In something like five billion years from now, our Sun is expected to run out of hydrogen fuel, expanding into a red giant that will eventually either engulf the Earth or send it spiraling outwards, an all but guaranteed end of all life on our pale blue dot.

But there may be a way for humanity to survive past the Sun’s demise even without having to leave our planet, as independent researcher Gabriel Harry outlines in a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society.

It’s admittedly extremely far-fetched, but it’s a fun thought experiment that he argues could result in Earth staying habitable for another “9.1 million billion years.” Who could possibly argue against that?

In an accompanying piece for Phys.org, Harry lays out his daring plan. First, he proposes blocking out the Sun to keep the Earth from burning to a crisp by placing a “large sunshade at the Lagrange point 1, which is a “gravitational balancing spot between the Sun and Earth.”

“We’d need to cover a huge 70-degree area of the sky to ensure the red giant would be eclipsed,” he wrote. It would indeed be immense: it’d need to be roughly 434,000 miles in radius, tied to a carbon tether 1.2 million miles in length.

To provide the warming radiation that was now being blocked, Harry suggests sending fusion reactors some 4,000 miles deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to produce energy, which would then have to be transmitted via laser back to the Earth.

And to move the Earth away from the self-destructing Sun, Harry thinks we could “redirect an asteroid to fly close to Earth’s surface a million times, with the gravitational slingshot effect gradually transferring energy to increase Earth’s orbital distance.”

Moving it that far away would stop the Earth’s tectonics and nutrient cycles, something Henry images could be solved by “sinking [4 pounds] of antimatter” into the Earth’s core per day.

Fast forwarding some four to five billion years, and any surviving humans would need to move the entire solar system out of the way of an incoming Andromeda galaxy, which is currently on a collision course with the Milky Way, Harry argues. To do so, he suggested firing a “beam of hydrogen just above or below the Sun’s north or south pole” to generate a “gravitational slingshot effect.”

In all, Harry’s galaxy-brain proposal would allow humans to stay alive without having to cover interstellar distances — something that would require a “million times” more energy — or terraforming a new planet. Because, after all, what’s better than staying right here, a comfortable place organic life has called home for around four billion years already?

“By building and maintaining the safeguards, for 9.1 million billion years, life on Earth would enjoy comfortable geology, security, seasons, days and starry nights — until, in a hundred trillion years, the last star fades out and the night sky turns dark,” Harry on Phys.org.

More on the Sun’s death: Earth Will One Day Die, But We Could Survive By Moving Here

The post Scientist Reveals Plan to Save Earth From Destruction by the Sun appeared first on Futurism.

A rare tidal disruption event exposed a massive wandering black hole about 30,000 light-years from its galaxy’s center. A star was torn apart nearly 30,000 light-years from the center of a massive nearby galaxy, exposing a black hole where astronomers rarely see one. The unusually distant flare revealed an extremely rare “wandering” black hole and [...]

Earth itself may be one of the world’s largest detectors for ultralight dark matter. Earth may already contain one of the largest dark matter experiments ever built. Instead of relying only on specialized equipment inside a laboratory, scientists have found a way to use the planet’s magnetic field, atmosphere, and surface as parts of a [...]

Wherever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the boundary between them buckles, then curls, then rolls up into vortexes. It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the physics behind it was worked out in the late 1860s. We know this instability explains why wind causes ripples on the surface of water and clouds shear into a row of curves.

For decades scientists argued the same thing must be happening with plasma on the surface of the Sun, and yet nobody had been able to confirm it. Now, a team led by David Kuridze and Friedrich Wöger of the National Solar Observatory reports that Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are not just visible on the Sun, but they’re ubiquitous. Their new study proposes that this may change the way we think about how heat, mass, and magnetic energy move through the Sun's atmosphere.

Telescope’s test drive

The reason plasma whirlpools on the Sun stayed hidden for so long is rather trivial: They are very small. Their scale sits below what telescopes with mirrors smaller than 2 meters can resolve. For most of the history of solar physics, that has ruled out every telescope on Earth. This changed when the US National Science Foundation opened the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, a 4-meter instrument in Hawaii and the largest solar telescope in the world. The telescope entered its operational phase back in November 2021.

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© NASA/Goddard/SDO

Wherever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the boundary between them buckles, then curls, then rolls up into vortexes. It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the physics behind it was worked out in the late 1860s. We know this instability explains why wind causes ripples on the surface of water and clouds shear into a row of curves.

For decades scientists argued the same thing must be happening with plasma on the surface of the Sun, and yet nobody had been able to confirm it. Now, a team led by David Kuridze and Friedrich Wöger of the National Solar Observatory reports that Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities are not just visible on the Sun, but they’re ubiquitous. Their new study proposes that this may change the way we think about how heat, mass, and magnetic energy move through the Sun's atmosphere.

Telescope’s test drive

The reason plasma whirlpools on the Sun stayed hidden for so long is rather trivial: They are very small. Their scale sits below what telescopes with mirrors smaller than 2 meters can resolve. For most of the history of solar physics, that has ruled out every telescope on Earth. This changed when the US National Science Foundation opened the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, a 4-meter instrument in Hawaii and the largest solar telescope in the world. The telescope entered its operational phase back in November 2021.

Read full article

Comments

© NASA/Goddard/SDO

Enormous rifts on Venus might still be widening.

On July 27, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card containing 1,350,144 names as part of a commemorative plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The names were submitted by people globally, including astronauts from Artemis II and Artemis III. The memory card will travel with the Roman observatory to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, or L2, about one million miles from Earth, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balance out.

Roman is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and one of the architects of the agency’s modern science program. Roman championed space-based observatories that could study the universe from above Earth’s hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community.

NASA and SpaceX are targeting launch for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, Aug. 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.

To learn more about the Roman mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/roman

Image credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya

Last month, NASA announced that it was launching an unprecedented and risky mission to rescue its aging Swift observatory.

The telescope, which has spent over two decades in orbit studying the most powerful explosions in the universe, has seen its orbit decay over time. With the help of a specialized space tug developed by contractor Katalyst Space Technologies, the space agency was hoping to give Swift a much-needed push to a more stable orbit, prolonging its life.

But as it turns out, it’s not the observatory that ended up needing help. After launching its robotic spacecraft, dubbed LINK, on July 3, Katalyst Space watched in horror as it started tumbling out of control following a series of unfortunate events.

According to a new update, NASA admitted that the “spacecraft experienced issues with attitude control, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.”

“Preliminary investigation shows that two of LINK’s three reaction wheels currently are not operable, and there is some loss of functionality in its cold gas thruster system,” the agency noted. Reaction wheels are motor-driven flywheels used by spacecraft for attitude control.

At least there’s a silver lining. LINK’s other subsystems are still functional, allowing the ground team to communicate with the spacecraft.

And not all is lost just yet. The Katalyst team is hoping to stop LINK from spinning before reevaluating how to go forward with the rescue mission, if at all.

But considering that a rapidly spinning spacecraft is the very last thing the Swift observatory needs in its vicinity, it’s clearly not the result the agency was hoping for.

And time is rapidly running out. Without a boost, the telescope is destined to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere in the upcoming months.

While it has long outlived its originally intended lifetime at almost 22 years old, it’s currently the only orbital telescope that can detect gamma ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Fortunately, the space agency didn’t have to dig too deep into its own pockets. Its Katalyst contract was $30 million, which in the grand scheme of things is a drop in the bucket when considering the untold billions NASA is spending to return astronauts to the Moon.

Even before LINK launched and started spinning out of control, agency officials were content with NASA’s willingness to give it a shot.

“From a programmatics standpoint, I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we’re even going to try this,” NASA astrophysics director Shawn Domagal-Goldman told Ars Technica last month.

More on the mission: NASA Prepping to Launch Extremely Risky Rescue Mission

The post NASA Rescue Mission Spirals Into Crisis appeared first on Futurism.

For more than two millennia, astronomers have puzzled over a stellar mystery recorded by some of history’s greatest skywatchers. Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi—all separated by more than 1,000 years—each described Theta Eridani as one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Yet today, the previously celebrated star barely ranks among the more noticeable stars visible to the naked eye.

A new astronomical study published on arXiv suggests that those ancient observers may have unknowingly recorded an extraordinarily rare stellar event. The star system remained dramatically brighter than normal for roughly a millennium before fading back to its present appearance sometime between the 10th and 16th centuries.

If confirmed, the finding would be among the longest-lived stellar transients ever proposed, fusing modern astrophysics with historical astronomy to reconstruct an event spanning centuries rather than days or months.

The study combines historical star catalogs with state-of-the-art observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), high-definition spectroscopy, and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Together, those observations allowed the researchers to reconstruct the architecture and evolutionary state of the Theta Eridani system and to propose a physical mechanism that could explain its mysterious ancient brilliance.

“The remarkable combination of orbital and stellar parameters hints that the historical brightening of Theta Eridani was due to a millenary transient phase,” researchers write. “This strengthens the case that the apparent brightening was real and not due to an error by three different ancient observers, as has been commonly claimed in the past.”

Today, Theta Eridani, also known by its traditional name Acamar, shines at approximately magnitude 2.9, making it a respectable but hardly spectacular star marking the end of the constellation Eridanus. Yet ancient records tell a very different story.

Hipparchus described it as an exceptionally bright star around 129 BC. Roughly 250 years later, Ptolemy ranked it among only fifteen first-magnitude stars in the Almagest, effectively placing it among the thirteen brightest stars visible in the night sky.

More than 800 years afterward, the Persian astronomer al-Sufi independently retained that same first-magnitude classification while revising the brightness estimates of many other stars toward values that closely match modern observations.

The sharp contrast between the historical accounts and Theta Eridani’s modest appearance today has made the star one of astronomy’s most enduring and compelling mysteries.

Researchers examined long-standing alternative explanations, including simple observational mistakes, copyist errors in ancient manuscripts, confusion with the much brighter star Achernar farther south, and even errors caused by atmospheric extinction near the horizon. One by one, they argue the evidence weighs against those explanations.

Theta Eridani would not even have been visible to the Greek and Arab astronomers because of Earth’s changing orientation over time. Likewise, statistical analyses of nearly 1,000 stars contained in the Almagest show that Theta Eridani represents the single largest discrepancy between ancient and modern brightness estimates, rather than part of a wider systematic mistake.

The historical trail eventually changes around the dawn of the Age of Exploration. By the late 1500s and early 1600s, after European navigators began mapping the southern skies, star catalogs consistently described Theta Eridani as only a third-magnitude star—essentially the same brightness observed today.

That suggests the bright phase had already ended.

To investigate whether Theta Eridani itself could plausibly have undergone such a transformation, the team turned to modern astronomical observations.

Rather than a single star, Theta Eridani consists of three stars. The primary component itself is a remarkably tight binary whose two stars orbit one another every 4.1077 days at a separation of just 0.083 astronomical units—roughly one-fifth the distance between Mercury and the Sun.

Using interferometric measurements from the VLTI, together with spectroscopy and precision photometry from TESS, the researchers determined that the two stars each contain just over twice the Sun’s mass and have swollen to approximately 4.3 and 4.0 solar radii.

Those enlarged sizes are significant because both stars have expanded to nearly 80 percent of the volume where gravity from one star begins pulling material toward the other, a region around a star in a binary system known as the Roche lobes. The close gravitational interaction also produces measurable ellipsoidal distortions that TESS detects as subtle, rhythmic brightness variations every orbit.

Researchers’ evolutionary modeling further revealed that the primary star occupies an unusually brief stage within stellar evolution, having only recently exhausted hydrogen in its core and begun transitioning into a subgiant. That evolutionary timing may be critical.

According to the researchers, Theta Eridani may once have possessed a much more elongated orbit. As the primary expanded, it could have begun overflowing its Roche lobe during each close approach, transferring material toward its companion and possibly generating an extended common envelope surrounding both stars.

Unlike the violent stellar explosions astronomers typically classify as transients, this proposed event would have evolved extraordinarily slowly. Instead of lasting weeks or years, the researchers suggest the envelope may have persisted for roughly a thousand years while gradually extracting orbital energy from the binary.

Because the surrounding envelope would have remained optically thick, it could have radiated from an area far larger than either star individually, making the entire system appear nearly ten times brighter than it does today.

Researchers’ calculations suggest that such an envelope could have reached roughly 20 times the Sun’s radius while needing only a tiny amount of encircling material, because that material would be continually replenished and slowly ejected over hundreds of thousands of orbits.

Importantly, researchers stress that this is still a proposed physical explanation rather than a demonstrated one. Modeling the detailed hydrodynamics of eccentric mass transfer and long-lived common envelopes remains beyond the scope of the current work.

Nevertheless, they argue that the unusual combination of orbital geometry, stellar evolution, and historical observations makes the scenario physically plausible.

The study of Theta Eridani also raises wider implications for time-based astronomy.

Modern astronomical surveys are exceptionally good at finding dramatic events that unfold over minutes, days, or years. A stellar brightening lasting centuries, or even a millennium, would be almost impossible to recognize within a human lifetime. Researchers suggest there may be other long-duration stellar transients hidden among ordinary-looking stars whose histories have been forgotten.

If their interpretation proves correct, some of humanity’s earliest astronomers may have unknowingly documented one of the most unusual stellar phenomena ever proposed—not an exploding star, but a binary system trapped in an exceptionally slow evolutionary episode which lit up the night sky for generations before quietly receding into obscurity.

“Although modern photometric surveys have had an observational coverage of a few years to a few decades rather than two millennia like Theta Eridani, they are sensitive to objects up to 14 magnitudes fainter than the naked eye limit,” researchers write. “Therefore, there could be unexplored or unexplained Theta Eridani-like transients that either brightened or faded in current data.”

The team’s new study, The Forgotten Bright Star: Theta Eridani as a Millenary Stellar Transient Observed by Hipparchus, Ptolemy and al-Sufi, is currently available on the arXiv.org preprint server.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com 

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory captured an “orphan” black hole lighting up as it devoured a star on the outskirts of a faraway galaxy. These phenomena are rare to begin with, and none had ever before been seen so far outside of a galaxy’s core.

“We were looking for these star-shredding events as a way to find otherwise invisible supermassive black holes wandering away from the galactic cores where they usually reside,” said Robert Stein, a research fellow at The University of Maryland, College Park and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “With this discovery, which is one of just a couple that have been confirmed so far, we’ve validated a new technique and can use it to hunt for more.”

A paper describing the results, led by Stein, was published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Researchers saw an ultrabright flare unleashed by a star being torn apart by extreme gravitational forces after drifting too close to a monster black hole — a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event. The black hole behind the blast weighs in at about a million times the Sun’s mass. Its existence was first flagged in November 2025 as an unusual brightening in a galaxy about 750 million light-years away by ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility), a survey conducted by the Palomar Observatory in Southern California.

“Out of the half million flashes ZTF detects each night, our new artificial intelligence algorithm automatically recognized a flare that looked a lot like a tidal disruption event, despite its unusual location in the outskirts of a galaxy,” Stein said. For a few months, the tidal disruption event outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet wavelengths, temporarily radiating with the light of about 10 billion suns.

Other telescopes, including the SOAR (Southern Astrophysical Research) telescope in Chile, followed up on the ZTF source to look at the event’s spectrum, which revealed features supporting that it was likely a tidal disruption event. Astronomers then used NASA’s Swift to look at wavelengths they can’t detect with ground-based telescopes to uncover new information. For example, Swift’s UVOT (Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope) took the blip’s temperature and found that it had quite a fever at about 54,000 degrees Fahrenheit (30,000 degrees Celsius).

“The combination of all this data helped us rule out other explanations and confidently say it’s a tidal disruption event, despite its strange location,” said Jonathan Carney, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who took the first spectra that supported the flare’s interpretation as a tidal disruption event.

Hidden heavyweights

Nearly every galaxy in the universe is anchored by a supermassive black hole sitting right in the center. About once every 100,000 years, a star will drift too close to this invisible heavyweight and trigger a tidal disruption event.

While they’re rather rare in any given galaxy, scientists scour millions of galaxies for them. Each year, astronomical surveys typically spot about 30 tidal disruption events occurring somewhere in the universe.

Prior to 2024, they’d only been seen in galaxy cores. That’s partly because astronomers mainly looked for them there; after all, it’s where all the known supermassive black holes were, and you can’t get a tidal disruption event without one (the gravitational pull of lighter black holes isn’t strong enough).

Then scientists saw the telltale signs of a star being shredded 2,600 light-years from the center of its host galaxy. That inspired more astronomers to look beyond galaxy cores for similar events, and now a team has identified one more than 30,000 light-years away from a galaxy’s center.

Oddball origin story

So how did the newfound black hole become so off-kilter?

“It must have originated in a galaxy’s center, but not the one it’s in the outskirts of now,” Stein said. “We think the host galaxy’s supermassive black hole is still at its core, but the one eating the star could have started off in a small galaxy that merged with the big one we see today.”

The researchers have outlined two possibilities. Three or more galaxies may have merged together, and the gravitational tug-of-war between their central supermassive black holes may have flung the lightest black hole out to the galaxy’s edge.

Or a dwarf galaxy could be midway through a merger. As the dwarf’s stars fell into the larger galaxy, one may have passed too close to the dwarf’s supermassive black hole.

“Further discoveries could reveal the origin of this apparent ‘orphan’ black hole,” Stein said. “The key science question we want to answer is: How common are wandering black holes?”

The answer may soon be within reach. “Pointed science observations with Swift’s UVOT and XRT (X-Ray Telescope) instruments are temporarily suspended as the mission awaits an orbit boost, which is planned for this summer,” said co-author S. Bradley Cenko, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA Goddard. The spacecraft, whose primary mission ran from 2004 to 2006, is slowly sinking toward Earth due to atmospheric drag after more than 20 years of observations of the changing universe. Nudging it to a higher orbit could extend its lifetime even longer. “Once it resumes normal operations, Swift could continue searching for more examples of out-of-place black holes.”

In the coming years, scientists will use the new technique to search for disintegrating stars in observations from the newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, in Chile and NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

“Rubin’s wide, deep surveys will reveal a much larger sample of tidal disruption events than current observatories are capable of collecting, including ones that are off-center,” Carney said. “And Roman’s space-based surveys will extend the current search zone by seeing ones that are farther away, looking back through 9 billion years of cosmic history.” Adding their observations to Swift’s and those from ground-based observatories will bring astronomers closer than ever before to completing a census of the universe’s behemoth black holes.

To learn more about the Swift mission, visit:

https://nasa.gov/swift

By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Media contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940

A new study using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope finds that star formation in the nearby Andromeda galaxy has undergone a 500-million-year decline, with an even steeper drop in the last 40 million years. Andromeda, a spiral galaxy comparable in size to our Milky Way, is close enough to be seen with the unaided eye from areas with dark skies. Located about 2.5 million light-years from Earth, practically our cosmic backyard, Andromeda offers an opportunity for astronomers to examine its stellar populations in detail, leading to better understanding of the past of galaxies like our own.

The results published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal.

To reach this conclusion, the researchers combined data from two Hubble surveys: the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury and the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury. Together, these two surveys mapped two-thirds of the disk of Andromeda in ultra-sharp detail. In total, the team measured about 200 million individual stars across the galaxy, giving them a detailed picture of Andromeda’s past activity.

“We need to measure the individual stars because they are the fossil record of the galaxy’s formation. Hubble is the only telescope that can give you high enough spatial resolution over a large enough area to be able to do that in Andromeda,” said Ben Williams, astronomer at the University of Washington and a co-author on the study.

Massive stars are bluer and short-lived, while less massive stars are redder and longer-lived. As a result, areas that have experienced recent star formation tend to have a larger fraction of blue stars, while areas with less recent star formation typically have a redder population. The team divided the Andromeda images into thousands of squares, spanning 300 light-years on each side of the square, and determined the history of star formation within each parcel to gain a comprehensive view of the galaxy’s past.

Steady decline

Previous research showed the Andromeda galaxy experienced a dramatic burst of star formation about 2 billion years ago, likely due to a past interaction or merger with another galaxy. Since that time, star formation has been steadily declining.

Astronomers measure the rate of star formation in terms of the mass, or amount of gas and dust, converted into stars per year. The researchers calculated that, 500 million years ago, Andromeda formed stars at a rate of about one solar mass per year. However, the formation rate dropped to about half that by 40 million years ago. The current rate has plummeted even farther, to about one-fifth the mass of our Sun per year.

The team also examined whether that decline was consistent across the galaxy or concentrated in certain areas. They found that much of the recent star formation has occurred in a star-forming ring located about 32,000 light-years from the galaxy’s center. As a result, much of the decline they measure is driven by decreasing activity within that ring.

Rather than being the result of reduced material from which new stars can form, the decline is more likely to be a natural winding down from its previous, more active state.

“It’s just like after running a marathon, sometimes you’ve got to take a bit of a breather,” said Tobin Wainer, lead author, University of Washington.

Likely suspect

The team also investigated whether there was any connection between the decrease of activity in Andromeda and its proximity to satellite galaxy M32 (Messier 32). The M32 galaxy is separated from Andromeda by about 16,000 light-years in the plane of the sky; however, its 3D location in space is uncertain. As a result, astronomers are unsure if or when it might have interacted with Andromeda in the past.

“One of the major motivations for this program was to probe potential interactions between M32 and Andromeda’s disk,” said Zhuo Chen, co-author, University of Washington.

Survey data from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Southern Treasury allowed the team to study the history of star formation in Andromeda near M32. They found that this area showed signs of decreased star formation compared with other regions. The timing of this decrease, which this study finds began roughly 60 million years ago, could help constrain when the M32 galaxy interacted with Andromeda’s disk.

“We can’t explicitly say that we are seeing a decrease in star formation because of M32. But it’s right there, and it’s definitely the most likely suspect,” said Wainer.

The team plans to continue analyzing the Hubble data and combine it with data from ground-based observatories to gain additional insights into the history of Andromeda.

“There’s a strong scientific value to this archival data. Andromeda is important because it’s a neighbor that is close enough that we can see it in great detail while also getting a global perspective,” said Raja GuhaThakurta, co-author, University of California Santa Cruz.

An even greater global perspective is likely to come from NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope after it launches as early as Sunday, Aug. 30. Roman’s gigantic field of view can cover at least 100 times as much area as Hubble at near-infrared wavelengths in a single observation. A newly approved Roman observing program will image the entirety of Andromeda’s disk and areas of its surrounding halo, allowing astronomers to measure hundreds of millions of stars and enabling groundbreaking new science.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.

 

This discovery marks a major milestone in the search for life on worlds beyond our solar system. A faint stream of helium escaping from a distant rocky world has revealed something astronomers had never clearly detected before: an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet in another star’s habitable zone. The result is the strongest evidence so [...]

The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a spiral galaxy struggling against titanic forces that appear on galactic scales in space. This is NGC 4654, an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden). It is classified as an “intermediate” because its overall shape lies between spiral galaxies that have a bar across their centers and those that don’t. NGC 4654 has a weak bar structure at its center and is located 72 million light-years from Earth in the Virgo Cluster, a particularly massive and populous galaxy cluster.

NGC 4654 is particularly asymmetric, with a rounded and clearly-defined edge on one side and a long tail of gas stretching out from the opposite side — outside the field of view captured in this image. This gaseous tail is the result of ram pressure stripping, a force that galaxies can experience as they plow through space. NGC 4654 moves with such high velocity that it sweeps up and rams through the hot, rarefied gas filling the space between the Virgo Cluster’s galaxies. This intracluster medium in turn exerts a “ram pressure” on the galaxy, compressing the galaxy’s leading edge and dragging its gas behind the galaxy, creating the elongated tail.

It’s not just the galaxy’s gas that is unevenly distributed: its stars are too, and this is more unusual for a spiral galaxy. While the spiral arm on its leading edge is rich with stars and gas, the opposite arm noticeably lacks stars, influencing the galaxy’s lopsided spiral shape. Astronomers think that ram pressure alone is unlikely to cause this effect. Rather, NGC 4654 was also subjected to the gravitational force of fellow Virgo Cluster galaxy NGC 4639. While the two galaxies are far apart now, it’s thought that a fly-by interaction between them around 500 million years ago ripped away NGC 4654’s gas along one side, limiting star formation there and creating the asymmetry in its shape.

Many galaxies that undergo ram pressure stripping suffer reduced star formation rates as the cold gas that collapses to form their stars is pulled away and lost. NGC 4654, however, is still forming nearly two Suns’ worth of stars every year, a rate comparable to other galaxies of similar size. The active star formation is visible in the latest Hubble data included in this image. The data picks up on a wavelength of red light emitted by the clouds of energized gas where newborn stars lurk. The bright pink bubbles that appear across NGC 4654 — from its forward spiral arm, to around its weak bar, and out to the edge of its disk — are areas where these newborn stars shine.

The data used in this image came from two observing programs (#15654, #17502) that aim to link the gas in galaxies with star formation. By observing many prominent galaxies in the vicinity of our own, researchers hope to better understand how gas moves in galaxies, where and when it collapses to form stars and star clusters, and what effect those new stars have on the gas around them.

Text Credit: ESA/Hubble

Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

Webb found a hidden giant planet by detecting its atmospheric chemistry through a bright debris disk. For years, a third giant planet remained concealed within the bright dust surrounding Beta Pictoris, one of the most closely observed planetary systems in the Milky Way. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has now exposed the hidden world by [...]

Scientists have identified an accelerator that produces the highest-energy protons in our galaxy, a finding that could clarify the nature of the fast-moving particles filling the space between stars. Across the Milky Way, charged particles race through space with energies beyond the reach of even the most powerful accelerators built on Earth. Known as cosmic [...]

Around 4.6 billion years ago, an immense cloud of gas and dust in space collapsed in on itself. As it collapsed, gravity pulled most of the material toward several small points, one of which would eventually become our Sun. The other points formed other stars in what scientists call an open cluster. 

During this early stage of the Sun’s life, it was surrounded by a swirling disk of leftover material aligned with its equator, known as a protoplanetary disk. Eventually, this disk condensed to form the planets that make up our solar system. This process normally results in a system with a star at its center, and the planets orbiting the plane of the star’s equator. 

However, scientists have found that this scenario doesn’t quite hold for our solar system. The planets in our solar system orbit the Sun in a single plane offset from the Sun’s equator by approximately 6°. The fact that the planets are in the same orbital plane suggests that the protoplanetary disk model of solar system formation is correct, since the odds of the Sun capturing 8 rogue planets in this arrangement are astronomically low. So, what threw the planets in our solar system off-kilter?

To determine what caused the solar system to tilt, Daohai Li at Queen Mary University of London recently used the computer program NBODY6++ to model different versions of the open cluster from which the Sun came. In these simulations, he varied the number of stars in the cluster, from 500 to 2,000 to 8,000. He also varied the radius of the cluster, from 0.25 to 1 to 4 parsecs (8 to 30 to 100 trillion kilometers or 5 to 20 to 70 trillion miles). Finally, he varied the percentage of stars with a binary companion from 10% to 50% to 90%. Li assigned each star a randomly generated initial mass, starting position, and velocity, and simulated their interactions for 400 million years.

First, Li examined the simulations to identify stars with masses approximately equal to the Sun’s. From this group of solar-massed stars, Li found ones that left the cluster after 400 million years as a single star, after either forming alone or having lost a former companion star. He proposed that these stars were the most similar to the Sun and could thus host a simulated solar system.

Li then simulated the planets and their orbits as they would have formed on these potential host stars. To simplify this process, Li only simulated the 4 giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, which dominate planetary behavior in our solar system. He modeled these solar systems independently for 200 million years to ensure they would remain intact and used those that did for statistical analysis of the solar system’s past.

Overall, Li discovered 2 scenarios that could explain the solar system’s tilt. In the first, the primordial solar system was jostled by many distant neighboring stars in its cluster. This jostling tilts the planets’ orbits, but it does so randomly. Therefore, this scenario would make it unlikely for the planets to remain in the same orbital plane. It would also cause them to orbit the Sun faster and more chaotically than in our solar system.

In the second scenario, the Sun had a temporary companion star that it either formed with or briefly encountered before separating. When this occurred, the simulated planets’ orbits all tilted together. Stars that formed with a binary companion had a 10% chance of tilting their planets’ orbits by 6° or more, while stars that formed alone had a less than 0.1% chance. 

Li concluded that the solar system could have tilted as a result of interactions between the Sun and a temporary companion star within its parent cluster. However, he acknowledged that the model strongly depends on how closely a star passes by the Sun, since the closer a star passes, the more it disturbs the solar system. Despite this uncertainty, it’s possible that somewhere in space is the Sun’s twin or former neighbor that we haven’t seen in eons, and that’s what made our solar system crooked!

The post The Sun’s twin star may have tilted the planets’ orbits appeared first on Sciworthy.

Scientists may have found a more realistic set of thermodynamic rules for black holes that never stop changing. Black holes are among the most extreme objects known in the universe. They compress enormous amounts of mass into remarkably small regions, creating gravitational fields so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape once it crosses [...]

New research is revealing possible links between one of the most enduring cosmic mysteries—dark matter—and the existence of a “hidden” fifth dimension.

Dark matter is widely believed to exist according to several leading cosmological theories, although this nonluminous material remains invisible through direct detection. However, its presence can be inferred through the gravitational influence this mysterious form of matter has on the surrounding universe.

Now, according to researchers at the University of Sheffield, one reason dark matter may have remained so elusive involves the possibility that it exists within a “hidden” dimension—a concept that has gained traction in past research.

The Sheffield team’s recent look at this possibility, detailed in a study published in Physical Review D, takes the concept one step further by introducing a new potential framework that could help reveal clues to the behavior of dark matter, as well as why astronomers have had such a hard time detecting it.

A Dark Secret Lurking in a Hidden Dimension?

In their new research, the Sheffield team says that dark matter may be lurking within a hidden dimension accompanied by dark photons, a variety of particles among those which physicists call “hidden sector particles,” and which are believed to represent potential force carriers for dark matter.

Due to the specific geometry present within this hidden dimension, a phenomenon known as dark matter resonance may occur, where dark photons align in specific arrangements.

“Dark matter resonance is already known to be a powerful idea,” according to Yu-Dai Tsai, Ph.D., a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield and one of the new paper’s coauthors.

Tsai adds that the concept has “the potential to change our understanding of how dark matter was produced in the early universe and how we search for it today,” although reconciling it with our current understanding of dark matter has presented issues for researchers in the past, which include questions about its specific origins.

“Many previous resonant dark matter models have treated the resonance as an assumption,” Tsai recently said in a statement. “[Our team’s] work gives a possible deeper origin for it: The resonance may come directly from the geometry of hidden dimensions.”

Unlocking Dark Matter Resonance

According to Tsai and his co-author, Taegyu Lee, understanding dark matter resonance more fully could hold significant implications for unlocking new clues about how matter behaved at early stages in our universe, and why that may differ significantly from what astrophysicists see occurring right now.

“This resonance can make dark matter interactions much stronger at crucial epochs in cosmic history,” Tsai says. “Crucially, the model allows for these strong interactions in the past while still explaining why dark matter appears so inert and hard to detect today.”

Although Tsai concedes that the concept of dark matter resonance has been explored in the past, unlike previous studies, the Sheffield duo’s new work suggests that dark matter may essentially be “in tune” with conditions in a hidden fifth dimension already, arising naturally from its innate mathematical structure.

Tsai says this approach toward understanding dark matter, if correct, “would represent a profound advance in humanity’s knowledge of the cosmos and what it is made of.”

A New Approach Toward Unraveling Dark Matter’s Mysteries 

Fundamentally, the team’s findings point to promising new ways physicists may be able to explore the underlying mysteries of both dark matter and the possibility of additional dimensions in which it may operate.

“Our research gives physicists clear new targets in the search for dark matter,” Tsai says, “while connecting two of the biggest ideas in fundamental physics: the mystery of dark matter and the existence of hidden dimensions.”

The recent study, “Naturally resonant dark matter from extra dimensions,” by Yu-Dai Tsai and Taegyu Lee, appeared in Physical Review D on July 8, 2026.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

The discovery hints that life’s ingredients may form before planets exist.

About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. To account for this observation, physicists came up with a new type of energy – called dark energy – which supposedly makes up more than 75% of the universe, and also has negative pressure. In a new paper, mathematicians claim that dark energy isn’t needed to explain that accelerating expansion, and