Blogs

The Gemini South Telescope captured this image of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it sped through the inner Solar System. The comet’s coma and tail are growing as it approaches the Sun. Image Credit: By International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the Scientist, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=174444353 Comet 3I/ATLAS’s appearance in the inner Solar System in July 2025 … Read more

Protoplanets are celestial objects in the act of forming into full planets within the gas and dust disks surrounding hot, young stars. These objects, often several times the mass of Jupiter, are still embedded in their birth environments, actively feeding on surrounding material through their own circumplanetary disks. Unlike mature planets, protoplanets offer a rare … Read more

A new comet approaching from sunward could make a fine dusk appearance in October. Hello. A bright new comet is now emerging from the Sun’s glare at dusk. It all started with discussion on the boards this past Friday September 12th, about a comet seen in the Solar Wind Anisotropies (SWAN) images near the Sun. … Read more

Three data releases from the recently retired Gaia spacecraft show that far-flung parts of the Milky Way are connected by families of stars born in clusters. Some continue to travel the galaxy together, while others appear wildly dispersed, sometimes as chains of related stars. One cluster is even trying to escape the Milky Way. The … Read more

One possibility to explain the constants of nature is that there’s more than one universe. That we live in a multiverse, with each different universe “sampling” different values of the constants. There are a few extremely hypothetical ideas in physics that can lead to the multiverse. One is through the concept of eternal inflation, where … Read more

This photo of comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE was taken in July 2020. There’s no doubt that comets have struck Earth in the past, and some have exploded in the air above the surface. One of these exploding comets could’ve triggered the Younger Dryas, bringing and end to the Clovis culture and wiping out megafauna. Image … Read more

Blue Origin is committed to making a permanent human presence in space a reality. To this end, they have developed the New Shepard and New Glenn rockets to send payloads to orbit, and aim to create super-heavy launch vehicles to reach the Moon (New Armstrong and Blue Origin) and beyond. Another focus has been on … Read more

Whenever astronomers detect something new moving through our region of space, like an interstellar object or an unusual asteroid, somebody somewhere claims it could be an alien interstellar space probe. It’s like one of those laws about human behaviour—Godwin’s Law for example—that should probably have its own name. This applies to the detection of 1991 … Read more

In a recent discovery, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detected a massive stellar eruption measuring eight light-years across. This outflow, known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), is located about 15,000 light-years away in the outer reaches of the Milky Way. Based on an analysis by an international team of astronomers, this outflow appears … Read more

78 million years ago, a 1.6 km asteroid slammed into what is now Finland, creating a crater 23 km (14 mi) wide and 750 km deep. The catastrophic impact created a fractured hydrothermal system in the shattered bedrock under the crater. There’s evidence from other impact structures that in the aftermath of a collision, life … Read more