Universe Today

A SpaceX Falcon upper stage crashed into the Moon on August 5th. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of the crash site from different viewing angles and with different sunlight angles. The images showed that the crater is about 18 meters wide and about 3 meters deep. SpaceX says the crash was an accident.

Mars' moon Deimos has a large crater on its southern pole. It's also covered by a layer of regolith so deep it buries many other, smaller craters. New research shows that an impact is responsible for both, and that the moon is rather fragile and porous, like a rubble pile asteroid.

Researchers studied gas flows in the Monoceros R2 star forming region to understand how gas is channeled into star forming hubs. By tracing the flow of carbon monoxide, they found that a system of hub-filaments and interfilaments are responsible for feeding gas into star-forming locations. The filaments move most of the gas, but the interfilaments play a role too, especially by feeding more gas into the main filaments.

So, did you miss the August 12th total solar eclipse? Like lots of humanity, we sat out the celestial drama of this month's solar eclipse, both total and partial. But the good news is, a large swath of the world can still catch the eclipse season spirit, with a deep, nearly total partial lunar eclipse next week. The event is the last eclipse of four (two lunar and two solar) for 2026. This also marks the current end of the second eclipse season for 2026, which began with the total solar eclipse on August 12th.

Some signs of an alien civilization are easier to spot than signs of life itself. On technosignatures, from CFCs and industrial gases to the pandemic dip in pollution, and why Earth's most detectable moment might be right now.

This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month takes us to a fantastical realm within our home galaxy, where piercing starlight and billowing winds sculpt dust clouds into inventive shapes. This scene is from the Carina Nebula, which lies just 7500 light-years away in the constellation Carina (the Keel).

Something's wetting the surface of dwarf planet Pluto along the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, and planetary scientists have found a good explanation for it. A recent study of new Horizons images taken during the 2015 flyby revealed evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising up through cracks in Sputnik Planitia. That's the giant heart-shaped glacial basin we see in all the Pluto images taken by the spacecraft.

Astronomers have discovered another S star, the population of stars that orbits the Milky Way's SMBH. This one is the fastest of them all, and also comes closest to the SMBH. It will let astronomers test relativity, especially the Lense-Thirring effect.

In our fourth installment in the Interstellar Travel series, we'll examine solar sails, magnetosails, and directed-energy propulsion (DEP), which are currently the most plausible methods for reaching another star system within a human lifetime.

It seems the overwhelming majority of the time when we write about satellite megaconstellations, it’s as a warning. That’s not because they aren’t useful, but because they hold the potential to completely destroy our access to space if not managed properly, and possibly cause a whole bunch of Earth-based devastation as well. So it probably won’t come as a surprise when there is yet another paper from a leading expert on space debris pointing out the potential hazards of the latest crop of satellite megaconstellations - which is exactly what a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Hugh G. Lewis of the University of Birmingham, does.

Remember the “Wow!” signal? That high energy radio signature happened in 1977, when the Earth was much “quieter” in the radio band. If it were to happen today, it probably wouldn’t even move the needle on the background noise of human radio chatter. Signals from satellites, radar, and other human technology have crowded out extraterrestrial radio signals, limiting our ability to monitor the heavens for signals like the still unexplained one received in 1977. What’s more, the ionosphere partially blocks lower frequency radio signals, making them even harder to see from the ground. So, for a long time, scientists and engineers have been proposing putting a radio telescope on one of the last spots in the solar system that is safe from our ever growing sphere of radio influence - the far side of the Moon. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from lead author David DeBoer of the University of Oxford and his co-authors, lays out a plan to do just that - and stresses that we need to do it before even that last safe haven is gone for good.

When the JWST peered into the ancient Universe, it found surprisingly massive galaxies. These galaxies were so massive they challenged our understanding of how quickly galaxies can assemble. But new research says that multitudes of low-mass stars are hiding in these galaxies, and they're actually even more massive than we thought. When will it end?

A single pixel of light holds astonishing detail. How ocean glint, rotational mapping, and the vegetation red edge let us read a distant planet's oceans, continents, and even forests, all without ever resolving it as more than a point.

Nitrous oxide (otherwise known as laughing gas) is likely a key atmospheric component of life in the cosmos.

Astronomers know that evolved AGB stars shed their outer layers, contributing to the makeup of the interstellar medium. But new JWST observations show this can happen even near a supermassive black hole, where powerful radiation could obliterate molecules.

For decades, scientists have theorized that young protostar jets are shaped and driven by complex, twisted magnetic fields. But they couldn't detect them. Now, thanks to ALMA, they've found them around a young binary protostar.

Of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, Callisto is the one that gets the least attention. Io is constantly being resurfaced by volcanoes. Europa has a giant liquid water ocean. And Ganymede has its own magnetic field that interacts with its parent planet in weird ways. Callisto, by comparison, seems sedate, with its ancient, crater-saturated surface seemingly frozen in time. But new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows that even this most benign of the Big Four moons is more active than previously realized.

Gravitational wave astronomy has seen plenty of improvements since the original signal was captured in 2015. Despite that, it remains an engineering challenge to actually create the detectors needed for the precise measurements that gravitational waves require. A new NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant is funding a concept from a team led by Paul Stankus at Brookhaven National Laboratory that could potentially solve some of those engineering problems - by using quantum mechanics.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory is being built for one purpose: to directly image another living Earth. Inside the coronagraph that must block ten billion times the planet's light, the picometer-stable mirror we don't yet know how to build, and the messy problem of reading an atmosphere.

The surface of Mars is home to some of the most breathtaking and awe-inspiring landscapes in the solar system. This is primarily due to the Red Planet lacking several re-surfacing processes that Earth possesses, including plate tectonics, volcanism, and flowing water. While Mars does have dust storms, this has done little to reshape the planet’s surface, which has remained largely undisturbed for billions of years. However, this near-pristine landscape has enabled scientists to look back in time while slowly piecing together what Mars was like long ago.