Universe Today
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Image: Universe Today This Ancient Meteorite Hints at Mars' Warm, Wet Past
- Date
- Authors
- Evan Gough
Ancient Martian meteorites are like time-capsules from the planet's past. They're delivered to us by impacts that launch them into space, where some of them find their way to Earth. One recently discovered meteorite…
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Image: Universe Today Queen's University Belfast Students Find Neptune's Elusive Trojan Asteroids
- Date
- Authors
- Matthew Williams
Astronomers at Queen’s University Belfast have led an international team studying new solar system bodies near Neptune, helping to unravel the mysteries of our solar system’s evolution.
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Image: Universe Today What Could Split a Black Hole in Two?
- Date
- Authors
- Carolyn Collins Petersen
We all know that black holes can collide. It has happened since black holes began to form, early in cosmic time. The result is always a clash that gives off gravitational waves and a giant bang. Since black holes have…
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Image: Universe Today Hera Probe Sees Asteroid Pair Separately for First Time
- Date
- Authors
- Laurence Tognetti, MSc
Planetary defense is a growing concern among the scientific community, as efforts have been made to design and implement missions meant to deflect incoming threats to the Earth well in advance. In 2022, NASA…
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Image: Universe Today Space Outposts Beyond the Moon May Rely on Planetary AI
- Date
- Authors
- Laurence Tognetti, MSc
NASA plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface in 2028 for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. But the famed agency has no intention of stopping there, as they plan to establish a permanent human presence on…
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Image: Universe Today Ceres' Water Ice Can Mask Massive Surface Salt Deposits
- Date
- Authors
- Laurence Tognetti, MSc
The dwarf planet Ceres is arguably one of the most overlooked and underappreciated planetary objects in the entire solar system. This could be because while Ceres has the same dwarf planet designation as Pluto, Ceres is…
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Image: Universe Today Martian Polar Crater Ice Shifts with Seasonal Frost
- Date
- Authors
- Laurence Tognetti, MSc
The planet Mars shares many landforms and weather patterns with the Earth, including changing seasons, volcanoes, canyons, dust storms and dust devils, and water ice. But one feature that Earth and Mars share among the…
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Image: Universe Today New Research Resolves the Mystery Behind Van Gogh's The Starry Night
- Date
- Authors
- Matthew Williams
The sky in Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) matches, in both observation and shape, the pre-dawn sky over Saint-Rémy around 22 July 1889, when a waning crescent moon, Venus and the Hyades star cluster appeared…
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Image: Universe Today Researchers May Have Solved a Puzzling Contradiction in the Ryugu Sample
- Date
- Authors
- Evan Gough
Samples from the asteroid Ryugu, and from carbonaceous chondrites that have crashed on Earth, present an apparent contradiction. Their fine-grained matrices have widely varied compositions of their clay-like minerals…
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Image: Universe Today The JWST May Have Found Where Heavy Black Hole Seeds Formed
- Date
- Authors
- Evan Gough
Astrophysicists think that black holes grow through a hierarchical merger framework. But the elusive Intermediate Mass Black Holes are the missing link between stellar mass black holes, and the gargantuan supermassive…
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Image: Universe Today The Vera Rubin Has Found Two More of the Milky Way's Dim Satellites
- Date
- Authors
- Evan Gough
The Vera Rubin Observatory has detected two more of the Milky Ways' dim, hard to see satellites. One is an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, and one is a globular cluster. Each one is a missing piece of the puzzle in the Milky…
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Image: Universe Today Stubborn Asteroids Around White Dwarfs Resist Becoming Dust
- Date
- Authors
- Evan Gough
Astronomers are finding more dusty disks around white dwarf stars, and some of them are home to asteroids. But how these rocky asteroids are turned to dust and form these rings isn't clear. New research shows that the…
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Image: Universe Today What Will Politics Look Like on Other Planets? It's Likely to Be a Mishmash
- Date
- Authors
- Alan Boyle
When we make our home on other worlds, who will be in charge? Will it be an emperor? A billionaire? A rebel alliance? Or none of the above? Astrobiologist Jacob Haqq Misra runs through the legal and political options.
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Image: Universe Today Students Test Prototype Landing Pad to Make Lunar Operations Safe
- Date
- Authors
- Matthew Williams
This summer, a team of students and researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville successfully conducted three rocket-motor firing tests on a prototype lunar landing pad. The tests showed the prototype’s…
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Image: Universe Today A Virtual Lifeless Earth Will Help Scientists Find Life on Exoplanets
- Date
- Authors
- Evan Gough
Researchers have created a model lifeless Earth that couples the atmosphere with interior planetary processes. The model can reproduce Earth's modern habitable state without including life, showing that a planet that…
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Image: Universe Today Giant Impacts Help Rocky Planets Retain Their Atmospheres
- Date
- Authors
- Evan Gough
For a long time, planetary scientists thought that giant impacts drove a young planet's atmosphere away into space with all the heat they generated. But it turns out the opposite could be true. The mass a young planet…
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Image: Universe Today Game Theory Helps SETI Search for Alien Civilizations
- Date
- Authors
- Evan Gough
SETI can be more effective the more the targets in the search are refined. SETI's newest survey effort uses game theory to inform its search. It's based on the idea that other ETIs would almost certainly use the transit…
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Image: Universe Today China Unveils Their Plan for a Crewed Moon Landing
- Date
- Authors
- Matthew Williams
Yesterday, on November 3rd, the deputy chief designer of China's crewed space program and chief designer of the lunar exploration program (Wang Xiang) unveiled an official statement detailing its [plans for a crewed…
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Image: Universe Today Exoplanets Can't Hide From The JWST's 'Digital Twin'
- Date
- Authors
- Evan Gough
Finding dim exoplanets hidden in the glare of their stars is an ongoing challenge in astronomy. Telescopes use coronagraphs to block out starlight, but even they have their limitations. Researchers have developed a new…
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Image: Universe Today Interstellar Visitor 3I/ATLAS Shows Water Ice Behaves the Same Across Alien Star Systems
- Date
- Authors
- Andy Tomaswick
Targets of opportunity sometimes happen in astronomy, and we got a major one when the third interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS, was discovered in July 2025. And it just so happens that in the intervening years between the…
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