Space News & Blog Articles

Observers from Europe to Australia will see the final lunar eclipse of 2025 this weekend.

Large exoplanets are more easily detected than small ones. It's axiomatic. While large planets block out more starlight during transits, small planets block out much less, letting them hide in the overpowering glare from their stars. To help detect sub-Jupiter mass exoplanets, astronomers search for the effect these planets can have on their surroundings.

One of the most difficult parts of astronomy is understanding how time affects it. The farther away you look in the universe, the farther back you look in time. One way this complicates things is how objects might change over time. For example, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the early universe might appear one way to our modern telescopes, but the same supermassive black hole might appear completely differently a few billion years later. Understanding the connection between the two objects would be difficult to say the least, but a new prerint paper on arXiv from researchers at the University of Science and Technology in South Korea describes one potential parallel, between the recently discovered “Little Red Dots” of the early universe and “BlueDOGs” of the slightly later universe.

In astronomy, some of the most profound discoveries happen by accident. As the saying goes, "The most exciting phrase in science is not 'eureka!' but 'that's funny.'" This was certainly the case with Matus Rybak - a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University - and his colleagues were observing RXJ1131-1231, a quasar located 6 billion light-years away in the constellation Crater. This active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a favorite among astronomers because of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its center and the fact that there is an intervening galaxy between it and Earth.

Water is key to life as we know it. But that doesn’t mean its key to life everywhere. Despite the fact that the ability to house liquid water is one of the key characteristics we look for in potentially habitable exoplanets, there is nothing written in stone about the fact that life has to use water as a solvent as opposed to other liquid options. A new paper from researchers at MIT, including those who are developing missions to look for life on Venus, shows there might be an alternative - ionic liquids that can form and stay stable in really harsh conditions.

The Taurus star-forming region is only a few hundred light-years away, and it may be the nearest star formation region to Earth. It's a stellar nursery with hundreds of young stars, and attracts a lot of astronomers' attention. One of the young stars in Taurus is named IRAS 04302. IRAS 04302 is sometimes called the "Butterfly Star" because of its appearance when viewed edge-on.