Universe Today

Most of us are familiar with Betelgeuse (also known as alpha Orionis), the bright shoulder star in the constellation Orion. It's a red supergiant star that lies somewhere between 400 and 550 light-years away from us and is quite bright. Betelgeuse contains about 14 times the mass of the Sun and is a fairly young star compared to ours. It appears to be no more than 10 million years old, which means that it evolved rapidly from a protostar to the red giant we see today. That lifecycle means Betelgeuse will explode as a supernova sometime in the relatively near future — say within the next 100,000 years.

The planet Mercury is the first planet from the Sun but also one shrouded in mystery. This is primarily due to the limited number of spacecrafts that have visited it, but this limited data has provided scientists with new and exciting characteristics previously thought impossible. One fascinating aspect is its magnetic field, which was first discovered in March 1974, which both surprised and puzzled scientists due to the planet’s small size, which is measured at about half the size of the continental United States from coast to coast.

Galaxies in the infancy of the Universe are the building blocks of more modern galaxies. They began as small "shreds" of material that coalesced over time to form larger ones. That's why astronomers use observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the young Universe. The light from those early objects appears in the infrared part of the spectrum, which JWST is tuned to see.

Primordial black holes (PBH) remain hypothetical, but that isn't stopping astrophysicists from figuring out how they could interact with other stellar objects. New research shows how PBHs, formed in the early Universe from collapsing pockets of dense subatomic matter instead of from stars, can enter white dwarfs. In some cases, that could've triggered a Type Ia supernova with particular chemical fingerprints, which should be detectable.

On March 10, 2026, the Fermi telescope gamma-ray burst team reported the detection of a long-duration gamma ray burst that occurred when a star exploded inside a dense, highly magnetized cloud of hydrogen gas. That HII region is a bubble of ionized hydrogen created by winds from a massive young star. Astronomers immediately turned as many telescopes as possible to view the burst and its afterglow, including the NSF's Karl Jansky Very Large Array.

Before any major telescope commissioning, there are dozens of papers that attempt to define what we can expect from it. We’re starting to see some come through for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which hopefully will get a more imaginative name when the 39m behemoth is officially commissioned in Chile in the 2030s. A new paper from Evann Kurzawa-Ferrandez and his co-authors at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and available in pre-print on arXiv, showcases what kind of biologically relevant gases we can find on some of our nearest exoplanets.

NASA has selected a concept study, led by physicist Paul Stankus, exploring whether a pair of spacecraft flying in tight formation could one day produce an actual image of an Earth like exoplanet's surface, oceans, continents and all. It's an early stage idea, backed by NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program, but if it ever came together, it would represent an extraordinary leap beyond simply detecting a distant world to genuinely seeing its face.

A team of researchers have found a surprisingly simple way to boost the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. It’s surprisingly simple to, just point an ordinary thermal imaging camera at the mirrors themselves. The technique could improve LIGO's next upgrade by up to 31%, letting it detect neutron star collisions tens of millions of light years farther away, and is already being built into the design of its planned successor, Cosmic Explorer.

A new study presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting suggests that solar storms may warm the Martian lower atmosphere, but only when they strike during a major Martian dust storm. The discovery was accidental, emerging from a search for a different effect entirely, and hints that the weather system on Mars may be more tangled and interconnected than scientists previously assumed.

Confirming the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence via radio signals, also called technosignatures, is the cornerstone of radio astronomy. While humanity has been asking since time immemorial whether or not we’re alone in the universe, radio astronomers are at the frontlines trying to tirelessly answer this longstanding question. To accomplish this, they’ve traditionally focused on a specific radio frequency band called the “water hole”, which resides between 1.42 and 1.66 GHz. This is due to two water-forming molecules, hydrogen and hydroxyl, emitting these frequencies.

When astronomers talk about directly imaging an exoplanet that is orbiting a far away star, the analogy they most commonly go with is trying to spot a fireflight next to a massive search light. An Earth-like exoplanet is incredibly dim - usually between 100 million and 10 billion times fainter than its host star. Understandably, that makes them very difficult to see. But a new paper from Hyunsoo Choi of Hanyang University in South Korea and his co-authors, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, describes a theoretical solution - use a mix of smart computer algorithms and quantum physics.

Geostationary orbit (GEO) is arguably one of the most important orbital spaces we have. So it's critical that we keep it clear of debris that could destroy the valuable GPS, weather tracking, and communications satellites already in this orbit. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done; small pieces of debris at that altitude can slip past even our most sensitive sensors. But now, a new paper published in the Journal of Astronautical Sciences by James Blake and an international collaboration of researchers showcases how an advanced algorithm can help find tiny pieces of debris that would otherwise be missed by traditional surveys.

A strong foundation is key for any building construction, and this doesn’t just apply to construction on Earth. As humanity slowly expands throughout the many worlds of our solar system, and possibly beyond, understanding the planetary surfaces is key to constructing long-lasting habitats beyond Earth. Thus, it’s only natural this venture begins with our own Moon, which is the target of a permanent lunar south pole base by NASA. While the Moon is covered by a thin layer of dust, also called regolith, it’s vital for engineers to know the thickness of this regolith to know the safest locations to construct future lunar habitats and buildings.

Every year, thousands and thousands of satellites get launched into orbit around our planet. The result is an increasingly congested "space" above Earth populated by equipment that provides services to the surface. At the same time, these satellites affect ground-based astronomy research and create potential for damage when they eventually fall through Earth's atmosphere to the ground. In addition, near-Earth space hosts old rocket bodies and other materials left in space by past missions.

A new study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) addresses the threat of debris in cislunar space, which could pose threats for future missions bound for the Moon.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory has completed a new survey with the updated Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. It's called the VLASS, the Very Large Array Sky Survey, and it's the most detailed radio survey of the sky ever completed. The VLA used the power of its 28 movable dishes to complete the survey.

Planetary debris disks around white dwarfs appear to be more plentiful than thought. That's because some white dwarfs are magnetic, and those magnetic fields create patches of metallic debris near the stars' poles, where it's more difficult to detect. This leads to an underestimation of debris, something new research is trying to correct.

Astronomers want to know how universal the initial mass fraction (IMF) of galaxies is. To do they that, they need to discern binary stars in other galaxies, a difficult task. Researchers used the JWST to study the Small Magellanic Cloud and determine how many binary stars are there, since they can confuse measurements of the IMF.

Sometimes, you have embark on a journey to appreciate home. The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission recently gave us just such a view of our homeworld and our large natural satellite, as seen from the spacecrafts’ temporary orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point.

What happens when a black hole and a star meet in the middle of nowhere in a galaxy? It sounds like it could be a dramatic science fiction backdrop, with some hapless starship caught in the crunch. Actually, such encounters in real life are pretty rare. They happen maybe once every 100,000 years. But, when they do occur, the immense gravity of the supermassive black hole tears the star apart. It's an eerie-looking process. The star gets "spaghettified" — that is, pulled on one side by the black hole. That rips out a stream of gas from the star which eventually forms a disk around the black hole.