions of years in the past and will continue to happen for billions of years into the future. So far humanity has been lucky,

Saturn’s rings are one of the jewels of the Solar System, but it seems that their time is short and their existence fleeting. A new study suggests the rings are between 400 million and 100 million years old – a fraction of the age of the Solar System. This means we are just lucky to

They are known as ultra-fast outflows (UFOs), powerful space winds emitted by the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) – aka. “quasars.” These winds (with a fun name!) move close to the speed of light (relativistic speeds) and regulate the behavior of SMBHs during their active phase. These gas

After just a few short months in the lead, Jupiter has once again ceded the title of “most known moons” to Saturn. The discovery of 62 previously unknown satellites has put the ringed planet firmly back in the lead, with a grand total of 145 officially recognized moons. This means Big Jupe, with its paltry

We’ve touched on the hazards of solar storms plenty of times in the past. We’ve also recently started reporting even more stories involving some sort of AI, especially in the last few months since it has come back to the forefront of many discussions around technologies. So it should come as no surprise that a

Extending high above and below the Milky Way’s galactic plane, a pair of huge, symmetrical blobs of gas stretch out like the lobes of a cosmic hourglass, glowing faintly with an X-ray radiance. They’re known as eROSITA bubbles, named after the X-ray telescope that spotted them in 2020, and are located in the Milky Way’s

Just because there’s no mini-Neptune in our Solar System doesn’t mean they’re not common. They appear to be widespread throughout the Milky Way, and according to NASA, are the most common exoplanet type. GJ 1214 b is one of them. One of the James Webb Space Telescope’s stated science goals is the study of exoplanets.

Astronomers said on Friday they have identified the “largest” cosmic explosion ever observed, a fireball 100 times the size of our Solar System that suddenly began blazing in the distant universe more than three years ago. While the astronomers offered what they think is the most likely explanation for the explosion, they emphasized that more

Fast radio bursts – intense, milliseconds-long flashes of radio energy from outer space – have puzzled astronomers since they were first spotted in 2007. A single burst can emit as much energy in its brief life as the Sun does in a few days. The great majority of the short-lived pulses originate outside our Milky

How did we get here? Where are we going? And how long will it take? These questions are as old as humanity itself, and, if they’ve already been asked by other species elsewhere in the Universe, potentially very much older than that. They are also some of the fundamental questions we are trying to answer

Scientists have been left baffled by a mysterious celestial object so bright that physics dictates it should have exploded. NASA has been tracking so-called ultraluminous X-ray sources, objects that can be 10 million times as bright as the Sun, to understand how they work. These objects are impossible in theory because they break the Eddington

A grapefruit-sized metallic object fell from the sky, straight through the roof of a New Jersey home, and crashed into the floor of the bedroom on Monday, according to local reports. Police who responded to the incident in Hopewell, New Jersey, believe the falling object may be a meteorite, possibly from the Eta Aquarids meteor

In a recent study submitted to the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, a pair of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) examine the likelihood of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations intercepting outward transmissions from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) that are aimed at

The first-time detection of gravitational waves (GW) by researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015 triggered a revolution in astronomy. This phenomenon consists of ripples in spacetime caused by the merger of massive objects and was predicted a century prior by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. In the coming years, this burgeoning

Shadows flickering across the dust roiling around a newborn star have revealed a rare glimpse of how the Solar System may have formed billions of years ago. Changing light around a star named TW Hydrae suggests that the giant disks of material circling the star are off-kilter, orbiting at slightly different angles of inclination. New

The surface of Mars is a pretty desolate place at first glance. The soil is many times as dry as the driest desert on planet Earth, the temperatures swing from one extreme to the other, and the air is incredibly thin and toxic. And yet, there’s ample evidence that the planet was once much warmer

To the best of our knowledge, humans have never been contacted by aliens from the depths of space. Yet statistically speaking, we shouldn’t be alone. Like a spurned lover, we’ve desperately tried to work out why nobody has called, coming up with one possible excuse after another. A researcher from the Laboratory of Statistical Biophysics

Well, the verdict is in. The Moon is not made of green cheese after all. A thorough investigation has found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron. This, researchers hope, will help settle a long debate about whether the Moon’s inner

Of the thousands of meteorites found on Earth, about 188 have been confirmed to be from Mars. How did they get here? Over the tumultuous history of our Solar System, asteroids have smashed into Mars with such force, the debris was blasted into space and then drifted through space, eventually entering the Earth’s atmosphere, and

The Sun is incomprehensibly massive, turbulent, and violent. It erupts high-energy radiation into space, some of which slams into the International Space Station rocketing around Earth. The ISS circles our planet 16 times a day. With the right telescope, from the right location, you can see it passing overhead. And for just a few precious

The Moon dominates our view of the night sky. But it’s not the only thing orbiting Earth. A small number of what scientists call quasi-satellites also orbit Earth. One of them is called Kamo’oalewa, and it’s a near-Earth asteroid. It’s similar to the Moon in some respects. Could it be a chunk of the Moon?