Astrophysics News

July 16, 2025

Top Headlines

UF Students Are Bending Metal With Lasers to Build Massive Structures in Orbit

July 2, 2025 — UF engineers, backed by DARPA and NASA, are perfecting laser-forming techniques that let metal sheets fold themselves into giant solar arrays, antennas, and even space-station parts right in ...

World’s Largest Camera Just Snapped the Universe in 3,200 Megapixels

June 27, 2025 — The LSST camera at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released its jaw-dropping first images, each capturing 45 times the area of the full moon in one shot. Over the next ten years, this cosmic giant will scan the southern sky in ultra-HD, helping ...

Mojave Lichen Defies Death Rays—could Life Thrive on Distant Exoplanets?

June 24, 2025 — Lichen from the Mojave Desert has stunned scientists by surviving months of lethal UVC radiation, suggesting life could exist on distant planets orbiting volatile stars. The secret? A microscopic “sunscreen” layer that protects their vital ...

AI Reveals Milky Way’s Black Hole Spins Near Top Speed

June 15, 2025 — AI has helped astronomers crack open some of the universe s best-kept secrets by analyzing massive datasets about black holes. Using over 12 million simulations powered by high-throughput computing, scientists discovered that the Milky Way's central ...

Black Holes Could Act as Natural Supercolliders -- And Help Uncover Dark Matter

June 5, 2025 — Supermassive black holes might naturally replicate the colossal energies of man-made particle colliders possibly even revealing dark matter offering a cosmic shortcut to discoveries that would ...

Millions of New Solar System Objects to Be Found and 'Filmed in Technicolor' -- Studies Predict

June 3, 2025 — Astronomers have revealed new research showing that millions of new solar system objects are likely to be detected by a brand-new facility, which is expected to come online later this ...

Webb Reveals the Origin of the Ultra-Hot Exoplanet WASP-121b

June 2, 2025 — Tracing the origin of an ultra-hot exoplanet: The chemical composition of WASP-121b suggests that it formed in a cool zone of its natal disc, comparable to the region of gas and ice giants in our Solar System. Methane indicates unexpected ...

Scientists Discover New Evidence of Intermediate-Mass Black Holes

May 30, 2025 — A series of studies sheds light on the origins and characteristics of intermediate-mass black ...

Could 'Pausing' Cell Death Be the Final Frontier in Medicine on Earth and Beyond?

May 30, 2025 — The process of necrosis, a form of cell death, may represent one of the most promising ways to change the course of human aging, disease and even space travel, according to a new ...

Understanding Why Galaxy Clusters Are Warm May Explain the Origin of Giant Interstellar Structures

May 29, 2025 — Astronomers have explained how a galaxy cluster maintains its heat, despite emitting X-rays that cool the hot gas at its center. The group discovered the existence of a fast-moving, high-temperature ...

Cosmic Mystery Deepens as Astronomers Find Object Flashing in Both Radio Waves and X-Rays

May 28, 2025 — A team of international astronomers have discovered a new cosmic object emitting both radio waves and ...

'Raindrops in the Sun's Corona': New Adaptive Optics Shows Stunning Details of Our Star's Atmosphere

May 27, 2025 — Scientists have produced the finest images of the Sun's corona to date. To make these high-resolution images and movies, the team developed a new 'coronal adaptive optics' system that removes blur ...

Latest Headlines

updated 1:42pm EDT

Two Monster Black Holes Just Collided — It’s So Massive, It Shouldn’t Exist

July 16, 2025 — Two colossal black holes among the most massive ever seen collided in deep space, creating gravitational waves that rippled across the cosmos and ...

Big-Bang Echoes Unmask a Billion-Light-Year Hole Around Earth—and It’s Stretching Space Faster

July 15, 2025 — Our galaxy may reside in a billion-light-year-wide cosmic bubble that accelerates local expansion, potentially settling the long-running Hubble ...

Gravitational Shockwave: LIGO Catches a 225-Solar-Mass Black-Hole Smash-Up

July 15, 2025 — Gravitational-wave detectors have captured their biggest spectacle yet: two gargantuan, rapidly spinning black holes likely forged by earlier smash-ups fused into a 225-solar-mass titan, GW231123. ...

Hubble Cracks Open a Glittering Cosmic Time Capsule, Revealing Multi-Generational Stars 160,000 Light-Years Away

July 14, 2025 — Hubble’s crystal-clear look at NGC 1786—an ancient globular cluster tucked inside the Large Magellanic Cloud—pulls us 160,000 light-years from ...

It Looked Like Nothing—then Scientists Found a World 10x the Size of Jupiter

July 14, 2025 — Astronomers have uncovered a massive, hidden exoplanet nestled in the dusty disc of a young star—MP Mus—by combining cutting-edge data from the ...

These Mysterious Stars Could Glow Forever Using Dark Matter

July 13, 2025 — Imagine a star powered not by nuclear fusion, but by one of the universe’s greatest mysteries—dark matter. Scientists have proposed the existence of “dark dwarfs,” strange glowing objects ...

100 Ghost Galaxies May Be Orbiting the Milky Way—and We’re Just Now Uncovering Them

July 13, 2025 — New supercomputer simulations suggest the Milky Way could be surrounded by dozens more faint, undetected satellite galaxies—up to 100 more than we ...

NASA Probe Flies Into the Sun and Captures the Origins of Solar Storms

July 11, 2025 — In its closest-ever dive into the Sun’s atmosphere, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has returned stunning new images and data that bring scientists closer to solving one of the Sun’s biggest ...

This Interstellar Comet May Be a Frozen Relic from Before the Sun

July 11, 2025 — A newly discovered comet, 3I/ATLAS, may be the most ancient visitor ever detected, potentially older than our solar system itself. Unlike previous interstellar objects, this ice-rich comet seems to ...

This Tiny Rice Plant Could Feed the First Lunar Colony

July 11, 2025 — In a bold step toward sustainable space travel, scientists are engineering a radically small, protein-rich rice that can grow in space. The Moon-Rice project, led by the Italian Space Agency in ...

Astronomers Catch Planets in the Act of Being Born

July 9, 2025 — Astronomers have spotted centimeter-sized “pebbles” swirling around two infant stars 450 light-years away, revealing the raw ingredients of planets already stretching to Neptune-like orbits. ...

Ice in a Million-Degree Fermi Bubble Reveals the Milky Way’s Recent Eruption

July 9, 2025 — Astronomers using the Green Bank Telescope spotted surprisingly cold, dense hydrogen clouds embedded inside the Milky Way’s vast, super-hot Fermi bubbles—structures thought to be created by a ...

Hidden DNA-Sized Crystals in Cosmic Ice Could Rewrite Water—and Life Itself

July 9, 2025 — Scientists from UCL and the University of Cambridge have revealed that "space ice"—long thought to be completely disordered—is actually sprinkled with tiny crystals, changing our ...

Can One Vanishing Particle Shatter String Theory — and Explain Dark Matter?

July 5, 2025 — Scientists are on the trail of a mysterious five-particle structure that could challenge one of the biggest theories in physics: string theory. This rare particle—never seen before and predicted ...

A Star Exploded Twice — First-Ever Image Reveals Its Cosmic Fingerprint

July 3, 2025 — Astronomers studying the remnant SNR 0509-67.5 have finally caught a white dwarf in the act of a rare “double-detonation” supernova, where an initial helium blast on the star’s surface triggers ...

Citizen Scientists Spot Rare Exploding Star in Real-Time

July 1, 2025 — Citizen scientists using the Kilonova Seekers platform spotted a stellar flash 2,500 times brighter than before, allowing astronomers to identify the exploding cataclysmic variable GOTO0650 within ...

JWST Unlocks 10-Billion-Year Mystery of How Galaxies Shape Themselves

June 30, 2025 — Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists spotted thin and thick disks in galaxies as far back as 10 billion years ago—something never seen before. These observations reveal that galaxies ...

Record-Breaking 10-Billion-Year Radio Halo Just Rewrote the Universe’s Origin Story

June 28, 2025 — A newly discovered radio halo, 10 billion light-years away, reveals that galaxy clusters in the early universe were already steeped in high-energy particles. The finding hints at ancient black hole ...

Planets May Start Forming Before Stars Even Finish Growing

June 30, 2025 — In a stellar nursery 460 light-years away, astronomers sharpened old ALMA data and spotted crisp rings and spirals swirling around 27 infant stars—evidence that planets start taking shape just a ...

What the Universe Tried to Hide: The 21-Centimeter Signal Explained

June 22, 2025 — Scientists are peering into the universe's mysterious Cosmic Dawn using the faint whispers of hydrogen radio waves emitted over 13 billion years ago. These signals, particularly the elusive ...

Massive Thread of Hot Gas Found Linking Galaxies — and It’s 10 Times the Mass of the Milky Way

June 19, 2025 — Astronomers have uncovered a colossal, searing-hot filament of gas linking four galaxy clusters in the Shapley Supercluster a discovery that could finally solve the mystery of the Universe s missing ...

A Thousand Colors, One Galaxy: Astronomers Reveal a Cosmic Masterpiece

June 18, 2025 — Astronomers have produced the most detailed map yet of the Sculptor Galaxy, revealing hundreds of previously unseen celestial features in stunning color and resolution. By combining over 50 hours of ...

Impossible Signal from Deep Beneath Antarctic Ice Baffles Physicists

June 14, 2025 — A cosmic particle detector in Antarctica has emitted a series of bizarre signals that defy the current understanding of particle physics, according to an international research group that includes ...

Why Giant Planets Might Form Faster Than We Thought

June 14, 2025 — Astronomers using ALMA have uncovered how gas and dust in planet-forming disks evolve separately an insight that reshapes our understanding of how different types of planets form. While dust lingers, ...

Tiny Orange Beads Found by Apollo Astronauts Reveal Moon’s Explosive Past

June 16, 2025 — When Apollo astronauts stumbled across shimmering orange beads on the moon, they had no idea they were gazing at ancient relics of violent volcanic activity. These glass spheres, tiny yet ...

Magnetic Mayhem at the Sun’s Poles: First Images Reveal a Fiery Mystery

June 16, 2025 — For the first time in history, we re seeing the Sun from an angle no one ever has: from above and below its poles. Thanks to the European Space Agency s Solar Orbiter and its tilted orbit, scientists ...

Webb Space Telescope Reveals Starburst Galaxies That Lit Up the Early Universe

June 13, 2025 — Data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has revealed dozens of small galaxies that played a starring role in a cosmic makeover that transformed the early universe into the one we know ...

NASA’s Webb Telescope Reveals Monster Star Clumps in Galactic Wreckage

June 12, 2025 — Surveying nearby galaxies in the process of merging with other galaxies, astronomers have identified massive, dense star factories, unlike any found in the Milky Way. The findings provide a rare ...

Sun’s Secret Storms Exposed: NASA's Codex Unveils a Turbulent Corona

June 12, 2025 — NASA s CODEX experiment aboard the International Space Station is revealing the Sun like never before. Using advanced filters and a specialized coronagraph, CODEX has captured images showing that the ...

From the Andes to the Beginning of Time: Telescopes Detect 13-Billion-Year-Old Signal

June 11, 2025 — Astronomers have pulled off an unprecedented feat: detecting ultra-faint light from the Big Bang using ground-based telescopes. This polarized light scattered by the universe's very first stars ...