Universe Today

Space and Astronomy News from Universe Today
  1. If Life Exists in Venus' Atmosphere, It Could Have Come From Earth

    Photographed in ultraviolet light and rendered in false color, this view reveals the complexities of the clouds that coat Venus. Credit: JAXA/ISIS/DARTS/Damia Bouic

    A new study presented at the 2026 LPSC suggests that if life does exist in Venus' clouds, there's a chance it came from Earth.

  2. An Aerobot With ISRU Capabilities Could Explore Venus' Atmosphere for Years

    Artist's concept for NASA's High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC). Credit: NASA

    In a new proposal, a team of scientists explores how aerial robotic platforms (areobots) with in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) capability could operate for years in Venus' atmosphere.

  3. The Habitable Worlds Observatory Will Need Astrometry To Find Life

    Artist's concept of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Credit - NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

    We’re getting closer and closer to finding a real Earth-like exoplanet. But finding one is only half the battle. To truly know if we’re looking at an Earth analog somewhere else in the galaxy, we have to directly image it too. That’s a job for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a planned space-based telescope whose primary job is to do precisely that. But even capturing a picture and a planet and getting spectral readings of its atmospheric chemistry still isn’t enough, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv by Kaz Gary of Ohio State and their co-authors. HWO will need to figure out how much a planet weighs first.

  4. The Artemis Generation Begins! Artemis II Launches for the Moon

    NASA's Artemis II mission launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1st, 2026. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

    At 06:25 p.m. EDT (03:25 p.m. PDT) on April 1st, the Artemis II mission lifted off from the historic Launch Pad-39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This mission will send astronauts on a ten-day journey around the Moon and will be the first crewed mission to venture beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since the Apollo Era.

  5. Why Are Supermassive Black Holes Growing So Slowly?

    Astronomers studied more than 1 million galaxies and more than 8,000 growing supermassive black holes (SMBH) over billions of years to try to answer a difficult question. During Cosmic Noon about 10 billion years ago, the growth of SMBH began to slow dramatically. The image on the left represents one of the rapidly-growing SMBH in the past, and the image on the right represents a slower-growing SMBH about 3 billion light-years away. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State Univ./Z. Yu; Optical (HST): NASA/ESA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds, L. Frattare

    About 10 billion years ago, the growth rate of supermassive black holes began to slow dramatically. To this day, the SMBH growth rate still appears to be low. There are three potential explanations for this, and researchers think they've figured out which explanation fits best.

  6. Astronomers Find a Third Galaxy Missing Its Dark Matter, Validating a Violent Cosmic Collision Theory

    Image of the NGC 1052-DF2 Ultra Diffuse Galaxy that started the chain of discoveries of galaxies lacking dark matter. Credit - NASA, ESA, and P. van Dokkum (Yale)

    Astronomers have long argued that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding that holds galaxies together. Without its immense gravitational pull, the rotational spins of galaxies would force them to simply fly apart. But now, scientists have found a string of galaxies that seem to be missing their dark matter entirely. The latest in this string, known as NGC 1052-DF9, is described in a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Michael Keim, Pieter van Dokkum and their team from Yale. It lends credence to a radical theory of galaxy formation known as the “Bullet Dwarf” collision scenario, which has been a controversial idea for the last decade.

  7. The Largest Survey of Exoplanet Spins Confirms a Long-held Theory

    Using the W.M. Keck Observatory, astronomers investigated the long-predicted relationship between mass and spin for giant planets and brown dwarfs. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

    For some time, astronomers have theorized that there is a connection between planetary mass and rotation. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai'i, a team of astronomers confirmed this relationship by studying dozens of gas giants and brown dwarfs in distant star systems.

  8. Scouring TESS Data With AI Reveals A Hundred New Exoplanets

    This artist's illustration shows an Ultra-Short Period planet orbiting its star. This type of exoplanet takes less than one Earth day to orbit its star. Some scientists think these exoplanets are the remaining rocky cores of once much larger gas giants whose atmospheres have been stripped away by their stars. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Schaller (for STScI)

    New AI tool validates over 100 new planets, finds thousands of candidates, and gives our best estimate for how likely it is to find certain planets around Sun-like stars.

  9. Exploding Primordial Black Holes Might Have Reshaped the Early Universe - And Created All Matter As We Know It

    Artist's depiction of Primordial Black Holes. Credit - NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

    The early universe is absolutely so far outside our understanding of how the world works it's hard to describe in words. Back then, the cosmos wasn’t filled with stars and galaxies but with a boiling soup of quarks and gluons, with a few microscopic black holes thrown in, occasionally detonating like depth charges. That’s the early universe theorized by a new paper, available in pre-print from arXiv, from researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and MIT anyway.

  10. Mercury Scout Mission Concept with Solar Sail Propulsion

    Image of Mercury obtained by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008. (Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Arizona State University/Carnegie Institution of Washington)

    The planet Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and also the most difficult for spacecraft to visit and explore. This is because as spacecraft get closer to Mercury, the Sun’s enormous gravity pulls in the spacecraft, greatly increasing its speed and making it hard to slow down without large amounts of fuel. But what if a spacecraft could both travel to and explore Mercury without fuel? This could drastically reduce mission costs while delivering impactful science.