compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan

The Sun Will Destroy the Earth One Day, Right? Maybe Not. In six billion years the sun will expand into a red giant. That process should consume Mercury, and maybe Venus. For a long time we have thought it might incinerate Earth, too. But perhaps all is not doomed for planet Earth (although it may be a world that will have long since become uninhabitable)….more

Record Discovery: Three Large Stars Locked in a Space Smaller Than Mercury’s Orbit A trio of stars just under 5,000 light-years away has absolutely smashed a long standing record. TIC 290061484 is a system of gravitationally bound stars consisting of a tightly-orbiting binary pair with a third star that circles both. Astonishingly, they’re so close together the entire system would fit inside the orbit of Mercury…..more

Large radio bubble detected in galaxy NGC 4217 An international team of astronomers has performed radio observations of a star-forming galaxy known as NGC 4217. The observational campaign detected a large radio bubble in the galaxy’s halo. The finding was reported in a paper published September 23 on the pre-print server arXiv…..more

There’s a Large Hole in the Wheel of NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover Twelve years of rolling around on Mars has apparently taken its toll on NASA’s Curiosity rover after photographs showed a large hole in the middle of one of its wheels. Curiosity landed on Mars on August 5, 2012, and was expected to last for two years …more

This Black Hole Has a Cosmic Wingspan Who knew a dragon’s tongue could be so long?Astronomers announced last week that they had discovered a black hole spitting energy across 23 million light-years of intergalactic space. Two jets, shooting in opposite directions, compose the biggest lightning bolt ever seen in the sky…more

NASA scientist viewed first Voyager images. What he saw gave him chills. In 1979, Alan Cummings, a scientist working on NASA’s unprecedented Voyager mission, entered a Caltech room in Pasadena, California, and saw an unusual, alien world projected on a screen. The brand-new image, just beamed back from space, revealed a place like no other ever seen. It was a moon teeming with vibrant volcanoes. …more

‘Weird’ Ancient Galaxy Discovered by James Webb Space Telescope A”totally new phenomenon” has been discovered by astronomers in a strange galaxy from the dawn of time. This galaxy, named GS-NDG-9422 (9422), was discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope to have an unusual light signature suggesting that its gas shines brighter than its stars…more

NASA’s Webb telescope peers into the boundary between day and night on a distant world Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have glimpsed tantalizing new details about what it’s like at the boundary of a tidally locked planet—that is, one where half of the planet is always exposed to its star, while the other is always shrouded in darkness…more

Simons Observatory Begins Hunt for Echoes of the Big Bang in Universe’s Oldest Light The hunt is on. From a vantage point high in the Chilean Andes, cosmologists with the Simons Observatory have begun searching for evidence of what happened in the minuscule fraction of a second that followed the Big Bang…more

“Scientists find an unusual star that hints at a new way stars can die” Scientists have found a star unlike any other one recorded—which may change our picture of how stars die. This unusual star, 13,000 light-years away, has an elemental makeup that suggests it was formed in the aftermath of a more massive star exploding in a way that no existing theory seems to explain. According to everything else we know, the original star should have turned…more

New Webb Telescope data suggests our model of the universe may hold up after all We know many things about our universe, but astronomers are still debating exactly how fast it is expanding. In fact, over the past two decades, two major ways to measure this number—known as the “Hubble constant” —have come up with different answers, leading some to wonder if there was something missing from our model of how the universe works….more