Universe Today

An international team involving over ten institutions, with a strong participation from ESO and INAF, has characterised TOI-201 c, the transiting brown dwarf with the longest period for which mass has been measured. The study, published today in Nature, reveals a compact, coplanar system in which the presence of a massive, eccentric object redefines the stability boundaries for the inner planets

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists are using a solar wind forecasting method combined with analytic and numerical heliosphere models to find out where the first plasma boundary of the outer heliosphere lies as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hurtles toward this mysterious region of space.

A study led by the University of Bonn presents new data that calls the existence of Dark Matter - a fundamental pillar of the current cosmological model - into question.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has captured evidence of a Jupiter-like world orbiting another star, using a trick straight out of Einstein’s relativity: gravitational microlensing. The technique marks a first for TESS, and opens up the possibility of a whole new category of planets the spacecraft might uncover.

Scale in the universe is hard to understand from a purely human perspective. Many times the math just doesn’t sit well with our brains that evolved to capture and process data about the world around us rather than groking the complexities of stellar dynamics and galaxy mergers. But every once in a while astronomers find something that, if we can wrap our heads around the numbers, gives a sense of just how big the universe is. That is precisely what a new paper, available in preprint on arXiv from a group of astronomers led by Z.L. Wen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, hopes to do when it describes a merger of not one, not two, but six supermassive galaxies and the active dynamics they’re subject to.

Some planets can survive when their main sequence stars "die" and evolve into red giants. Astronomers have found several of them. One of them in particular is orbiting extremely close to its star, providing an opportunity to study it with the JWST to determine how it got there.

New research shows that repeated impacts on Earth during the Hadean eon prevented thick and stable crustal material from forming. The heat from these impacts penetrated deep into the planet, and along with radiogenic heating, delayed the formation of a solid crust.

Some of the most massive galaxies in the Universe appear to be missing a lot of stars. That seems unusual, since birthing stars is one of a galaxy's main tasks as it grows. According to Xin "Cindy" Xiang of the University of Michigan, something is suppressing or quenching the births of stars in these and she thinks that black holes might be the culprit.

Every muscle in the human body is, in a sense, in constant conversation with gravity, sensing load and responding accordingly to stay strong. Remove that conversation, as happens to astronauts in orbit, and the consequences unfold at a molecular level long before they become visible. New NASA-supported research is tracing exactly how that breakdown happens, using a purpose-built model that mimics weightlessness here on Earth. The surprising twist is where else this knowledge might apply

When stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives, the textbook story has them puffing up and quietly shedding their outer layers to leave a white dwarf behind. A new model suggests it is far less serene than that. As dying stars eject mass asymmetrically, each burst delivers a tiny recoil, and over hundreds of thousands of years roughly ten thousand of these kicks add up to send the star drifting through space at a respectable speed. The idea neatly explains why wide binary star systems tend to fall apart once one star becomes a white dwarf, and it hints at something more dramatic still waiting to be confirmed

Even the universe’s emptiest regions, the vast voids that make up most of the volume of space, are not entirely empty. A new study using the CAVITY survey hunts for galaxy groups hiding within these voids, applying a friends of friends technique to chart how nearby galaxies cluster together despite the surrounding emptiness. The results paint a striking picture that most void galaxies actually live entirely solitary lives, yet where groups do form, they are small, loose and curiously indifferent to just how empty their void actually is. It raises a deceptively simple question that turns out to be anything but: in the universe’s quietest neighbourhoods, what makes some galaxies choose company while most remain alone?

Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, has become a prime solar system target for astrobiologists. This is because the small moon, which is just over 10 percent the diameter of Earth’s Moon, harbors a vast subsurface ocean beneath its icy crust. This subsurface ocean combined with the geysers at Enceladus’ south pole that discharges bits of this ocean into the void provides scientists with a treasure trove of opportunities for scientific research into whether Enceladus could harbor ingredients for life as we know it, or even direct evidence for life.

Searching for habitable worlds beyond our solar system consists of more than just having it orbit within its star’s habitable zone, which is the region where temperatures could be just right for liquid water to exist on the surface. On Earth, where water comprises approximately 75 percent of the planet’s surface, life is absurdly abundant. But what about the exoplanet’s star, specifically its activity and rotation? How could this influence how exoplanets are identified for current and future missions?

Astronomers using W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, have discovered the third known galaxy apparently lacking dark matter, part of a strange linear structure that may have formed during a violent collision between galaxies.

Exoplanet atmospheres have become prima targets for astrobiologists in the search for life beyond Earth. This is because exoplanet surfaces can’t be directly imaged yet, so astronomers must get creative with how to search for signs of life, also called biosignatures. Presently, powerful ground- and space-based telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are improving in their ability to observe and analyze exoplanet atmospheres. But did these atmospheres form and evolve, and what could this mean for the search for life beyond Earth?

The Vera Rubin Observatory's long-awaited Legacy Survey of Space and Time has begun. This decade-long movie of the cosmos will capture anything that changes brightness, position, or both in the southern night sky. It will study grand subjects like dark energy and dark matter, and important things closer to home like near-Earth objects.

The way that dark matter is distributed may need a rethink. New research shows that dark matter could gather near supermassive black holes. The evidence is based on a new detection method, and is only moderately convincing so far. But if true, it also turns SMBH into 'dark matter labs' and could change how we understand SMBH growth.

Hopefully, we’re about to travel back to the Moon relatively soon. And while the original “giant leap for mankind” was taken by a human, Neil Armstrong brought a plethora of other forms of life along with him. Humans themselves are essentially walking ecosystems, and understanding how our microbial companions survive in the harsh environments of space will be critical to ensure the health and safety of future astronauts, no matter where their giant leaps might be. A new PhD thesis from Tommaso Zaccaria at Radboud University showcases just how well-suited to some of these harsh environments terrestrial pathogens actually are.

The famous opening scene of the Martian has Mark Watney stabbed in the torso with a communications antenna. While this accident sets up the plot for what is widely regarded as a modern classic of sci-fi storytelling, what if he was wearing a space suit that would have stopped the impact altogether? That’s the idea behind a recent NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I program run by researchers from Materials Research & Design, Fiber Materials, Inc, and NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Their work, which was recently presented at the National Space & Missile Materials Symposium, showcased a type of advanced 3D-reinforced fabric that could have saved Watney and his compatriots a whole lot of trouble.

Observations of a distant cluster of stars in our galaxy have resulted in a new class of objects that turn out to be galactic building blocks. Researchers used Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the stars that make up Terzan 5, long though to be a globular cluster. What they found puts that cluster into a very rare class of objects called "bulge fossil fragments."