Astro Blog

By Katherine Kornei , The New York Times.  Excerpt: If our species manages to hang on for a few billion additional years, we might be in for a wild ride — stars passing in the vicinity of the sun could cause planets in our solar system to collide or even be ejected, according  to a paper published last month  in the journal Icarus. The findings even suggest a scenario in which our world ends not consumed by the sun, but in a carom prompted by the powers of gravity. ...The researchers found that the triple threat is a massive star that makes a close approach to the sun at a relatively low velocity, magnifying its gravitational effect. But the alignment of all these attributes is rare. “A huge fraction of stellar passages are inconsequential to our solar system,” Dr. Kaib said. The researchers found that 0.5 percent of their simulations resulted in planets colliding or a planet being ejected from the solar system....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/...

By Kenneth Chang  and  Katrina Miller , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Vera C. Rubin Observatory...telescope, more than two decades in the making, will provide a comprehensive view of the night sky unlike anything astronomers have seen before. The project’s scientists revealed some of the first imagery it released on Monday. ...The observatory’s treasure trove of data will allow astronomers  to investigate dark energy , a force pushing the universe to expand ever faster,  as well as dark matter , a mysterious substance that behaves somewhat like galactic glue. Closer to Earth, it will identify asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth. ...The level of detail in the Rubin images is impossible to convey on a computer screen or a newspaper page. As a result, the Rubin team has developed  Skyviewer , which lets people zoom in and out of the giant images....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/science/vera-rubin-telescopes-firs...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Cerro Pachón in Chile ...the giant telescope is built for speed. ...The camera at its heart is fast, too, capable of spitting out a 3200-megapixel image from each exposure in less than 3 seconds. ...10 May, ...commissioning scientist Kevin Fanning prepares to take his 350-ton baby out for a spin. At the press of a button on his laptop, the towering structure begins to move and is soon rotating effortlessly on a thin film of oil. ...Rubin needs to be fast because it must cover a lot of sky—all of it. ...Rubin will march relentlessly across the firmament, capturing swaths in a field of view that covers the equivalent of 45 full Moons. At each stop its 3-ton, car-size camera will record the view with an array of 189 light sensors cooled to –100°C, producing an image so rich it would take a wall of 400 ultrahigh-definition TV screens to display it in full. Each snapshot takes 30 seconds; then the telescope slews in less than 5 seconds to a new vist...

By European Space Agency (ESA).  Excerpt: Thanks to its  newly tilted orbit  around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led  Solar Orbiter  spacecraft is the first to image the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane. Solar Orbiter’s unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the  solar cycle  and the workings of space weather. ...Any image you have ever seen of the Sun was taken from around the Sun’s equator. This is because Earth, the other planets, and all other operational spacecraft orbit the Sun within a flat disc around the Sun called the ecliptic plane. By tilting its orbit out of this plane, Solar Orbiter reveals the Sun from a whole new angle....  Full article at https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_gets_world-first_views_of_the_Sun_s_poles . 

By Adithi Ramakrishnan, Associated Press Excerpt: Scientists have unlocked one of the solar system’s many secrets from an unexpected source: a planetarium show opening to the public on Monday. At the American Museum of Natural History last fall, experts were hard at work preparing “Encounters in the Milky Way,” .... They were fine-tuning a scene featuring what’s known as the Oort Cloud, a region far beyond Pluto filled with icy relics from the solar system’s formation. ...scientists have never glimpsed its true shape. One evening while watching the Oort Cloud scene, scientists noticed something strange projected onto the planetarium’s dome. “Why is there a spiral there?” ...The inner section of the Oort Cloud, made of billions of comets, resembled a bar with two waving arms, similar to the shape of our Milky Way galaxy. ...Scientists had long thought the Oort Cloud was shaped like a sphere or flattened shell, warped by the push and pull of other planets and the Milky Way itself. Th...

By Phie Jacobs , Science.  Excerpt: Researchers...aren’t quite sure why...the corona, is so much hotter than the Sun’s surface—or why it can violently eject huge volumes of plasma that can mess with Earth’s magnetic field and scramble power grids. ...air turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere blurs our view of it, making it hard to discern fine details. Now, using an adaptive optics system installed at Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO), the authors of a new  Nature Astronomy  study have removed this blur—producing  the clearest images and videos to date of the Sun’s atmosphere . In  a statement , BBSO optical engineer and study co-author Nicolas Gorceix likened the new technology to “a pumped-up autofocus and optical image stabilization in your smartphone camera, but correcting for the errors in the atmosphere rather than the user’s shaky hands.” ...researchers also captured a phenomenon known as coronal rain, where city-size droplets of hot plasma in the Sun’s corona...

By Dennis Normile , Science.  Excerpt: Following its successes retrieving lunar samples from both the near and far sides of the Moon, China is planning an encore, sending a probe to snatch material from a near-Earth asteroid. The target of the Tianwen-2 mission, which is expected to launch by the end of the month, is a chunk of rock named 469219 Kamo‘oalewa. It is one of just seven asteroids that fall into a little-understood class known as quasi-satellites of Earth—and it could also be the first known asteroid comprised of lunar material. That hypothesis could be confirmed by laboratory studies of fragments collected by Tianwen-2, which are due to be returned to Earth about 2.5 years after launch. ...Kamo‘oalewa was discovered in 2016 by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope on Haleakalā in Hawaii. It ... has been in its current orbit for about 100 years  and will likely remain there for another 300.... University of Arizona planetary scientist Benjamin Sharkey and colle...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Researchers have found promising hints that the atmosphere of a distant planet contains gases linked to life,  BBC reports today . A team led by University of Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan reports in  The Astrophysical Journal Letters  that it  used NASA’s JWST telescope to detect the signatures of the gases  dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in starlight that had passed through the atmosphere of K2-18b, a massive planet 120 light-years from Earth. On Earth, those gases are produced by marine phytoplankton and give sea air its distinctive scent. ...It’s also possible that DMS and DMDS are produced on the planet  by some nonbiological process . Last year, a different team of researchers reported signs of DMS  within the dust and gas of the definitively lifeless comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko , calling into question the gas’ usefulness as a biosignature....  See also New York Tim...

By Jenna Ahart , Science.  Excerpt: Like the fictional planet Tatooine in  Star Wars , some exoplanets ...orbit binary pairs of stars, which cast their worlds in double sunrises and sunsets as they themselves orbit each other. Now, researchers report today in  Science Advances  that they have found  an especially unusual example of such a planet : one that orbits over and under the poles of two failed stars that loom in its skies. ...only 16 exoplanets had ever been confirmed to orbit around a binary pair—and all of those planets orbit within the plane of the stars’ orbits around each other, not over the poles. ...this peculiar planet, known rather prosaically as 2M1510 (AB) b, ...orbits... brown dwarfs, failed stars that aren’t massive enough to spark on. ...In binary systems like this one, the elliptical orbit of each object in the binary will gradually shift its orientation over time, like the axis of a spinning top tracing out a circle as the top wobble...

By Molly Herring , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Researchers have found salts in samples from asteroid Ryugu. Combined with similar salty discoveries from asteroid Bennu, the finding suggests that aqueous incubators of life’s first ingredients may have been relatively common in the early solar system. ...The results from  Ryugu  were reported in  Nature Astronomy  in November 2024, and those from  Bennu  were reported in January 2025. The parallel discoveries paint a compelling picture of the early solar system. ...“We can now say, for the first time, that 4.5 billion years ago—long before most of us thought it could happen—we had both the ingredients and the environment in which the early stages of organic evolution towards life could begin,” said  Tim McCoy , a curator of meteorites at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who studied the Bennu samples. Such evolution “didn’t happen on a large, icy moon or a large, warm planet like Earth. It...

By Robin George Andrews , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The vermilion, amethyst and jade ribbons of the northern and southern lights are some of Earth’s most distinctive features. But our planet doesn’t have a monopoly on auroras. Scientists have spied them throughout the solar system, ... Mars , Saturn,  Jupiter  ...some of Jupiter’s  fiery and icy moons ... Uranus , too. But auroras around our sun’s most distant planet, Neptune, have long eluded astronomers. That has changed with the powerful infrared instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope. In a study published on Wednesday in the journal  Nature Astronomy , scientists reveal unique auroras that spill over either side of Neptune’s equator, a contrast with the glowing gossamer seen arcing over other worlds’ poles..  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/science/neptune-aurora-nasa-webb-telescope.html . 

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected what could be a chemical relic of long-ago life on Mars: long-chain organic molecules. Found after painstaking reanalysis of data on a sample drilled from a lake that dried up billions of years ago, the molecules likely derived from fatty acids, a common building block of cell membranes on Earth. The finding,  published  today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is not a definite detection of past life; the fatty acids could also have formed without life. But it’s another in a series of tantalizing hints....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/curiosity-rover-detects-long-chain-carbon-molecules-mars . 

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: ...the Moon formed some 65 million years after the start of the Solar System—and only tens of millions of years after Earth. The findings promise to resolve decades of debate about the Moon’s age, says Thorsten Kleine, a cosmochemist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research who  presented new work  here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC). Several strands of research are converging on a new and older age for the Moon, he says: “It’s about 4.5 billion years.”...  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/impact-formed-moon-struck-practically-newborn-earth .

By Hannah Devlin , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Astronomers have discovered 128 new moons orbiting  Saturn , giving it an insurmountable lead in the running tally of moons in the solar system. Until recently, the  “moon king” title was held by Jupiter , but Saturn now has a total of 274 moons, almost twice as many as all the other planets combined....  Full article at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/11/astronomers-discover-128-new-moons-orbiting-saturn . 

By MARCIA DUNN, Associated Press.  Excerpt: A  private lunar lander  carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a  string of companies  looking to kickstart business on Earth’s celestial neighbor ahead of  astronaut missions . Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon’s northeastern edge of the near side. ...An upright and stable landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon  without crashing or falling over . Even  countries have faltered , with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan. ...the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under N...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Staring deep into space and far back in time, a team of astronomers may have spotted a galaxy full of stars made from only the primordial gas created in the Big Bang. Such “population III stars” would have formed from hydrogen and helium and nothing else, and researchers have been searching for them for decades.... If confirmed, the discovery, made with NASA’s JWST space observatory, opens a window on the starting point of the chemical enrichment of the universe, in which the heavier elements needed to make planets and life began to be forged in stellar explosions. ...The nature of population III stars remains uncertain. Most theorists think they were huge, with masses up to 1000 times that of the Sun, 10 times larger than any star around today. ...The gigantic stars that resulted would also burn hot and fast, ending in a supernova explosion after just a few million years. That brief first flash of population III stars is hard for astronomers to...

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Mars today is a cold, dry, dusty planet with its only obvious water locked up in frozen polar ice caps. But billions of years ago, it appears to have had sandy beaches lapped by waves along the shoreline of a vast ocean. The evidence for beaches on Mars comes from a Chinese rover, called Zhurong, that landed on the planet in 2021. During its short life it detected evidence of underground beach deposits in an area thought to have once been the site of an ancient sea, bolstering the idea that the planet long ago had large bodies of water. ...between May 2021 and May 2022, Zhurong traveled 1.9 kilometers (1.2 miles) roughly perpendicular to escarpments thought to be an ancient shoreline from a time — 4 billion years ago — when Mars had a thicker atmosphere and a warmer climate. Along its path, the rover used ground penetrating radar (GPR) to probe up to 80 meters (260 feet) beneath the surface. ...“The structures don’t look like sand du...

By Sarah Stanley , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A closer look at previously disregarded observations reveals stronger evidence that a deep ocean lies beneath Callisto’s icy surface. ... Cochrane et al.  have revisited the Galileo data in more detail. Unlike in prior studies, this team incorporated all available magnetic measurements from Galileo’s eight close flybys of Callisto. Their expanded analysis much more strongly suggests that Callisto hosts a subsurface ocean....  Full article at https://eos.org/research-spotlights/jupiters-moon-callisto-is-very-likely-an-ocean-world . 

By Lan Dai  and  Axel Timmermann , ScienceAdvances.  Abstract summary: Asteroid Bennu has a 0.037% chance of colliding with Earth in 2182 CE.  The potential collision of such medium-sized asteroids would inject dust into the atmosphere and disrupting climate, vegetation, and marine productivity. Simulations show global temperature drop of 4°C, reduced precipitation, and significant decreases in terrestrial and marine net primary productivity....  Full article at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adq5399 .  See also Life’s Building Blocks Found in Bennu Samples (Eos/AGU)

By Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS), JPL/CalTech.  Excerpt: CNEOS analysis of near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4, which is estimated to be about 40 to 90 meters wide, indicates it has a more than 1% chance of impacting Earth on Dec. 22, 2032 — which also means there is almost a 99% chance this asteroid will not impact. These analyses will change from day to day as more observations are gathered. The CNEOS analyses are used for NASA’s contribution to the  International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) . After the impact probability for this asteroid reached 1%, IAWN issued its official  notification  for the potential impact....  Full article at https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news210.html .  See also: International Asteroid Warning Network - https://iawn.net/obscamp/2024YR4/index.shtml , explanation of the Torino Scale on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale , European Space Agency Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center - https://neo.ssa.esa.int/-...

By Daniel P. Glavin et al, Nature Astronomy.  Abstract Excerpt: Organic matter in meteorites reveals clues about early Solar System chemistry and the origin of molecules important to life.... Samples returned from the B-type asteroid Bennu by the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer mission ...show that Bennu samples are volatile rich, with more carbon, nitrogen and ammonia than samples from asteroid Ryugu and most meteorites. ...Bennu’s parent asteroid developed in or accreted ices from a reservoir in the outer Solar System where ammonia ice was stable. ...The transport and delivery of organic compounds from these bodies could have been a source of molecules available for the emergence of life on Earth and potentially elsewhere....  Full article at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02472-9 .  See also Nature article An evaporite sequence from ancient brine recorded in Bennu samples [Brines ...are environment...

By Javier Barbuzano , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The James Webb Space Telescope offers astronomers a rare glimpse into the chemical composition of a rocky planet’s interior—and the results are “very surprising.” ...disintegrating planet, K2-22b, ...Discovered in 2015, ...orbits a small star 787 light-years away, completing one orbit every 9 hours. ...The spectroscopic results are “very surprising,” said University of Leeds astronomer  Richard Booth , who wasn’t involved with the study. “We expected to see a composition akin to Earth’s mantle with minerals like magnesium silicate, and they see hints of that,” Booth said. “You just wouldn’t expect any icy material surviving at these temperatures.”....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/scientists-finally-get-a-good-look-at-a-disintegrating-exoplanet . 

By Mark Zastrow , Astronomy.  Excerpt: On Jan. 2, the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced the  discovery of an unusual asteroid , designated 2018 CN41. First identified and submitted by a citizen scientist, the object’s orbit ...came less than 150,000 miles (240,000 km) from Earth, closer than the orbit of the Moon. That qualified it as a near-Earth object (NEO) — one worth monitoring for its potential to someday slam into Earth. But less than 17 hours later, the Minor Planet Center (MPC) issued an  editorial notice : It was deleting 2018 CN41 from its records because, it turned out, the object was not an asteroid. It was a car. To be precise, it was  Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster  mounted to a Falcon Heavy upper stage, which boosted into orbit around the Sun on Feb. 6, 2018....  Full article at https://www.astronomy.com/science/astronomers-just-deleted-an-asteroid-because-it-turned-out-...

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: “Dust is the building block of the universe,” says Melissa Shahbandeh, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). Over millions of years, specks of cosmic dust and gas clump together to form large, dense clouds from which planets and stars are born. But the dust’s own origins have been mysterious. Now, in data from NASA’s JWST space observatory, Shahbandeh and her colleagues  have found a source for the dust that filled the early universe : giant stellar explosions called interacting supernovae, whose intense shockwaves can blast out dusty plumes that accumulated in the supernovae’s surroundings. These results, presented last week at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society and submitted to The Astrophysical Journal are “impressive,” says Lifan Wang, an astrophysicist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the work. ...The findings...deepen understanding of where Earth and everything...

By Amanda Holpuch , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A couple in Canada were returning home from walking their dogs some months ago when they found a burst of dusty debris on their walkway. They turned to their security-camera footage for answers and found it showed a mysterious puff of smoke appearing on the tidy walkway where the mystery splotch was. The source of the splotch was officially registered  on Monday  as the Charlottetown meteorite, named after the city on Prince Edward Island, in eastern Canada, where it landed....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/science/meteorite-debris-security-camera-canada.html . [includes video of the camera]