Clouds of gas drifting through the early Universe have given astronomers a glimpse at what remains of the very first stars ever born. Not the stars themselves; they are long gone, burning hot and fast before exploding in a blaze of supernova glory too distant for our instruments to detect. However, the material they leave

For the first time, astronomers have identified the flare of light as a dying star engulfs and destroys one of its orbiting worlds. Although this phenomenon has long been theorized, finally observing it in action will help astronomers figure out what happens to a planetary system as the star enters its dramatic death throes, puffing

The International Space Station (ISS) is nearing the end of its service. While NASA and its partners have committed to keeping it in operation until 2030, plans are already in place for successor space stations that will carry on the ISS’ legacy. China plans to assume a leading role with Tiangong, while the India Space

One of the wildest exoplanets ever found in the Milky Way has just gotten even more interesting. In the atmosphere of KELT-9b, astronomers have detected the rare earth metal terbium swirling around in clouds of vaporized metal, the first time this extremely rare element has been found on a distant world. The team also made

NASA has dropped a new animation to give you a true sense of the amount of space dominated by a supermassive black hole. These are the behemoths of the Universe; the colossi that sit at the centers of galaxies; the gravitational hearts around which stars whirl in an orbiting dance measured in eons. They start

Mobile phones are so ubiquitous that we typically don’t think about how they work. They just do, much to our benefit, and sometimes annoyance. But the key to their function is a vast array of radio transmission towers. These cell towers span a large percentage of Earth’s land surface, particularly in heavily populated areas, and

The rarely seen moment a black hole catches and devours a star has been spotted at the closest proximity yet. In a galaxy named NGC 7392 located just 137 million light-years away, a quarter of the distance of the previous record, astronomers captured the scream of light as a supermassive black hole first pulled apart

Okay, so we all know that the Sun is heading into solar maximum. That means it’s quite a bit more active, with sunspots, coronal mass ejections, and flares aplenty. But, luckily for us, the Sun isn’t as active as the members of the binary star system V1355 Orionis. One of its stars periodically releases superflares.

Voyager 2’s demise has been postponed after NASA found a way to hack a backup source of power to keep the probe going until 2026. Voyager 1 and 2 have provided crucial scientific information in their 45 years of spaceflight. Today, the probes are traveling in interstellar space, 12 and 14 billion miles away from

Gravitational wave astronomy is still in its early stages. So far it has focused on the most energetic and distinct sources of gravitational waves, such as the cataclysmic mergers of black holes and neutron stars. But that will change as our gravitational telescopes improve, and it will allow astronomers to explore the Universe in ways

New images of the Universe’s most photogenic pit of darkness are providing insight into a mysterious black hole behavior. For the first time, we are looking at the source of a colossal jet of plasma blasting into space from the edge of supermassive black hole M87*. It’s also the first time that we’ve seen the

The strange asteroid responsible for Earth’s annual shower of Geminid meteors just got even more peculiar. Every orbit, as it approaches the Sun and heats up, 3200 Phaethon grows a comet-like tail of material, which streams away in a pale fog. Phaethon’s tail was thought to consist of tiny grains of dust, but new observations

Like gravitational waves (GWs) and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most powerful and mysterious astronomical phenomena today. These transient events consist of bursts that put out more energy in a millisecond than the Sun does in three days. While most bursts last mere milliseconds, there have been rare cases

The Universe is swarming with galaxies, billions upon billions as far as the eye can see. And among this multitude, some galaxies really stand out in a spectacular way. These are the quasar galaxies. Powered by an active supermassive black hole guzzling material at such a tremendous rate, they blaze with some of the brightest

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mathew Owens, a professor of space physics at the University of Reading who researches space science and weather as it relates to solar activity and the solar maximum. It’s been edited for length and clarity. We’re close to the next solar maximum, predicted to begin in

Tokyo-based company ispace made a bold attempt to land a spacecraft on the lunar surface on Tuesday, and fears that it ended with a crash landing. The HAKUTO-R M1 lunar lander appeared to be descending to the Moon as planned, posing ispace to claim the historic feat of the first private Moon landing – until

Our galaxy’s largest nearby companion is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy visible to the naked eye in the Southern Hemisphere. In recent years, new theoretical research and better observational capabilities have taught astronomers a great deal about our (not-so-little) neighbor. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the LMC is helping shape the Milky

Quakes rumbling through Mars have been detected rolling through its gooey core for the first time, giving scientists the tools they need to figure out what, exactly, Mars’ heart is made of. According to seismic data obtained using NASA’s InSight lander, which monitored the red planet’s innards for four years, Mars’ center is a liquid

Physicists believe most of the matter in the Universe is made up of an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see. We’re not crazy! Without this ” dark matter“, the Universe as we see it would make no sense. But the nature of

A rare world 245 light-years away could be key to unraveling a planetary mystery. An exoplanet called TOI-733b is just under twice the radius of Earth, and is orbiting a star a little smaller than the Sun with a period of 4.9 days. Measurements of its density suggest that it may either have lost its

It’s the end of an era, at least for the Perseverance rover on Mars, who has lost a long-time friend. For 427 sols or days on Mars, Perseverance has been carrying around a rock in one of its wheels. We’ve been following the saga of this pet rock, which for over a year has stuck

There’s something really odd about the Sun. Actually, there’s a lot of odd somethings about the Sun, but a ground-breaking space probe has just given us the clue we might need to solve one of them. New observations from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter suggest that the constant reconnection of tiny magnetic field

SpaceX carried out Starship’s first test flight on Thursday morning – successfully launching the shiny silver mega-rocket that could one day take humans to Mars and beyond. Around 4 minutes after take off, the rocket blew up – or experienced a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ – as the team attempted stage separation. But the fact the

For close to a minute on Thursday, parts of Australia went dark as the Sun was blocked out by the Moon in the country’s first solar eclipse of 2023. The rare, hybrid solar eclipse was only visible as a totality from a few cities in southeast Asia and Western Australia, but was watched by tens

Amateur astrophotography is becoming increasingly popular among the astronomy community, as advancements in telescope and camera technologies allow individuals from all walks of life to observe the heavens in mind-blowing detail, including our own Sun, albeit with the proper protective equipment. This was recently demonstrated by Andrew McCarthy (Twitter @AJamesMcCarthy), who owns and operates Cosmic

You may have heard about an asteroid set to fly near Earth that is the size of 18 platypuses, or maybe the one that’s the size of 33 armadillos, or even one the size of 22 tuna fish. These outlandish comparisons are the invention of Jerusalem Post journalist Aaron Reich (who bills himself as “creator

The first solar eclipse of 2023 will span Australia and Southeast Asia into the Pacific Ocean region. Mark your calendars. The first eclipse season of 2023 is about to begin on Thursday 20 April, with a rare hybrid annular-total solar eclipse. Editor’s note: If you’re not lucky enough to be in the path of this

With the number of confirmed exoplanets in the Milky Way rising, we will have to be choosier about the targets we select for looking for signs of life. A team of astronomers led by Anna Shapiro of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany has narrowed down the options. According to a

It has been over sixty years since Dr. Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) and his colleagues mounted the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) survey. This was known as Project Ozma, which relied on the “Big Ear” radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Greenbank, West Virginia, to look for

SpaceX is about to attempt the first test flight of a mega rocket that could one day take us to Mars. If successful, Starship will be the tallest and most powerful fully reusable rocket ever flown. That is a rather sizeable ‘if’. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has given the test launch only a 50 percent

A spacecraft quietly speeding its way through the Solar System has caught its first glimpses of the asteroids it was sent to investigate from a distance of hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy probe heads the first-ever mission to study the asteroids attendant on Jupiter. Of the 11 objects it

Spend long enough in America’s frozen north, and you get used to seeing stunning displays of nature high in the sky. Mostly it’s in the form of the shimmering curtains of light created as solar winds collide with the upper atmosphere. To photographer Todd Salat, auroras are worth a patient wait in the cold night

A popular and easy method for validating whether or not a chunk of rock is a meteorite, and what kind of meteorite it is, has been inadvertently erasing invaluable information locked inside. The use of rare-earth magnets such as neodymium erases and overwrites the magnetic record locked inside ferromagnetic minerals in meteorites, scientists from MIT

Astronomers have discovered a cosmic smash-up just waiting to happen in a giant object just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. A galaxy called J0749+2255 actually consists of two galaxies merging into one, and it has not one but two actively feeding supermassive black holes. It just so happens these two black holes are

A stunning solar “waterfall” has been spotted on the surface of the sun. The picture, taken by astrophotographer Eduardo Schaberger Poupeau on March 9, shows a wall of plasma being shot “some 100,000 kilometers” – or about 62,000 miles – up towards space, Poupeau told Spaceweather.com. That’s high enough to engulf about eight Earths. The

The motion of a star as it makes its way through the galaxy has led to the discovery of a new alien world. Using data from the Gaia spacecraft that’s mapping the Milky Way, astronomers detected a kink in the motion of a star named HIP-99770, suggesting the presence of a nearby planet. Follow-up observations

This month marks the anniversary of a major achievement in astrophysics. On 10 April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration unveiled the first-ever direct image of the shadow of a black hole. Now, scientists have used a new machine learning technique to reprocess the original data to reveal a new, sharper view of the

Could we discover conditions necessary for life outside the Earth in the Solar System? This is one of the mysteries that the space mission JUICE (for JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) – set to be launched from Kourou, French Guiana, on Thursday 13 April 2023 at 12.14 pm UT – will look to elucidate. To propel

Some mysteries in science vanish with more accurate measurements, resolving gaps with a puff of new data. And sometimes, a second look simply reinforces the fact you have a mystery on your hands. It’s the latter in the case of a new study that challenges the Universe’s most fundamental laws of physics. The Hubble constant

How did the most massive stars form? Astronomers have debated their origins for decades. One of the biggest problems facing these theories is the lack of observations. Massive stars are relatively rare, and so it’s hard to catch them in the act of formation. But new observations of the so-called Dragon cloud may hold the

We’ve just been given a spectacular new perspective on what is possibly the oddest ball in the Solar System. The James Webb Space Telescope has turned its golden, infrared gaze on the enigmatic seventh world from the Sun, Uranus – and the image it returned has revealed the turquoise planet in gleaming glory. Moons, rings,

Astronomers are currently searching for signs of life in the “habitable zones” of nearby stars, which is defined as the band around a star where liquid water can potentially exist. But a recent paper argues that we need to take a more nuanced and careful approach, based not on the potential for life, but the