Space News & Blog Articles

Planets form inside swirling discs of gas and dust surrounding newborn stars, hidden that make them extraordinarily difficult to detect. Astronomers know these protoplanetary discs contain the raw ingredients for planetary systems because our own Solar System condensed from such a disc 4.6 billion years ago, but actually spotting planets while they’re still forming has remained one of astronomy’s great challenges. Until now, very few planets have been confirmed around stars that are still in their infancy.

The first photograph of a black hole arrived in 2019 like a revelation. That blurred orange ring surrounding the supermassive black hole M87*, 55 million light years away represented one of astronomy’s greatest achievements, the first direct visual confirmation of objects so extreme that not even light escapes their gravitational grip. Three years later, a second image captured Sagittarius A*, the black hole lurking at our own Galaxy’s centre. Both photographs captivated billions of people and opened an entirely new scientific frontier.

Galaxies don’t exactly move with urgency. At distances measured in hundreds of thousands of light years and timescales spanning hundreds of millions of years, even a direct collision unfolds slowly. The two spiral galaxies captured in NASA’s latest composite image, IC 2163 and NGC 2207, brushed past each other millions of years ago at speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second. From our perspective, they appear frozen mid embrace, their spiral arms reaching toward one another like dancers caught in an eternal waltz.

Many stars die spectacularly when they explode as supernovae. During these violent explosions, they leave behind thick, chaotic clouds of debris shaped like cauliflowers. But supernova remnant Pa 30 looks nothing like that.

Four mice went to space as astronauts. One came back and became a mother. And that simple fact might matter more than you’d think for humanity’s future beyond Earth.

How did hot Jupiters end up orbiting so close to their stars, thus earning their moniker? This is what a recent study published in *The Astronomical Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers from The University of Tokyo investigated the orbital evolution of hot Jupiters ended, specifically regarding where their orbits started before orbiting so close to their stars. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.

Forty light years away, seven Earth sized planets orbit around a dim red dwarf star in one of the most tightly packed planetary systems ever discovered. The TRAPPIST-1 system has captivated astronomers since 2017, with three of its planets orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water might exist. But there’s been a lingering question whether any of these worlds could hold onto moons?