View larger. | Artist’s illustration of Cassini spacecraft flying through the water vapor plumes of Enceladus. A new study from researchers in the UK has found that Enceladus’ subsurface ocean might have layers that make it difficult to find traces of life on Enceladus. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech/ Space Science Institute. Saturn’s moon Enceladus has … Read more
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s super Neptune! But this Superman-mimicking planet is not blasting through space on its own. It is being dragged along by its parent star. NASA scientists have discovered what they suspect is the hypervelocity star racing through space with a Neptune-like planet in tow. The system … Read more
Sometimes, things across the vast Universe line up just right for us. The Einstein Ring above, like all Einstein Rings, has three parts. In the foreground is a distant massive object like a galaxy or galaxy cluster. In the background, at an even greater distance away, is a star or another galaxy. We’re the observers, … Read more
This is the optical module of the telescope KM3NeT that has captured the highest energy neutrino yet known. It made the discovery from the dark depths of the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. Image via KM3NeT (CC BY-NC 4.0). Highest energy neutrino observed from undersea telescope There’s a telescope sitting more than a mile and … Read more
Look closely. Can you spot the ring of light around the center of this galaxy, NGC 6505? ESA’s Euclid telescope captured galaxy NGC 6505, which is acting as a gravitational lens, bending the light from a more distant galaxy and creating this Einstein ring. See closeup below. Image via ESA/ Euclid/ Euclid Consortium/ NASA. Image … Read more
After losing his Pacific Palisades neighborhood in the fires that swept through Los Angeles in January, Kent Tobiska, the CEO and chief scientist at Space Environment Technologies, is reconsidering a part of his work. Specifically, he’s rethinking the danger posed by geomagnetic storms. Instead of worrying only about rare storms like the 1859 Carrington event, … Read more
U.S. military officials are scrambling to upgrade decades-old systems that track objects in space — a critical capability they say is falling dangerously behind modern threats — as thousands of new satellites crowd Earth’s orbit and rival powers demonstrate increasingly sophisticated space capabilities. Military leaders and industry experts warn that this Cold War-era tracking infrastructure … Read more
Having launched on January 9, 2024 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Einstein Probe detected several new events during its commissioning phase. Last October, Yuan Weimin, the spacecraft’s principle investigator, told China Central Television that the X-ray observatory had already discovered around 60 very strong transient celestial objects, close to a thousand potential transients, … Read more
As the use of space accelerates, so too does the risk of orbital debris — a pressing threat to communications, navigation and other technologies underpinning life on Earth. An estimated 131 million pieces of satellites and rockets larger than a millimeter are currently in orbit, traveling at speeds of up to 28,100 kilometers per hour. … Read more
Watch this video of the largest radio jet that astronomers have seen yet in the early universe. Image via NOIRLab. Largest radio jet seen yet in the early universe In the nearby universe, astronomers have seen many radio jets blasting outward from the black holes at the cores of galaxies. But on February 6, 2025, … Read more