Astronomers from Australia and Serbia have performed multi-band photometric observations of a binary star known as V717 Andromedae. The observations yielded crucial information regarding the properties of V717 Andromedae, finding that it is an active low mass ratio contact binary system. The new findings are detailed in a research paper published Sept. 27 on the arXiv preprint server.
Scientists have begun to unravel the origin story of a cataclysmic collision between two black holes, which seem to have met their fate on a rarely observed "squashed" orbital path.
A Northwestern University-led team of astronomers has captured the most detailed glimpse yet of a doomed star before it exploded. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the international team identified a supernova's source star, or progenitor, at mid-infrared wavelengths for the first time. These observations—combined with archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope—revealed the explosion came from a massive red supergiant star, cloaked in an unexpected shroud of dust.
The China National Space Administration's (CNSA) Tianwen-2 probe is currently at a distance of about 43 million km (26.7 million mi) from Earth. This places it in a stable geosynchronous orbit (GSO) and almost halfway between its first destination, the near-Earth asteroid (NEA) 469219 Kamo'oalewa, which is still 45 million km (~28 million mi) away. As is customary for interplanetary missions, its controllers are using the flight phase to test the spacecraft's instruments and make sure they are in working order.
Not all stars are created equally. Astronomers believe that the first stars to form after the Big Bang were mostly made of only hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of lithium, as the heavier elements formed later on by nuclear fusion inside the stars. When these stars went supernova, heavier elements spread throughout space and formed more stars. Each successive generation contained more heavy elements, and these elements also became successively heavier.
When astronauts land near the moon's south pole as part of NASA's Artemis program in a few years, they likely will find themselves in an unexpected treasure trove of clues that could help scientists better understand how Earth's only natural satellite came to be. That's according to a new study led by Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona.
In recent years, NASA's Parker Solar Probe has given us a close-up look at the sun. Among the probe's revelations was the presence of numerous kinks, or "switchbacks," in magnetic field lines in the sun's outer atmosphere. These switchbacks are thought to form when solar magnetic field lines that point in opposite directions break and then snap together, or "reconnect," in a new arrangement, leaving telltale zigzag kinks in the reconfigured lines.
Astronomers have captured the clearest picture yet of how massive stars are born, revealing a dramatic interplay between gravity and magnetic fields in some of our galaxy's most dynamic star forming regions. A team led by Dr. Qizhou Zhang from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to conduct the largest and most detailed survey to date of magnetic fields in 17 regions where clusters of massive stars are forming.
Duplicating expensive resources is expensive and wasteful, and most people would agree it's unnecessary. However, the planned increase in major satellite constellations is currently causing a massive duplication of resources as individual companies and even countries try to set up their own infrastructure in space.
Simulation results highlight how team composition shapes stress, health, performance, and cohesion in long-duration space missions, according to a study published October 8, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Iser Pena and Hao Chen of the Stevens Institute of Technology, U.S. In particular, team diversity in personality traits may contribute to greater resilience under extended isolation and operational load.
Combing through 20 years of images from the European Space Agency's Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter spacecraft, scientists have tracked 1,039 tornado-like whirlwinds to reveal how dust is lifted into the air and swept around Mars's surface.
Gravitational waves are energy-carrying waves produced by the acceleration or disturbance of massive objects. These waves, which were first directly observed in 2015, are known to be produced during various cosmological phenomena, including mergers between two black holes that orbit each other (i.e., binary black holes).
Using ESA's XMM-Newton satellite, astronomers have conducted deep observations of a massive galaxy known as NGC 5746. As a result, they detected a hot gaseous outflow in the galaxy. The new findings, presented Oct. 1 on the arXiv pre-print server, could shed more light on the nature of NGC 5746.
SXS—Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes—is an ongoing scientific collaboration that has been generating simulations of dramatic events in space, particularly mergers of binary black hole systems, for several decades. Recently, SXS published a paper describing version 3 of its catalog of binary black hole simulations, six years after releasing version 2. The paper was published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
An asteroid recently made the second closest pass to Earth ever observed on October 1st. And astronomers only found it after it had already completed its closest approach. That offers another lesson in how difficult it is to find small objects coming close to our planet in the vast dark ocean of space.
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