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Category: Astronomy/cosmology

The moon may have formed in just five hours, new simulations suggest

The moon may have formed in just five hours, new simulations suggest

Live Science reports: The moon may have formed in as few as five hours after the cataclysmic collision between Earth and a long-lost protoplanet, new simulations suggest. The surprising findings could help shed light on other historic impacts throughout our cosmic neighborhood and beyond. Experts strongly suspect that the moon was created when a Mars-size space rock called Theia smashed into an early version of our planet, back when the solar system was young and extremely unstable. This colossal impact…

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How a massive solar storm could take down the power grid

How a massive solar storm could take down the power grid

CNN reports: Forecasters knew something unusual was hurtling toward Earth. Three days before a solar storm arrived on May 10, 2024, they watched as a dark knot on the sun — tangled magnetic field lines spanning 124,000 miles — took aim at the planet. “That’s magnets twisting and turning and popping through each other,” said Shawn Dahl, service coordinator at the Space Weather Prediction Center operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. “Think about a rubber…

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High-speed particle smashing recreates primordial soup droplets from the universe’s first moments

High-speed particle smashing recreates primordial soup droplets from the universe’s first moments

Discover reports: In the universe’s earliest moments, it took the form of a scalding soup filled with particles called quarks and gluons. These particles zipped through liquidy plasma for just a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Now, physicists have recreated these conditions by producing tiny droplets of the same primordial soup that filled the universe right after it was born. Making a modern version of the primordial soup — known as quark-gluon plasma — entails smashing…

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The death of dark energy is a false alarm – the universe is still accelerating

The death of dark energy is a false alarm – the universe is still accelerating

By Phil Wiseman, University of Southampton and Mark Sullivan, University of Southampton A 2025 study by South Korean researchers caught the attention of the astronomy community when it suggested that the evidence behind dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy makes up about 70% of the universe but nobody knows what it is. This makes it a frequent target for scepticism. Scientists had long known that the universe was expanding. But in the late 1990s, researchers discovered that this expansion…

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One of the largest-ever maps of the universe charts 4 billion objects

One of the largest-ever maps of the universe charts 4 billion objects

Live Science reports: The largest 2D map of the universe just dropped, and it’s a stunner. Compiled from more than a decade of observations, the new map charts 4 billion stars, galaxies, black holes, asteroids and other objects of interest throughout the cosmos. The map reveals about three-quarters of the night sky in high resolution, spanning both visible and near-infrared light wavelengths and charting the areas of the universe not blocked by dust or gas. The map is so big,…

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Unprecedented images may explain one of greatest mysteries of the Sun

Unprecedented images may explain one of greatest mysteries of the Sun

Ian Sample writes: Golden bands and swirling vortices have been spotted on the sun in the most detailed images ever captured of the turbulent surface of our home star. Astronomers observed the sun with the Inouye solar telescope in Hawaii, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, and saw new features smaller than 20km (12 miles) across in a magnetically active region close to a sun spot. The unprecedented pictures show processes on the surface that are likely to explain the…

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Astrophysicists puzzle over the new universe revealed by Webb

Astrophysicists puzzle over the new universe revealed by Webb

Jay Bennett writes: When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.” Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Little red dots were never seen before the telescope came…

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Proposed new satellite fleets may destroy the night sky

Proposed new satellite fleets may destroy the night sky

Science reports: Two new proposals for fleets of orbiting data centers and reflective satellites could pose an unprecedented threat to ground-based astronomy, astronomers warn in a new study. The spacecraft would not only leave destructive trails across telescope images, the analysis finds, but also brighten the night sky by as much as 300%, leaving observatories to peer through a haze of scattered light that would veil stars. “Essentially, we lose all the faint stuff for which we built the telescopes…

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A dark dimension could link two of the universe’s great unknowns

A dark dimension could link two of the universe’s great unknowns

Steve Nadis writes: For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. According to current estimates, approximately 70% of the stuff that makes up the cosmos consists of dark energy, an unknown force that pushes space to expand. And another 25% consists of dark matter, a mysterious material that holds galaxies together. But semantically speaking, dark energy and dark matter are not so much “dark” as they are invisible. They do not…

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How Thomas Paine spelled out astronomical expectations for a new nation

How Thomas Paine spelled out astronomical expectations for a new nation

Jo Marchant writes: In politics, as in nature, tensions can take years to build, but it takes just one stone to unleash an avalanche, one spark to ignite a wildfire. For many historians of the American Revolution, that spark was a pamphlet of fewer than 100 pages written by a newly arrived English immigrant named Thomas Paine. Throughout 1775, violent clashes between British troops and colonist rebels protesting onerous taxes inspired little talk of outright revolution. Most rebels aimed to…

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Could the oldest human story really be 100,000 years old?

Could the oldest human story really be 100,000 years old?

Mihai Andrei writes: For as long as humans have existed, they have looked to the sky. There are thousands and thousands of different myths and legends linked to stars and constellations, but one radical new idea says that one such story could be incredibly old. The legend is linked to the Pleiades, a set of stars that many cultures call the “Seven Sisters”. But look at them with the naked eye and you’ll only see six; so where’s the seventh…

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Apollo vs Artemis: How the Earth changed in 58 years

Apollo vs Artemis: How the Earth changed in 58 years

Richard Hollingham writes: After the Apollo 8 crew captured the iconic Earthrise photo in 1968, Artemis astronauts have recreated the image, revealing changes to our fragile blue planet. When the commander of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, first saw the far side of the Moon from his spacecraft window in 1968 he was struck by its desolate appearance. “The lunar surface was terribly distressed with meteorite craters and volcanic residue,” he told me during a BBC interview in 2018. “It was…

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Universe’s expansion rate cannot be explained by current physics

Universe’s expansion rate cannot be explained by current physics

Live Science reports: There’s a central crisis in cosmology: Different measurements yield different values for the expansion rate of the universe. Now, a comprehensive analysis combining decades of independent measurements suggests that this discrepancy is not due to error or uncertainty; instead, it’s a potential pathway to new physics beyond the standard cosmological model. Astronomers calculate the universe’s expansion rate, or Hubble constant, in two ways. One method is to use measurements of the distance to the cosmic microwave background…

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Ancient star opens window to early days of the universe

Ancient star opens window to early days of the universe

UChicago News reports: Not all archaeologists study ancient pottery and arrowheads. If you’re a stellar archeologist, you seek the oldest stars in the universe—those born long before our own sun and planet came into being. A group led by University of Chicago scientists has discovered a star that appears to date back to the second generation of stars ever formed. Still inside the tiny primordial galaxy where it was first born, it has a unique elemental makeup that can tell…

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Largest image of its kind shows hidden chemistry at the heart of the Milky Way

Largest image of its kind shows hidden chemistry at the heart of the Milky Way

European Southern Observatory (ESO): Astronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way in a striking new image, unveiling a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprecedented detail. Obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), this rich dataset — the largest ALMA image to date — will allow astronomers to probe the lives of stars in the most extreme region of our galaxy, next to the supermassive black hole at its centre. “It’s a place of…

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How astronomers are unveiling the ‘skeleton’ of the universe

How astronomers are unveiling the ‘skeleton’ of the universe

Paul Sutter writes: The universe is a vast, unseen loom, weaving galaxies into an intricate cosmic web through invisible threads of matter. This cosmic web is the fundamental scaffolding of everything we see, dictating where galaxies form and how they evolve. Much of this architecture remains a mystery, its delicate pathways hidden, and uncovering these cosmic threads requires new eyes and persistent effort. But a new observation has helped us trace one in the Ursa Major Supergroup. In a preprint…

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