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For its 26-year history, Universe Today was supported by advertisements to pay the salaries of everyone on the team. However, various market pressures made that business model increasingly unsustainable. Fortunately, I've been able to transition the business away from ads to the direct support of our fans on Patreon. This allowed me to remove all the ads from the Universe Today site, joining the podcast and newsletter in being completely ad-free. Thank you for your support!
Read the full story by Fraser Cain
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Huge NASA Budget Cuts // 128 New Moons for Saturn // Visiting the YR4 Asteroid
Astronomers find 128 new moons for Saturn, four mini-Earths orbiting around Barnard's Star, a new video from Blue Ghost 1, massive science budget cuts for NASA, and in our Patreon version, a bonus story about the return of the X-37b spaceplane.
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Upcoming Shows:
Whoa! Astronomers Found 128 New Moons Orbiting Saturn
Astronomers announced the discovery of 128 new moons orbiting Saturn. This brings Saturn's total to 274 moons, as much as the rest of the Solar System combined. The discovery was made using years of observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, comparing the images to see dots moving around Saturn. There are so many of these small moons, just a few km across, that astronomers think they're the result of the breakup of a larger moon or comet.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Remember That Asteroid That Isn't Going to Hit Earth? We Could Send A Mission to Explore it!
Astronomers have dialed down the potential threat of asteroid 2024 YR4 striking Earth in 2032 to about 0.001%. Pretty low risk at this point. But that doesn't mean that YR4 isn't scientifically interesting. In a new paper, engineers propose different mission architectures that could visit YR4, from a quick flyby to an orbiter to a full sample return mission. It would be fascinating to watch YR4 as it passes close to Earth, interacting with our planet's gravity.
Read the full story by Matthew Williams
SpaceX's Starship Flight Test Falls Short for the Second Time in a Row
On March 6th, SpaceX made its eighth flight test of the Starship/Super Heavy booster. The rocket took off perfectly, separated with Super Heavy returning to the Mechazilla launcher, and was caught by its giant chopsticks. Starship continued on, but an engine failure caused the rocket to tumble before completing its orbital burn - the same problem that happened with the 7th test flight. Debris from the rocket flew through the sky, visible to onlookers in the Caribbean.
Read the full story by Alan Boyle
Galaxies Made From Antimatter, Transparency of Science, Favourite Lagrange Point Reveal | Q&A 302
Is it possible that some of the galaxies out there are made of antimatter? How transparent is science research across the world? Which of the Lagrange points is my favourite? And in our free bonus question on Patreon, how big can of a moon can the Earth sustain? All this and more in this Q&A show.
Two Protostars Work Together to Create an Hourglass Shape
You're looking at an incredible image of the young binary star Lynds 483, as seen by JWST. These newly forming stars are enshrouded by a thick cloud of gas and dust, but Webb's infrared instruments allow it to peer through, revealing the two stars whirling around each other, surrounded by twin accretion disks. The powerful magnetic fields blast jets of material along the poles, shaping the surrounding nebula.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
This Precocious Galaxy is Surprisingly Mature for its Age
In 2024, JWST detected the most distant galaxy ever seen, known as JADES-GS-z14-0 at redshift z=14.32. That means the light has been travelling to us for about 13.5 billion years. Astronomers have been studying the light from the galaxy and found that it already contains half a billion solar masses, undergoing a burst of star formation in the last few million years. It has a surprising metallicity for such a young galaxy.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Finding White Dwarf-Main Sequence Binaries in Gaia Data With Machine Learning
Although ESA's Gaia mission ceased its operations earlier this year, the science is still flowing from this incredible observatory. Astronomers have pored through Gaia data and found 801 white dwarf-main sequence binary stars. This is where a main sequence star is paired up with a white dwarf, orbiting one another. Because both stars formed at the same time, they provide an astronomical clock, allowing important calculations like their age and metallicity.
Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick
Quantum Entaglement Sensors Could Test Quantum Gravity
Gravity and quantum mechanics are two theories that make accurate predictions about the world. The problem is that the two theories can't be integrated with each other. A new NASA NIAC grant hopes to provide physicists with some ways to make progress on this "theory of everything." It's called SUPREME-GQ and would fly a quantum-entangled sensor to test the Equivalence Principle of gravity—that gravity and acceleration are the same—with more precision than ever before.
Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick
The Core of My Business Model Suddenly COLLAPSED. Here's What's Next
I'm sure you've heard by now, but last week was rough. Universe Today crashed, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the server. As I was rebuilding the database on a new server, I realized that I didn't want to recreate the same bloated site with ads. As Google and advertisers have already been squeezing our industry, causing our revenue to decline, I decided to go another way. Good news: Universe Today is funded 100% by our patrons. No ads for anyone.
How Humans Can Reinvent Themselves to Live on Other Worlds
Space is hostile to humans, which means we have to carry a tiny version of Earth around with us everywhere we want to go. But what if humans could reinvent themselves to better handle the rigors of spaceflight? Scientists are considering ways to optimize the human body to better withstand higher radiation levels, lower gravity, and air pressures that are different from Earth. It sounds like science fiction, but it could be possible.
Read the full story by Alan Boyle
The Athena Lunar Lander Also Fell Over on its Side
Intuitive Machines has had a rough start. Their first lander, Odysseus, landed hard on the Moon last year, broke its leg, and fell over on its side. Unfortunately, its second lander, Athena, suffered the same fate last week, landing in a small crater and falling over on its side. It sent home an image showing the Earth rising between its legs, and then it ran out of power, unable to collect energy with its solar panels. Hopefully, their next landing will lift the curse.
Read the full story by Matthew Williams
Taking A Planet's Pulse
Planet Earth is a huge, interconnected group of systems that exchange gas, rock, and water in an endless cycle. Missions focus on one aspect, like ice coverage or sea levels. But a newly funded NASA NIAC grant would try to take the pulse of the entire planet. The atmosphere is broken up into layers that even connect seismically to the interior of the planet. A satellite could shine a laser through the atmosphere, measuring the entire slice and taking the planet's pulse.
Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick
Astronauts Could Replace Their Own Mitochrondria To Treat Radiation Sickness
Cosmic radiation is one of the greatest hazards of space travel, with an astronaut exposed to hundreds of times the radiation load once they leave Earth's protective magnetosphere. A new NASA NIAC grant called MitoMars would research how astronauts could treat their DNA damage on a long-duration flight between worlds. Astronauts could extract their mitochondria before a voyage and then replace it during flight to stay protected from radiation damage.
Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick
Galaxies in the Early Universe Seen Rotating in the Same Direction
Astronomers have completed a JWST survey of galaxies with enough clarity to see their direction of rotation. And they've come to a surprising discovery. Instead of being random, like the rest of the Universe, the vast majority of galaxies are rotating in a similar direction. What? How? One possibility is that there was an overall rotation to the Universe, but a more likely explanation is that the Earth's motion through the Universe makes some galaxies easier to see.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Galactic Navigation, People Born on Mars, Jumping Off Pluto | Q&A 303
Could we find a way to Earth from another part of a galaxy? Would people born on Mars grow taller to adopt to lower gravity? Can you jump off the surface of Pluto? And in our free bonus question on Patreon, what would happen if dark energy is disproved? All this and more in this Q&A.
A New Method to Split Water On the Way to Mars
NASA has become the master of recycling water in space, processing the precious liquid for reuse by astronauts. But water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen with electrolysis, creating propellant, a breathable atmosphere, and more. Traditional electrolysis equipment is bulky and heavy, so NASA has funded a new Phase 1 NIAC grant studying a lightweight technology that could split the molecule for a fraction of the size and mass.
Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick
New Horizons Needs a New Flyby Target. Vera Rubin Can Help.
NASA's New Horizons mission flew past Pluto and later the Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth. It still has enough propellant in the tanks to make more flybys, but it has no viable targets. Fortunately, the mighty Vera Rubin Observatory is online and can soon search the sky for targets. Researchers have proposed to use the observatory with 30 hours of telescope time to carefully examine New Horizons' location in the Kuiper Belt to find more flyby opportunities.
Read the full story by Carolyn Collins Petersen
Dark Matter Could Be Charging Up Hydrogen in the Milky Way
Astronomers still don't know what dark matter is, even though it makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. In a new paper, astronomers suggest that huge clouds of positively charged hydrogen at the center of the Milky Way could be a hint toward the nature of dark matter. The traditional theory is that cosmic rays cause this charged hydrogen, but the annihilation of dark matter concentrated together could also be knocking out negatively charged electrons.
Read the full story by Carolyn Collins Petersen
Watch the Sun Unleash a Solar Flare
ESA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft has been watching the Sun continuously, getting closer and closer. Images taken by its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) are sent back to Earth, and citizen scientists have stitched them together into fascinating timelapse videos. In a recent video that covered about 15 minutes of real time, you can watch as an M-class flare was unleashed off the surface of the Sun. These flares can produce brief radio blackouts on Earth.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Is Europa Alive? A Laser Could Detect Biosignatures From Space
Europa has a thick ice shell surrounding an ocean of water, and astrobiologists are hoping there's life down there. Getting through the ice will be a monumental engineering challenge, but the chemicals from life could make their way to the surface of Europa. In a new paper, scientists proposed using an ultraviolet laser which causes amino acids to fluoresce. If those molecules are seen at the surface, they could be a biosignature for life down in the ocean.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Four Mini-Earths Found at Barnard's Star!
Barnard's Star is the closest single star to Earth, located just 6 light-years from Earth. Astronomers announced today that they've found four new mini-Earth planets in orbit around the red dwarf star. The planets were found with the MAROON-X instrument installed on the Gemini North telescope, which uses the radial velocity method to detect subtle shifts in starlight from the gravity of the planets. One planet was found in August 2024, and three more were added this week.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Space Force's X-37B is Back After 14 Secretive Months in Orbit
The U.S. Space Force's X-37B spaceplane landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base this week, after spending 434 days in orbit. Although its mission is classified, Space Force says that it was on a highly elliptical orbit, completing a range of test and experimentation objectives. This was the 7th mission for the X-37B, and it was testing its experiments "across orbital regimes." Whatever that means. It's classified.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Webb Looks Right Into the Flame Nebula
Skywatchers are familiar with the Flame Nebula, a region of intense star formation about 1,400 light-years away. It's less than a million years old, and the region is filled with failed stars: brown dwarfs. Now, compare JWST's infrared view to Hubble's images of the Flame Nebula. Seen in infrared, we can peer through the gas and dust that shroud the region, revealing the smaller knots where young stars and brown dwarfs are forming.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Watch Blue Ghost Test its Vacuum and Drill Experiments on the Moon
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission is safely on the Moon, testing a range of experiments in lunar conditions. We've been able to video two of these experiments so far. First, there's its LISTER drill, which should be able to bore into the regolith up to 3 meters, helping scientists measure how quickly the Moon is cooling down. We've also seen its PlanetVac experiment, which is testing regolith sample collection in the vacuum conditions on the Moon.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Watching the Power of Supermassive Black Holes With X-ray Interferometers
Astronomers are considering interferometers for the next generation of space telescopes, combining the light from several instruments to create a virtual telescope the size of their separation. It works well for radio telescopes and has been demonstrated with infrared and visible telescopes. But what about higher wavelengths, like X-rays? A new NASA NIAC grant has been funded to investigate the feasibility of a small constellation of X-ray telescopes working together.
Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick
Building a Solar Power Satellite From Moon Dust
Scientists have been proposing space-based power generation for decades, but it's just not cost-effective if you launch the material from Earth. Instead, researchers are proposing that we could scoop up lunar regolith and build solar power satellites in an autonomous factory. The Moon has a lower gravity well, making them lighter and easier to launch back into low Earth orbit, where they could beam their power back to Earth for a fraction of the price.
Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick
JWST Cycle 4 Spotlight, Part 1: Exoplanets and Habitability
Each year, JWST mission controllers put out the call for proposals to astronomers, hoping to hear where they should direct the mighty telescope in its upcoming year. We've been through several cycles already, and this week, they announced the time allocation for Cycle 4. We've got a 4-part series about the different categories of observations Webb will be making, to give you a sneak peek for the science, starting with exoplanets and habitability.
Read the full story by Matthew Williams
Calibrating CubeSat Constellations Just Got Easier
In the last few decades, there's been a revolution in satellite technology: CubeSats. These can pack cameras, sensors, and communications equipment into a tiny spacecraft that you could hold in your hand. But they don't have a lot of power, so communicating with them can be tricky. A team of engineers has developed a new algorithm that should allow a constellation of CubeSats to link together into a larger network.
Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick
This is a Lunar Eclipse, Seen From the Moon!
Missed Thursday's total lunar eclipse? No problem, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost mission has you covered. The lander took a quick break from its science operations on the Moon to capture this stunning image of a lunar eclipse. From our perspective, we see the Earth's shadow fall on the Moon, eventually turning it red when the light from the world's sunsets falls upon it simultaneously. But from the Moon, it's the Sun that disappears behind the Earth.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
It's Time to Stop Being Surprised by Surprising Weather
Have you noticed how often we're getting 1-in-a-1000-year weather events? As global warming continues to make weather patterns unpredictable, scientific models can only go so far. A new paper suggests a scientific approach to deal with unprecedented weather events, using three different levels of adaptation: reacting to events more rapidly, making incremental adaptations to current infrastructure, and making transformational changes to systems to deal with the chaos.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Hubble Finds a Potential Triple Kuiper Belt Object
There are plenty of binary asteroids and Kuiper Belt Objects, but add a third object to the mix and things get unstable. Hubble has potentially found the second triple-Kuiper Belt Object ever seen, designated Altijira. It's located about 44 AU away, with two objects orbiting one another at 7,600 km apart. Hubble observations showed co-orbital motion, indicating that the inner object is actually two objects too close together to be distinguished.
Read the full story by David Dickinson
If Mars Samples Contain Life, Can We Detect It?
In the next decade, a space mission will scoop up samples from Mars and bring them to Earth. We don't want life to contaminate our planet, so scientists have developed a technique to scan the samples for evidence of microbial life. While conventional instruments couldn't detect life in samples of 100 million-year-old basaltic rock, they shined infrared light on thin slices of rock and detected microbes. Next, they need to push the technique to 2 billion-year-old samples.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
NASA's Punch and SPHEREx Missions Safely Blast Off
On March 11, 2025, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, carrying two NASA missions into space. One mission is SPHEREx, which will study the origins of the universe, the history of galaxies, and molecular clouds within the Milky Way. The other mission was four separate satellites that make up PUNCH, which is tasked with studying how the Sun's outer atmosphere causes the solar wind.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Vera Rubin Gets its Camera Installed
Another huge step this week for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Workers installed the car-sized LSST camera onto the Simonyi Survey Telescope, completing the last major step of its construction. This is the largest camera ever built, weighing over 3,000 kilograms and able to capture 3,200 megapixels. This is now matched up with the 8.4-meter primary/tertiary mirror of Rubin, which will allow it to capture everything that happens in the southern sky, night after night.
Read the full story by Mark Thompson
Did Water or Lava Cause That Channel? The Answer is in How it Bends
Scientists have surveyed rivers on Earth through soil and ice and compared them to lava flows through rock. With rivers, centrifugal forces push the water to go faster at the bends, leading to erosion on the outer edge and sediments along the inner edge. Volcanic and ice channels are created by melting and do not deposit material in the same way. This difference will allow scientists to work out the history of channels on worlds across the Solar System.
Read the full story by Evan Gough
Other Interesting Space Stuff
- NASA Officials Undermine Musk's Claims About "Stranded" Astronauts
- Spaceline: A Design for a Lunar Space Elevator
- Zubrin's New Mars Plan With a Mini Starship Called Starboat | NextBigFuture.com
- Surprising Stars Reveal Second-Closest Supermassive Black Hole
- Ask Ethan: Does the Multiverse Explain our Fundamental Constants?
- Athena Spacecraft Declared Dead After Toppling Over on Moon
- What's Behind the Recent String of Failures and Delays at SpaceX?
- Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is the new Leader of Relativity Space
- Scientists Have Definitively Taken us Beyond the Big Bang
- Finally, an Explanation for a Strange Radio Blasts. They're Coming from Binary Stars
- Why Invest in Fundamental Research? A Former Nazi Explains
- Space Force Wants six Kinds of Space Weapons—Including Anti-Satellite Lasers
- Ask Ethan: Why do Galaxies Still Collide in the Expanding Universe?
Thanks!
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today
As always, if you have comments or questions, or suggestions on how I can improve this newsletter, please don't hesitate to reply this email or email me at info@universetoday.com.
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