Astro Blog

By Sara Hashemi , Smithsonian Magazine.  Excerpt: On July 5, a Japanese spacecraft flew past an odd-looking asteroid named Torifune. The probe snapped photos, which it beamed to Earth, revealing that the object is actually made of two space rocks that are stuck together—something called a “contact binary.” ...The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spacecraft that captured the data, Hayabusa2 , snapped a particularly show-stopping close-up from just over half a mile from Torifune’s surface, according to a statement ....  Full article at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-images-reveal-that-this-asteroid-is-actually-two-conjoined-space-rocks-that-form-a-peanut-shaped-object-called-a-contact-binary-180989090/ .  See also The New York Times article, Cosmic Conjoined Twins, Caught on Camera .  

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: For decades, elementary students learned the same tale of the Solar System: first come rocky terrestrial planets such as Earth, followed by gas giants such as Jupiter and ice giants such as Neptune, with lovable Pluto bringing up the rear. ...the so-called ice giants likely contain very little ice. ...Uranus and Neptune were first called ice giants because they orbit past the Solar System’s so-called ice lines: the points beyond which water, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other volatile molecules exist as solids rather than gases. If this region abounded with frozen water during the early Solar System, then Uranus and Neptune’s interiors might consist mostly of water, squeezed by the pressure of the planets’ gravity into a hot “supercritical” soup. ...researchers have come up with a smorgasbord of ideas about the interiors of our outermost planets. The newest, posted as a preprint last week and currently in review at The Astrophysical Journal ,...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Last night, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory began to film the greatest time-lapse movie ever made: a 10-year record of the changing night sky. Over a few nights, the telescope will sweep the entire hemisphere of sky visible from its Chilean mountaintop with the largest digital camera ever built, then do it again and again for a decade. In its first year the survey will generate more data than all previous optical telescopes combined. It will capture everything from wandering asteroids and exploding stars to the growth of distant galaxies, and it will spew the data continuously to the world’s astronomers....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/rubin-observatory-begins-10-year-movie-changing-universe .

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Disclosure Day , arriving in movie theaters this week, deals with what would be a pivotal event in history: the moment conclusive evidence arrives of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The movie pits sinister military-industrial forces that hide and control the information against those who strive to reveal the truth. ...Researchers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have long realized this moment—if it ever arrives outside cinemas—is going to be fraught with emotion, confusion, and possible danger. To get a jump on such events, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) convened a permanent committee of SETI experts. In 1989, the committee drew up a set of “postdetection protocols,” nonbinding guidelines for what scientists and their institutions should do when the time comes. The protocols stress the importance of verifying the alien signal and making accurate and transparent announcements. They sugge...

By Adrian Cho , Science.  Excerpt: A new neutrino experiment in China has put the world on notice that it’s poised to make a breakthrough. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO), a plastic sphere 10 stories high filled with a liquid that flashes when certain particles pass through it, detects neutrinos streaming from nuclear power plants 53 kilometers away. Neutrinos come in three types that “oscillate,” or morph into one another, as they zip along at near–light-speed, a phenomenon physicists have yet to fully puzzle out. Now, JUNO has measured with unequaled precision two of the six parameters that describe the oscillations, as reported today in Nature . The result, based on just 2 months of data, suggests JUNO is on track to reach its main goal: sorting the neutrinos by mass. ...Nearly massless, neutrinos interact with other matter so rarely that every second trillions pass through each of us....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/first-re...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: When violent eruptions from the Sun slam into Earth’s magnetic field, they do more than paint aurorae across the night sky. They can scramble the electronics of satellites and induce powerful ground currents that knock out electrical grids. It’s been estimated that a one-in-a-100-year solar storm like the 1859 Carrington Event could cause more than $3 trillion of damage to the power grid alone. ...In a study published today in Space Weather , the researchers describe a provocative proposal called “StormWall”: a fleet of satellites that would release hundreds of tons of gases into space just before a solar storm strikes Earth. Computer simulations suggest the artificial cloud could cut the intensity of a major solar storm by half or more....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/radical-proposal-would-block-solar-storms-orbital-airbag . 

By ScienceAdvisor.  Excerpt: Most small worlds in the outer Solar System are not expected to have atmospheres. Gas escapes too easily, and there is little to replace it. Pluto, larger and rich in ices that can vaporize into gas, has long been the only known exception. Now,  astronomers have spotted a thin atmosphere around a much smaller object . Known as 2002 XV93, it’s a distant plutino, a Kuiper Belt object ...described in a new paper in  Nature Astronomy . At roughly 250 kilometers in radius, it falls far below the size thought necessary to sustain an atmosphere. But in January 2024, as the object passed in front of a distant star, astronomers noticed something unusual: The starlight did not vanish all at once, but instead dimmed gradually. That subtle fade is the telltale signature of an atmosphere. ...By modeling the signal, researchers estimated a surface pressure of about 100 to 200 nanobars, tens of times thinner than Pluto’s atmosphere, but far denser than expec...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Unusual radio signals could be long-sought smoking gun of galactic mergers. Astronomers routinely see galaxies crashing into each other and combining. But the final phase of these cosmic mergers has long proved elusive: two supermassive black holes, each once occupying the center of its own galaxy, closely circling each other within a single, combined galaxy. Now, researchers say they have found compelling evidence of such a pairing. A distant galaxy seems to be firing off two beams of radiation from its center at different angles—a sign that a pair of supermassive black holes lurks at its heart. The two behemoths—each with a mass as large as 1 billion Suns—seem to orbit each other every 121 days. ...In as little as 100 years...the black holes should collide, shaking spacetime itself in a titanic burst of gravitational waves. That final burst “would be a really fantastic gravitational wave signal,” says team leader Silke Britzen of the Max Planc...

By Matthew R. Francis , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A new model shows how the migration of Titan could have destroyed another moon, creating Saturn’s rings and the moon Hyperion. And, the model suggests, this all happened in the past billion years....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/titanic-shake-up-could-explain-saturns-young-rings-and-strange-moons . 

By Science Advisor, AAAS.  Excerpt: ...The rate of cosmic expansion, known as the Hubble constant, is so important for cosmologists that the disagreement among researchers over its value has its own name: the Hubble tension. Astronomers measure it one way, using stars or supernovae with predictable brightness. Cosmologists have another way, studying ripples in the echo of the Big Bang and winding the clock forward to today. The two techniques have become increasingly precise, but they steadfastly disagree with each other. A third method is needed to  break the deadlock  . That may come through the magic of gravitational lensing, which can cause a supernova—a star exploding at the end of its life—to appear to explode again and again. If a supernova is situated behind a large mass, such as a galaxy or cluster of galaxies, then as its light passes by the mass, its gravity bends the light along different paths, producing multiple images that show the explosion at different ti...

By Caryl-Sue Micalizio , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The  awe-inducing Vera C. Rubin Observatory  does not blink. From its sky-high altitude in the Chilean Andes, Rubin will image every point in the skies over the Southern Hemisphere 800 times over a 10-year period. The observatory is already issuing astronomers 800,000 alerts a night and eventually might send 10  million  a night. “The whole field of astronomy is about to be completely revolutionized by this dataset,” says astronomer Sarah Greenstreet in Kimberly Cartier’s beautiful, breathless introduction to the observatory, “ Small, Faint, or Fast, Rubin Will Find It .” So what is Rubin going to find? Asteroids . ...astronomers think Rubin might find 4 million more. Comets . Rubin’s unblinking eye will help astronomers trace comets and other trans-Neptunian objects in the icy reaches of the outer solar system. Planet 9 . “This is the survey that will determine whether Planet 9 is real or not,” says astronomer Meghan ...

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Jupiter, the most massive planet in our solar system, has correspondingly humongous storms.... Some of these storms also generate terrific bolts of lightning, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley scientists. Some flashes are 100 times more powerful than lightning on Earth — and possibly much stronger. The results come from analysis of data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting the planet since 2016 and scanning the atmosphere with its microwave radiometer, which can detect radio emissions from lightning similar to the radio interference created by lightning on Earth. ...lead author Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory...  study  was published March 20 in the journal  AGU Advances ....  Full article at https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/03/23/lightning-bolts-on-jupiter-pack-more-than-100-times-the-power-of-earths-flashes/ .  See also...

By Science Insider.  Excerpt: Out past Neptune, connected spheres of rock orbit through the solar system like faceless galactic snowmen. Called contact binaries, these objects represent roughly 10% of all planetary building blocks. But how these cosmic curiosities form has remained unclear. Typically, simulations of two colliding space objects model the masses as fluid blobs that squish into a single sphere on impact. But using high-performance computers, ...new models were  able to predict the snowman-shaped contact binaries for the first time , scientists reported this week. As for the origins of the binaries, scientists think they began as single objects formed when gravity pulled together dust, gas, and pebbles in the disc of the early Milky Way. As the disc rotated, it ripped apart such objects into two separate chunks that orbited each other. Over time, gravity gently tugged these chunks back together until they fused into their characteristic two-lobed shape....  F...

By Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: Of the more than 4,500 stars known to have planets, one puzzling statistic stands out. Even though nearly all stars are expected to have planets and most stars form in pairs, planets that orbit both stars in a pair are rare. Of the more than 6,000 extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, confirmed to date — most of them found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) — only 14 are observed to orbit binary stars. There should be hundreds. Where are all the planets with two suns, like Tatooine in  Star Wars ? Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the American University of Beirut have now proposed a reason for this dearth of circumbinary exoplanets — and Einstein’s general theory of relativity is to blame. ...If a planet is orbiting the pair of stars, the gravitational tugs from the stars make the planet’s orbit precess, ...similar to the way the axis of a spinning top...

By Elise Cutts , Science.  Excerpt: Astronomers are planning ambitious telescopes to search for signs of life on distant planets. A newly discovered world, announced here last week at the Rocky Worlds conference and  published yesterday  in  The Astrophysical Journal Letters , might just be the perfect target. The planet, called HD 137010 b, is almost exactly Earth-size. At 355 days, its orbit is almost exactly Earth-like, too. And its star is bright and just 146 light-years away–close enough to be observed in detail with future telescopes....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/earth-size-planet-spotted-yearlong-orbit . 

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen , Scientific American.  Excerpt: The galaxy MoM-z14 could offer clues to what the universe looked like in its early infancy. ...On Wednesday astronomers on  announced that a bright galaxy  called MoM-z14 that was found using NASA’s  James Webb Space Telescope  (JWST) is the farthest yet detected, existing just 280 million years after the big bang. ...The galaxy, the light of which has taken more than 13 billion years to reach our telescopes, is  brighter, denser and more chemically rich than astronomers had expected , according to NASA....  Full article at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwst-spots-most-distant-galaxy-ever-pushing-the-limits-of-the-observable/ . 

By Elise Cutts , Science.  Excerpt: Towering tidal waves of lava could be rolling around hot alien worlds, researchers reported last week, here at the  Rocky Worlds conference  and in a  preprint  posted on arXiv this month. The Sun and Moon drive tides on Earth, but these tidal waves would be tugged up by the intense gravitational forces endured by planets in tight orbits around their stars. For instance, lava tidal waves on the blazing-hot exoplanet 55 Cancri e—a rocky world that orbits its star every 18 hours—could rise several hundred meters high and surge at the speed of a human sprinter, says Mohammad Farhat, a planetary scientist at the University of California (UC), Berkeley who presented the modeling study. ...Scientists often look for alien air by taking the temperatures of planets’ dayside hemispheres. The presence of an atmosphere would spread heat around to the nightside, making the dayside look cooler than expected for a bare rock. But if lava wave...

By Katrina Miller , The New York Times.  Excerpt: This week, astronomers announced the discovery of a new kind of cosmic object, something that is very nearly a galaxy, save for one crucial, missing ingredient: stars. The almost-galaxy is about 14 million light-years from Earth. It was the ninth cloud found to be associated with a nearby spiral galaxy, leading to its serendipitous name: Cloud-9. The object is starless, consisting of only a haze of hydrogen gas that astronomers believe is swaddled in a much more massive clump of  dark matter,  the invisible substance that permeates the cosmos and shapes its overarching structure. ...Cloud-9 is the first confirmed example of what astronomers call a RELHIC, short for Reionization-Limited H I Cloud and pronounced “relic.” Such objects are rich in gaseous hydrogen but devoid of any stars. They are  failed galaxies  thought to be nearly as old as time itself, primordial fossils that can help astronomers understand the...

By Paul Voosen , Science.  Excerpt: After years on life support, NASA’s plan to collect martian rocks and ferry them back to Earth has died. Yesterday, Congress  released  a  compromise spending bill  for the present financial year that backs the White House’s effort to kill the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program. Although the bill must be passed by both congressional chambers and signed into law, it effectively signals the end of MSR....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-mars-sample-return-mission-dead .