Last November, NASA’s Lucy mission conducted a flyby of the asteroid Dinkinish, one of the Main Belt asteroids it will investigate as it makes its way to Jupiter. In the process, the spacecraft spotted a small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid, now named Selam (aka. “Lucy’s baby”). The moonlet’s name, an Ethiopian name that means “peace,” pays homage to the ancient human remains dubbed “Lucy” (or Dinkinish) that were unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974. Using novel statistical calculations based on how the two bodies orbit each other, a Cornell-led research team estimates that the moonlet is only ..read more

It’s that time again! Time for another model that will finally solve the mystery of dark matter. Or not, but it’s worth a shot. Until we directly detect dark matter particles, or until some model conclusively removes dark matter from our astrophysical toolkit the best we can do is continue looking for solutions. This new work takes a look at that old theoretical chestnut, primordial black holes, but it has a few interesting twists. Primordial black holes are hypothetical objects formed during the earliest moments of the Universe. According to the models they formed from micro-fluctuations in m ..read more

NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its Starlink broadband internet satellites for use in a Martian communication network. The idea is one of a dozen proposals that have won NASA funding for concept studies that could end up supporting the space agency’s strategy for bringing samples from Mars back to Earth for lab analysis. The proposals were submitted by nine companies — also including Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, Astrobotic, Firefly Aerospace, Impulse Space, Albedo Space and Redwire Space. Awardees will be paid $200,000 to $300,000 for ..read more

The JWST is astronomers’ best tool for probing exoplanet atmospheres. Its capable instruments can dissect the light passing through a distant world’s atmosphere and determine its chemical components. Scientists are interested in everything the JWST finds, but when it finds something indicating the possibility of life it seizes everyone’s attention. That’s what happened in September 2023, when the JWST found dimethyl sulphide (DMS) in the atmosphere of the exoplanet K2-18b. K2-18b orbits a red dwarf star about 124 light-years away. It’s a sub-Neptune with about 2.5 times Earth’s radius and 8.6 ..read more

First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is reaching milestone after milestone. A few weeks ago, the observatory announced that its digital camera, the largest one ever made, is complete. Now the observatory has announced that its unique primary/tertiary mirror has its first reflective coating. The Rubin’s massive digital camera has an important job and garners a lot of attention. But it’s powerless without the telescope’s innovative primary/tertiary mirror. Primary mirrors are always the most critical and time-consuming part of modern observato ..read more

A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it’s center seems to break our standard models of stellar evolution. But new data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggests that there may once have been three stars, and that one was destroyed in a catastrophic collision. About 3800 light years away, in the Southern constellation of Norma, you can find an object called the Dragon’s Egg Nebula (catalogue number NGC 6164). In the heart of this nebula lies a double star known as HD 148937. The pair are bright enough to be seen through binoculars and small telescopes ..read more

The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and higher to get better views of the Universe. On Earth, the best locations are at places such as the Atacama Desert in Chile. So, that’s where the University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory just opened its high-altitude eye on the sky, atop Cerro Chajnantor. This unique new observatory, which was just commissioned on April 30th, sits at 5,640 meters (3.5 miles) above sea level, making it the highest observatory in the world—with a Guinness World Record recognition to prove it. The idea is to use this po ..read more

The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope’s latest act of outdoing itself, it examined a distant exoplanet to map its weather. The forecast? An unending, blistering inferno driven by ceaseless supersonic winds. WASP-43b is a hot Jupiter orbiting a main sequence star about 261 light-years away. It has a slightly larger radius than Jupiter and is about twice as massive. It orbits its star in under 20 hours and is only 1.3 million miles away from it. That means it is tidally locked to the star, with one side facing all the radiation and the other permanently dark. This is not unusual for ..read more

You’ve seen the Sun, but you’ve never seen the Sun like this. This single frame from a video captured by ESA’s Solar Orbiter mission shows the Sun looking very …. fluffy!  You can see feathery, hair-like structures made of plasma following magnetic field lines in the Sun’s lower atmosphere as it transitions into the much hotter outer corona. The video was taken from about a third of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. See the full video below, which shows unusual features on the Sun, including coronal moss, spicules, and coronal rain.   Solar Orbiter recorded this video on S ..read more

The Search for Life in our Solar System leads seekers to strange places. From our Earthbound viewpoint, an ice-covered moon orbiting a gas giant far from the Sun can seem like a strange place to search for life. But underneath all that ice sits a vast ocean. Despite the huge distance between the moon and the Sun and despite the thick ice cap, the water is warm. Of course, we’re talking about Enceladus, and its warm, salty ocean—so similar to Earth’s in some respects—takes some of the strangeness away. Enceladus is Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, and the Cassini spacecraft observed it during its m ..read more