Water in the great, cold nurseries where stars birth has a cosmic fingerprint. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have found, for the first time, a rare form of water ice surrounding a young star remarkably similar to our infant Sun. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, this finding implies that some of ...
Among the most energetic events in the universe’s catalog of violent events since the Big Bang, astronomers have found a new extreme in the class of cosmic explosions. Dubbed extreme nuclear transients (ENTs), these rare, ultra-luminous events were seen in the centers of far-off galaxies where supermassive black holes split apart large stars in catastrophic ...
The Sun’s poles have long been a cosmic mystery buried from Earth’s perspective by the simple fact that our planet, along with every other spacecraft, orbits within the equatorial plane. Thanks to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Solar Orbiter spacecraft, however, mankind has now seen the solar south pole in history. Captured in March 2025, ...
A cosmic leviathan stirs across the great, quiet expanse of the early universe. About 12 billion years old, a supermassive black hole has unleashed a jet of energy so strong it defies understanding illuminated not by starlight but by the fading echo of the Big Bang itself. Three times the width of our Milky Way, ...
Astronomers have discovered a cosmic goldmine in the whirling disk of a young star 330 light-years away, rare isotopes of methanol molecules possibly holding the key to the beginnings of life. The discovery of HD 100453, a star hardly a million years old, provides an unparalleled window into the chemical soup that generates planets and ...
At the core of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), a cosmic behemoth is challenging preconceptions. Renowned for being the first black hole ever directly photographed, the supermassive black hole M87 has just exposed another amazing secret: it devours matter even faster and spins at a blistering 80% of the maximum speed in the universe. Using ...
The first time NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has observed a big magnetic burst in the sun’s corona, this event could fundamentally alter our understanding of solar storms and their impact on Earth. Against expectations, the spacecraft “touches” the sun’s atmosphere in daring close passes and finds a great surge of energy flinging high-speed plasma towards ...
When the most influential tech billionaire in the world and the U.S. president square off in a high-stakes game of political brinkmanship, what results? The response appears to compromise America’s supremacy in space. An explosive conflict between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump over a tax bill descended into threats last week that might compromise ...
Cosmologists have believed for a long time that dark energy the mysterious factor that accelerates the expansion of the universe–was a constant, indestructible presence. However, the latest information obtained from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) indicates this is not the situation. Instead, the impact of dark energy may diminish as time passes, a finding ...
Astronomers have been narrating a dramatic tale about the fate of our galaxy for more than a century: the Milky Way is relentlessly on collision with Andromeda, its enormous neighbor. Once judged unavoidable within 4–5 billion years, the cosmic smash-up would destroy spiral galaxies and create a new, shapeless elliptical galaxy known as “Milkomeda.” But ...
