Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

Three iron rings in a planet-forming disk

A three-ringed structure in the planet-forming zone of a circumstellar disk where metals and minerals serve as a reservoir of planetary building blocks.

January 8, 2024 Read more

New images reveal what Neptune and Uranus really look like

Neptune is fondly known for being a rich blue and Uranus green - but a new study has revealed that the two ice giants are actually far closer in colour than typically thought.

January 6, 2024 Read more

Mysterious missing component in the clouds of Venus revealed

Researchers may have identified the missing component in the chemistry of the Venusian clouds that would explain their colour and splotchiness in the UV range, solving a long-standing mystery.

January 5, 2024 Read more

Further evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars

New theoretical analysis places the likelihood of massive neutron stars hiding cores of deconfined quark matter between 80 and 90 percent. The result was reached through massive supercomputer runs utilizing Bayesian statistical inference.

December 28, 2023 Read more

The goldmine of a neutron star collision

International research team models the different signatures of a kilonova explosion simultaneously for the first time.

December 22, 2023 Read more

Studying a million galaxies to find out how the universe began

Researchers have analyzed more than one million galaxies to explore primordial fluctuations that seeded the formation of the structure of the entire universe.

December 22, 2023 Read more

Pancake stack of films on a balloon most accurate gamma-ray telescope

A pancake stack of radioactivity-sensitive films carried through the sky by a balloon was able to take the world's most accurate picture of a neutron star's gamma ray beam.

December 22, 2023 Read more

Organic compounds in asteroids formed in colder regions of space

Analysis of organic compounds - called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) - extracted from the Ryugu asteroid and Murchison meteorite has found that certain PAHs likely formed in the cold areas of space between stars rather than in hot regions near stars as was previously thought.

December 22, 2023 Read more

Astronomers detect seismic ripples in ancient galactic disk

A new snapshot of an ancient, far-off galaxy could help scientists understand how it formed and the origins of our own Milky Way.

December 22, 2023 Read more

Scientists measure the distance to stars by their music

A team of astronomers has used asteroseismology, or the study of stellar oscillations, to accurately measure the distance of stars from the Earth. Their research examined thousands of stars and checked the measurements taken during the Gaia mission to study the near Universe.

December 15, 2023 Read more

Astronomers discover first population of binary stripped stars

New findings confirm existence of hot helium stars long-thought to be at the heart of hydrogen-poor supernovae and neutron star mergers.

December 15, 2023 Read more

Unexpected chemistry reveals cosmic star factories' secrets

Using powerful telescopes to split two galaxies' light into individual colors, scientists were amazed to discover light from many different molecules - more than ever before at such distances.

December 14, 2023 Read more

Webb stuns with new high-definition look at exploded star

Like a shiny, round ornament ready to be placed in the perfect spot on a holiday tree, supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) gleams in a new image from the James Webb Space Telescope.

December 12, 2023 Read more

Giant doubts about giant exomoons

The extrasolar planets Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708b are supposedly the home worlds of the first known exomoons. A new study now comes to a different conclusion.

December 8, 2023 Read more

Ancient stars made extraordinarily heavy elements

How heavy can an element be? Scientists have found that ancient stars were capable of producing elements with atomic masses greater than 260, heavier than any element on the periodic table found naturally on Earth. The finding deepens our understanding of element formation in stars.

December 8, 2023 Read more

Stellar winds regulate growth of galaxies

Galactic winds, observed in galaxies over 7 billion years old, play a crucial role in regulating their growth and star formation rate by facilitating matter exchange with their surroundings.

December 7, 2023 Read more

Tracking undetectable space junk

Colliding pieces of space debris emit electric signals that could help track small debris littering Earth's orbit, potentially saving satellites and spacecraft.

December 5, 2023 Read more

Astronomers determine the age of three mysterious baby stars at the heart of the Milky Way

Through analysis of high-resolution data from a ten-metre telescope, researchers have succeeded in generating new knowledge about three stars at the very heart of the Milky Way. The stars proved to be unusually young with a puzzling chemical composition that surprised the researchers.

December 5, 2023 Read more