For most of human history, the night sky has been a place where stars, planets, and faraway galaxies can be seen. But what was there before the first stars came to life? Was the universe full of light when it was young, or was it a dark void? The answer is much more interesting than ...
For hundreds of years, the only time mankind could see the Sun’s corona, which is the highly hot and ethereal outer atmosphere, was during a total solar eclipse. But the European orbit Agency (ESA) has now gone above that boundary by making the first artificial solar eclipse in orbit. The Proba-3 mission, which began in ...
A spectacular astronomical event has unfolded in the southern constellation of Lupus as a newly discovered nova, V462 Lupi, surged into view this June. Initially recorded on June 12, 2025, by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), the nova has rapidly brightened to naked-eye visibility, stunning both professional astronomers and casual skywatchers alike. With ...
The quest for life beyond Earth has centered for decades on rocky, Earth-like planets, but a new class of enigmatic worlds called Hycean planets may upend this way of thinking about habitability. These ocean-laden exoplanets, cloaked in dense hydrogen atmospheres, could have great hidden seas thousands of miles below their surfaces, and tidal forces and geothermal heat ...
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 ...
