3I/ATLAS is a roughly 7-mile-wide (11 kilometers) comet that was first spotted in early July and is zooming toward us from beyond the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. Scientists quickly realized that the superfast object did not originate within our cosmic neighborhood. Instead, it was likely ejected from a distant star within the Milky Way and is now passing by us as it flies through the galaxy. It is unclear exactly where the comet originated, but initial findings hint that it is likely much older than the solar system.

On Aug. 27, astronomers at the Gemini South telescope in the Chilean Andes captured a detailed new photo of 3I/ATLAS, revealing the first clear look at the comet's tail. This plume of ice and dust is blown away from the comet by the solar wind, the stream of charged particles emanating from the sun. The tail is only starting to appear now, as the comet's frozen shell, or nucleus, soaks up more solar radiation, causing it to expel more particles from its icy surface. The tail will continue to grow as the comet gets closer to the sun in the coming months and will eventually become several times wider than the comet itself.

The new photo also shows a fuzzy cloud of ice and dust surrounding the comet. This cloud, known as a coma, will continue to swell as the comet is further heated by the sun. This will allow the comet to reflect more light that causes it to appear brighter in the night sky, although it will not become visible to the naked eye.

These classic cometary features are further proof that 3I/ATLAS is a natural object and not an extraterrestrial probe, which has been controversially proposed by some scientists with little to no supporting evidence.

Related: 8 strange objects that could be hiding in the outer solar system

3I/ATLAS is the third — and likely the largest — interstellar object ever discovered. It follows the past sightings of the mysterious object 'Oumuamua in 2017, which was also misidentified as a potential alien spacecraft, and Comet Borisov in 2019, which also grew a stunning tail.

The current extrasolar entity is shooting toward the sun at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) and will make a close approach to Mars next month, allowing Mars-orbiting spacecraft to get a better look at the comet and its tail, Live Science's sister site Space.com recently reported.

3I/ATLAS will reach perihelion, its closest point to the sun, on Oct. 29. But it will be on the opposite side of our home star as Earth, meaning we will lose sight of it during this time and may miss out on seeing its tail at its peak size. The comet will reach its minimum distance to Earth in December, when it will come within 170 million miles (275 million km) of our planet — around 700 times farther than Earth is from the moon — before beginning its long journey back out of the solar system.

Astronomers are racing to study the object as much as possible over the next year or so, to learn more about where it came from and how different star systems form and evolve. Recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope hint that 3I/ATLAS has unusually high levels of water and carbon dioxide compared with other known comets. Additional photos of the comet, including a detailed shot from the Hubble Space Telescope and a colorful image from the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii, have also shed light on its composition.

Each new shot of the comet also acts as a permanent reminder of this rare cosmic encounter.

"As 3I/ATLAS speeds back into the depths of interstellar space, this [new] image is both a scientific milestone and a source of wonder," Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and part of the Gemini observatories team, said in a statement. "It reminds us that our solar system is just one part of a vast and dynamic galaxy — and that even the most fleeting visitors can leave a lasting impact."

Photographers around the world pointed their cameras to the skies last night for a rare "blood moon" total lunar eclipse.

Total lunar eclipses occur when a full moon passes through Earth's darkest, innermost shadow, called the umbra. As only redder-colored light is able to penetrate our planet's atmosphere, the moon is cast in a blood-like hue that's often called a "blood moon". The U.S. was treated to a spectacular "blood moon" in March, but this time it was only visible in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.

Earth's natural satellite spent about 82 minutes totally covered by our planet's shadow on Sunday night into Monday morning (Sep. 7 to 8) in what was the longest total lunar eclipse since 2022. If you feel like you missed out, Live Science has rounded up some stunning snaps of the event.

In Beijing, China, photographer Sheng Jiapeng snapped a stunning shot of the blood moon rising above the capital's Olympic Park Observation Tower.

During a lunar eclipse, the moon travels behind Earth relative to the position of the sun, making it the opposite of a solar eclipse.

Related: Full moons of 2025: When is the next full moon?

Photographer Nicolas Economou caught the moon partially in shadow above residential buildings in the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

The moon remains visible during a lunar eclipse because some of the sun's light refracts through Earth's atmosphere and hits the moon before reflecting back to the surface of Earth facing the moon.

In Germany, photographer Emmanuele Contini captured the "blood moon" rising behind a spire on Berlin's Oberbaumbruecke bridge.

The moon appears red because particles in Earth's atmosphere are scattering the sun's blue and other short-wavelength light. This leaves the longer-wavelength oranges and reds to pass through and reach the moon.

Photographer Nicolas Koutsokostas took this photo of the "blood moon" beside an air traffic control tower at Athens Airport in Greece.

A lunar eclipse like this only occurs when the moon is perfectly aligned behind our planet, relative to the sun. When the alignment is slightly off, and the sun's light can still directly hit some of the moon, it's a partial eclipse. When the alignment is a little further off, we see a regular full moon reflecting the sun's light back at us — as is the case most months.

The next total lunar eclipse will be on March 3, 2026, according to NASA. The March 2026 "blood moon" will be visible over the Americas, as well as the Pacific Islands, Asia and Australia.

This spectacular new image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows a star cocooned within a massive disk of gas and dust. It's a protoplanetary disk — a ring of dense gas and dust surrounding a young star — where planets are likely forming.

The star is IRAS 04302+2247, better known as the "Butterfly Star" because of how our edge-on view separates the bright nebula into two lobes.

The star system is about 525 light-years away, in the Taurus star-forming region, or Taurus Molecular Cloud, which is within the constellation Taurus in the night sky. It's the closest star-forming region to the solar system, and it's rich in molecular hydrogen, dust and heavier elements from past supernovas. These are raw materials for new stars and planets.

Much of this region is invisible to optical telescopes but is revealed in infrared light. This image is a combination of mostly optical data from the archive of the Hubble Space Telescope and new infrared data from JWST's Near Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) , the European Space Agency (ESA) wrote in a description of the image.

Related: Will the James Webb telescope lead us to alien life? Scientists say we're getting closer than ever.

MIRI revealed a dark, dusty lane — the protoplanetary disk — that divides the nebula. It blocks the star's light, while surrounding gas and dust scatter the star's light. It's huge — about 40 billion miles (65 billion kilometers) across, or several times wider than the solar system, according to ESA.

The line of sight determines what astronomers can learn from images like this. In face-on images of protoplanetary disks, scientists can sometimes see rings, spirals or gaps where planets are forming. With an edge-on view like this, it's possible to study the thickness of a protoplanetary disk and how dust is distributed around it, both of which are key to understanding how planets form and accumulate mass. Here, dust is expected to settle toward the midplane, creating conditions where grains can clump and grow into planetesimals.

The image comes from a paper published last year in The Astrophysical Journal. The study found that the brightness of the nebula changes, which suggests the inner disk may be warped or misaligned. It's a glimpse into processes that may have shaped our own solar system billions of years ago.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Cas A's progenitor star had between about 15 to 20 solar masses, though some estimates range as high as 30 solar masses. It was likely a red supergiant, though there's debate about its nature and the path it followed to exploding as a supernova. Some astrophysicists think it may have been a Wolf-Rayet star.

In any case, it eventually exploded as a core-collapse supernova. Once it built up an iron core, the star could no longer support itself and exploded. The light from Cas A's demise reached Earth around the 1660s.

There are no definitive records of observers seeing the supernova explosion in the sky, but astronomers have studied the Cas A SNR in great detail in modern times and across multiple wavelengths.

New research in The Astrophysical Journal explains Chandra's new findings. It's titled "Inhomogeneous Stellar Mixing in the Final Hours before the Cassiopeia A Supernova." The lead author is Toshiki Sato of Meiji University in Japan.

"It seems like each time we closely look at Chandra data of Cas A, we learn something new and exciting," said lead author Sato in a press release. "Now we've taken that invaluable X-ray data, combined it with powerful computer models, and found something extraordinary."

One of the problems with studying supernovae is that their eventual explosions are what trigger our observations. A detailed understanding of the final moments before a supernova explodes is difficult to obtain. "In recent years, theorists have paid much attention to the final interior processes within massive stars, as they can be essential for revealing neutrino-driven supernova mechanisms and other potential transients of massive star collapse," the authors write in their paper. "However, it is challenging to observe directly the last hours of a massive star before explosion, since it is the supernova event that triggers the start of intense observational study."

The lead up to the SN explosion of a massive star involves the nucleosynthesis of increasingly heavy elements deeper into its interior. The surface layer is hydrogen, then helium is next, then carbon and even heavier elements under the outer layers. Eventually, the star creates iron. But iron is a barrier to this process, because while lighter elements release energy when they fuse, iron requires more energy to undergo further fusion. The iron builds up in the core, and once the core reaches about 1.4 solar masses, there's not enough outward pressure to prevent collapse. Gravity wins, the core collapses, and the star explodes.

Chandra's observations, combined with modelling, are giving astrophysicists a look inside the star during its final moments before collapse.

"Our research shows that just before the star in Cas A collapsed, part of an inner layer with large amounts of silicon traveled outwards and broke into a neighboring layer with lots of neon," said co-author Kai Matsunaga of Kyoto University in Japan. "This is a violent event where the barrier between these two layers disappears."

The results were two-fold. Silicon-rich material travelled outward, while neon-rich material travelled inward. This created inhomogeneous mixing of the elements, and small regions rich in silicon were found near small regions rich in neon.

This is part of what the researchers call a 'shell merger'. They say it's the final phase of stellar activity. It's an intense burning where the oxygen burning shell swallows the outer Carbon and Neon burning shell deep inside the star's interior. This happens only moments before the star explodes as a supernova. "In the violent convective layer created by the shell merger, Ne, which is abundant in the stellar O-rich layer, is burned as it is pulled inward, and Si, which is synthesized inside, is transported outward," the authors explain in their research.

The intermingled silicon-rich and neon-rich regions are evidence of this process. The authors explain that the the silicon and neon did not mix with the other elements either immediately before or immediately after the explosion. Though astrophysical models have predicted this, it's never been observed before. "Our results provide the first observational evidence that the final stellar burning process rapidly alters the internal structure, leaving a pre-supernova asymmetry," the researchers explain in their paper.

For decades, astrophysicists thought that SN explosions were symmetrical. Early observations supported the idea, and the basic idea behind core-collapse supernovae also supported symmetry. But this research changes the fundamental understanding of supernova explosions as asymmetrical. "The coexistence of compact ejecta regions in both the "O-/Ne-rich" and "O-/Si-rich" regimes implies that the merger did not fully homogenize the O-rich layer prior to collapse, leaving behind multiscale compositional inhomogeneities and asymmetric velocity fields," the researchers write in their conclusion.

This asymmetry can also explain how the neutron stars left behind get their acceleration kick and lead to high-velocity neutron stars.

These final moments in a supernova's life may also trigger the explosion itself, according to the authors. The turbulence created by the inner turmoil may have aided the star's explosion.

"Perhaps the most important effect of this change in the star's structure is that it may have helped trigger the explosion itself," said co-author Hiroyuki Uchida also of Kyoto University. "Such final internal activity of a star may change its fate — whether it will shine as a supernova or not."

"For a long time in the history of astronomy, it has been a dream to study the internal structure of stars," the researchers write in their paper's conclusion. This research has given astrophysicists a critical glimpse into a progenitor star's final moments before explosion. "This moment not only has a significant impact on the fate of a star, but also creates a more asymmetric supernova explosion," they conclude.

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

Researchers used hundreds of thousands of computer simulations to examine the remnants of these ancient magnetic fields, which still reside within the "cosmic web" billions of years later.

Magnetism is a natural force generated by the movements of electrical charges and has existed since the early days after the Big Bang, when the infant universe was full of jostling electrically charged particles. Experts have long suspected that the initial magnetic fields created by these particles, known as primordial magnetic fields, were much weaker than those created by complex cosmic objects that exist today, such as stars, black holes and planets.

But in the new study, published Aug. 13 in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers have revealed that these primordial fields may have been even weaker than they previously imagined. Using exhaustive computer simulations, the team constrained an upper limit on these fields' magnetic strength and found that they likely maxed out at 0.00000000002 gauss, which is billions of times weaker than a standard fridge magnet (~100 gauss).

Such magnetic fields are "comparable to magnetism generated by [the electrical activity of] neurons in the human brain," the researchers wrote in a statement.

Despite their weakness, remnants of these magnetic fields still reside within the intergalactic cosmic web — a mysterious, sprawling structure that permeates the entire known universe — and this was key to uncovering the new findings.

Related: Scientists share groundbreaking image of the 'cosmic web' connecting 2 galaxies near the dawn of time

The cosmic web is an expansive network of ghostly filaments that connect all the galaxies in the universe like a giant 3D spider's web. There is still a lot we don't know about the cosmic web, including what it is really made of. However, in recent years, scientists have started to image this gigantic structure properly and have begun to map it out in detail.

One of the biggest mysteries about the cosmic web is why it has its own magnetic fields. This is especially confusing in regions of space in-between galaxies, where the web is isolated within large expanses of nothingness.

"Our hypothesis was that this [magnetism] could be a legacy of events occurring in cosmic epochs during the birth of the universe," study lead author Mak Pavičević, a doctoral candidate at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, and co-author Matteo Viel, an astrophysicist at SISSA, jointly said in the statement. "This is what we sought to ascertain with our work."

Their team believes that the earliest primordial magnetic fields could have been caught up in the initial inflation of the universe and later become intertwined with the cosmic web as it grew in the expanding spaces between galaxies.

In the study, the researchers used approximately 250,000 computer simulations, based on observational data of the cosmic web, to reverse engineer this supposed series of events, allowing them to set "strict limits on the intensity of magnetic fields formed in the very early moments of the universe," Pavičević and Viel said.

These findings are still theoretical as there is currently no way of directly observing primordial magnetic fields. However, the researchers claim that the results align with recent findings concerning the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the radiation leftover from the Big Bang, although it is unclear which specific findings they are referring to.

The study team also notes that continued observations of the cosmic web with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could allow them to create more powerful simulations to further test their hypothesis in the future.

Every day, a faint red star warms this ocean world and the uncountable masses of hungry, plankton-like creatures that inhabit it. They rise to the surface by the billions, joining together in a living, floating continent larger than Australia — spewing out a pungent gas as they knit sunlight into food.

The sulfurous gas steams out of the alien bloom, filling the air so fully that a lone telescope floating 700 trillion miles (over a quadrillion kilometers) away can sense it — faintly, for just a few hours every month, when the watery planet glides in front of its small, red star. For those few hours, the alien algae of the pungent planet make themselves known to Earth.

It sounds like science fiction ... but is it?

For the past two years, this question has been the subject of intense debate among alien-hunting scientists, with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at its center. Captured in the powerful telescope's crosshairs is the planet K2-18b, located around 120 light-years from Earth. There's no question that the planet itself is real. But its surface conditions, as well as its likelihood of harboring life, remain contested.

One group of researchers who has studied K2-18b with JWST for the last few years claims to have detected signs of dimethyl sulfide (DMS). This compound, which has a cabbage-like odor, is what many Earthlings think of as "the smell of the sea" and is only known to be produced by living, breathing phytoplankton. The team first reported hints of DMS in K2-18b’s atmosphere in 2023, and has followed up with several papers since.

Outside researchers remain skeptical of this alleged DMS detection, however. They've cautioned that the team's detection relies on questionable data modeling and falls short of the threshold required to signify a new scientific discovery. Only further observations of the planet can truly settle the question.

But what isn't in doubt is that JWST's ultrapowerful infrared vision is giving humans the best-ever shot at finding extraterrestrial life.

Thanks to JWST, "we're learning more just in the last few years than we've learned in the preceding decades about the compositions of atmospheres outside the solar system," Eddie Schwieterman, an assistant professor of astrobiology at the University of California, Riverside who studies exoplanet habitability with JWST, told Live Science.

It's dogma in the search for alien life that where there's an atmosphere, there may also be water on a planet's surface — and where there's flowing water, there may be life. For the first time, JWST is bringing those alien atmospheres into focus.

"We are at a really important time in the search for life, in that we now have the technological capability to do it," said Victoria Meadows, a professor of astronomy at the University of Washington and director of the astrobiology graduate program. "Prior to JWST, we really did not have the capability to do this."

The breath of aliens

In the hunt for habitable planets — those that orbit in the "Goldilocks zone" of their home star, where liquid water can flow on the surface — JWST is in a class of its own.

Unlike Hubble and other optical telescopes, JWST can't directly image the surfaces of faraway planets. Nor can it detect radio waves and other potential "technosignatures" emitted by any advanced alien civilizations that might exist. The signs of life JWST seeks are far more elemental. They're not blurry snapshots of alien trackways or mysterious radio signals, but hints of molecules tumbling invisibly through space, far above a planet's surface.

"The first step in finding life is to find an atmosphere," Sebastian Zieba, a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Live Science. "In order to have liquid water on the surface, you need an atmosphere."

Compared with its predecessor — NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope (launched in 2003 and retired in 2020) — JWST is "better in every way," Zieba said. It can look farther across space and detect a broader range of infrared wavelengths than any telescope before it. Infrared emissions are crucial to the hunt for life, because those wavelengths are best at encoding information about the types of molecules that are absorbing or reemitting starlight in a planet's atmosphere.

For JWST to detect hints of an exoplanet's atmosphere, scientists must wait for a transit — the moment when a planet swoops in front of its home star, forcing that star's light to shine through the planet's atmosphere as seen from our perspective on Earth. In the case of K2-18b, for example, that happens once every 33 days.

"The planet passes in front of the star, and it backlights the atmosphere," Meadows said. "It's like a little halo around the planet."

That "halo" contains important clues about an alien world. As starlight streams through the planet's atmosphere, airborne molecules either absorb or reemit different wavelengths of light, changing what JWST sees when observing at those wavelengths. The unique signature of light compiled from these different wavelengths, called a spectrum, can reveal which molecules are in the atmosphere. This information, in turn, allows scientists to infer the planet's size, surface conditions, geography — and chances of supporting life.

For example, Meadows said, if JWST captures the spectrum of a planet that reveals high levels of methane and carbon dioxide absorption in its atmosphere, it could indicate a habitable world akin to Earth in the Archean eon (roughly 4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago), when primitive microbes were breaking down CO2 and spewing vast quantities of methane.

Proving those conditions exist on a planet trillions of miles away is the hard part.

The devil in the data

After making a promising biosignature detection, the challenge then becomes proving that it can't be explained by a geological process, such as volcanism. Then, scientists must demonstrate that their detection meets statistical significance — a rigorous undertaking that requires many repeat observations of the planet and verification from independent researchers using their own data models.

"Webb data is very complex," René Doyon, a professor at the University of Montreal and principal investigator of JWST's Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument, told Live Science. "People have been publishing results that are not always consistent. Depending on who reduced the data, you get a different answer."

It's here that early studies of K2-18b have fallen under scrutiny. Despite the tentative detection of DMS reported in two studies by a team of University of Cambridge-led researchers, outside experts have so far been unable to verify the result when looking at the same observations with different data models. Furthermore, the DMS detection only reached the three-sigma level of statistical significance, falling far short of the required five-sigma level. (A three-sigma level is around a 3 in 1000 chance of being a fluke, while a five-sigma value means a result has a probability of 1 in 3.5 million of being a fluke).

Nikku Madhusudhan, a professor of astrophysics at Cambridge and lead author of the two DMS studies, said this is no reason to ignore K2-18b as a candidate for a habitable world "teeming with microbial life."

"We have initial feelers for what we are seeing, but we could be wrong," Madhusudhan told Live Science. "So let's be open to being wrong and get more data. Only then can we confirm what we're seeing."

Schwieterman thinks it was "premature" to announce the detection of DMS on K2-18b, given the questionable statistical significance. However, he agrees that DMS is a promising signature of life that JWST should continue hunting for on other potentially habitable ocean worlds.

"The question we want to ask is, how common are global biospheres in the universe?" Schwieterman said. If there's complex life out there, including intelligent life, then "a big part of that question is, how common are the biospheres from which those more complex forms of life would originate?"

Hitting a "bull's-eye"

Even if life doesn't ultimately materialize on K2-18b, the distant planet is just one of many being targeted by JWST's keen infrared eye.

The telescope's search list includes some of the usual suspects, such as the TRAPPIST-1 system — the single most-studied star system beyond our own. The system contains seven rocky planets, at least three of which may be in the star's habitable "Goldilocks" zone. So far, though, JWST has found no hints of an atmosphere around any of those planets, possibly indicating that the host star showers its satellites with too much ultraviolet radiation to allow atmospheres to survive, Zieba said.

Doyon favors studying a world called LHS 1140 b, located 50 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. Doyon and team's observations with JWST reveal that the exoplanet, once thought to be a rocky "super-Earth" six times as massive as our planet, is a much bigger oddball — or, perhaps, an eyeball.

"It may be a bull's-eye planet," Doyon said, describing a mostly ice-coated planet with a single blue "iris" of liquid water pointed toward its home star.

Using JWST data from two transits of LHS 1140 b, Doyon and colleagues reestimated the mass and radius of the planet and found "it cannot be explained as a rocky planet — it must have something between 10% and 20% of its mass in water," Doyon said. "It's a potential waterworld, and it's right in the habitable zone."

According to Doyon, LHS 1140 b doesn't resemble Earth so much as it resembles our solar system's icy moons Europa and Enceladus, both of which are suspected to harbor subsurface oceans that could support life. But unlike those moons, this planet is so close to its home star that some of its ice may have sublimated into gas, forming an atmosphere. It's even possible that the sun-facing side of the planet (which, like Earth's moon, is tidally locked) could heat up enough for the ice to melt there, revealing a liquid-water ocean beneath a cloudy sky. As such, this warm, blue "iris" could host life.

Doyon thinks this is one the likeliest known exoplanets to harbor an atmosphere.

"If I had to bet a beer on whether it has an atmosphere, it probably has one," he said.

Pushed to the limits

Sadly, Doyon's beer will likely have to wait.

Although Doyon and his colleagues detected "hints" of a nitrogen-rich atmosphere around LHS 1140 b, he said it will take about a dozen more transits to prove whether there are other molecules indicative of an Earth-like atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide. Because LHS 1140 b becomes visible from Earth only four times a year, scientists would have to observe every possible transit for years to come before making any firm conclusions. It's a schedule that "really pushes JWST to its limits," Doyon added.

This underscores one of the telescope's biggest limitations: time.

In 2024, researchers around the world requested a total of more than 78,000 hours of JWST observation time — about nine times more than is available, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which manages JWST proposals each year. Of the more than 2,300 submissions, only 274 proposals were ultimately accepted, with exoplanet habitability research accounting for a small percentage.

That discrepancy is likely to widen with the passage of the Trump administration's proposed budget for 2026, which includes a nearly 50% cut to NASA's science budget, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com. If approved by Congress, the cuts would amount to a roughly 25% to 35% reduction in JWST operations, Neill Reid, multimission project scientist at STScI, said in July at the 246th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Anchorage, Alaska.

Finding the unforgettable

In the end, JWST may not uncover a smoking gun in the search for extraterrestrial life. But even if it doesn't, it will likely help scientists determine where to search next. Future telescopes will build on JWST's revelations, helping to fill in the missing gaps.

One major gap is oxygen. While the gas makes up about 21% of Earth's atmosphere and is a potent biosignature, "JWST can't do oxygen," Meadows said.

Multiple studies — including one co-authored by Meadows, in which researchers modeled what JWST would see if it studied Earth's atmosphere — have found that the telescope is simply not sensitive enough to detect oxygen. That poses a clear challenge to detecting Earth-like atmospheres.

Forthcoming telescopes could help account for that. For example, the Extremely Large Telescope — a powerful optical/near-infrared telescope being constructed in Chile that could see first light in 2029 — will be more sensitive to oxygen and water in planetary atmospheres than JWST is, Meadows said. It will also be able to peer all the way down to the surfaces of rocky planets — closer to where life and its byproducts are more likely to be, unlike the high upper atmospheres that are JWST's domain.

Further down the line, NASA's recently announced Habitable Worlds Observatory will take a census of planets around sunlike stars close to our solar neighborhood. Parsing visible, infrared and ultraviolet light signatures, the powerful observatory could potentially confirm atmospheres around dozens of Earth-like worlds. Currently, however, there is no planned launch date.

With JWST expected to remain operational at least into the 2030s, its era of discovery is just beginning. Will it find alien life? Maybe, maybe not. But in its first years, it's already leading scientists closer to that first tantalizing glimpse of evidence than any telescope has before.

And once that evidence is found — even if it's on a distant exoplanet that no human or probe will ever lay eyes on — there's no going back. Finding evidence of even one other inhabited planet would imply that there could be countless others out there, raising big questions about the prevalence of life in the universe, and where humans fit into it. The discovery of an alien world would change how we view the cosmos, as well as ourselves.

"Once we find a credible hint of evidence for life on an exoplanet … I don't think we're ever going to forget about that planet," Schwieterman said. "It's going to be both a scientific and cultural touchstone. Kids are going to learn about it in school."

Usually, such planet-forming disks contain water, but "water is so scarce in this system that it's barely detectable — a dramatic contrast to what we typically observe," Jenny Frediani, a doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University and lead author of the research, said in a statement.

The findings, published Aug. 29 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, challenge current ideas about planetary formation.

The science team still isn't sure what's going on at the star in NGC 6357, which is located 8,000 light-years from Earth, Frediani told Live Science in an email. However, further investigation into this system could help us understand more about the formation of Earth-like planets.

"These are the most common environments for the formation of stars and planets, and they also likely resemble the environment in which our own solar system formed," Frediani told Live Science.

Oddball star

Typically, newborn stars are swaddled in gas clouds. They create disks of material from which planets and other objects, like comets or asteroids, may eventually form.

Previous models have suggested that, as these disks evolve, bits of rocky material rich in water ice move from the outer and colder edges of the planet-forming disk to the warmer center. As the pebbles move in toward the young stars, temperatures on the surface of the rocks rise and make the ices sublimate. JWST can then spot this sublimation through the signature of water vapor.

But when JWST examined this star, known as XUE 10, it spotted a surprise: the signature of carbon dioxide.

There are two theories that could explain the weird environment, Frediani explained.

One possibility is a strong source of ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the newborn star or from some massive nearby stars. "Both can emit enough UV radiation to significantly deplete the water reservoir in a disk early on," she said.

Another reason may be due to dust grains in the region. Instead of having a lot of water coating the grains, perhaps the dust is replete with carbon dioxide "due to particular local environmental conditions around the young star," she said.

If this were the case, water vapor would accrete on to the star, but "a relatively large amount of CO2 [carbon dioxide] vapor will remain visible in the disk before it is eventually accreted as well," Frediani explained.

JWST is located at a gravitationally stable spot in space known as a Lagrange point, where it is far from interfering light from Earth or other celestial bodies. That remote location, paired with JWST's powerful mirrors, makes the telescope the only one sensitive enough to capture details about how planet-forming disks form in distant and massive star-forming regions, Frediani said.

Frediani is part of the eXtreme Ultraviolet Environments collaboration, which examines how intense radiation fields affect the chemistry of disks around planet-forming stars. For now, JWST remains the consortium's best bet for follow-ups of this strange system, but some upcoming ground observatories and upgrades will help, Frediani said.

For example, the long-running European Southern Observatory-led Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in the Chilean desert is being upgraded, with hopes to have the changes operational by the 2030s.

The Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade, as the work is termed, will "allow us to image the cold gas and dust reservoirs in the outer regions of disks, located in distant star-forming regions," Frediani said. This upgrade should allow researchers to see the root causes of phenomena such as disk truncation (or shrinking) happening due to strong external irradiation.

Another complementary ground observatory will be the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), a 130-foot (39 meters) ESO observatory that's under construction in Chile. When it's completed around 2027, the ELT will be the largest of the next-generation ground-based optical and near-infrared telescopes, according to the ESO.

"The ELT will be powerful enough to resolve the fine structure of these irradiated disks, revealing, for example, substructures that may be linked to forming planets in the disk," Frediani said.

Galaxy mergers play a key role in galaxy formation in the early universe. While not commonly seen, merging systems do occur, typically involving two galaxies. However, the newly identified merger, nicknamed JWST's Quintet, contains at least five galaxies and 17 galaxy clumps.

"Finding such a system with five physically linked galaxies is exceptionally rare, both in current simulations and in observations," said study lead author Weida Hu, a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University. "The probability of detecting even one [multiple-galaxy merger] is quite low, which raises the possibility that we may have been 'lucky' in identifying this system so early," Hu told Live Science in an email.

These galaxies are called emission-line galaxies as they have prominent signatures in their light, particularly those emitted by hydrogen and oxygen, which are telltale signs of new stars forming.

The power of two

The research, published Aug. 15 in the journal Nature Astronomy, used a combination of JWST and Hubble data.

JWST's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam)hinted at a large halo of gas around the group of galaxies, which meant that the five galaxies are not independent but are instead physically connected and embedded in the same system, Hu explained.

Related: James Webb telescope images reveal there's something strange with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS

While some of these galaxies were previously detected using Hubble, "only JWST data tell us that the five galaxies have the same redshift and are interacting with each other," Hu added. (Redshift is a measure of cosmic distance, with higher redshifts corresponding to more distant, ancient objects. Redshift occurs as the light emitted by distant objects stretches into longer, redder wavelengths while crossing the expanding universe.)

Hu suggested that there could be other faint or hidden galaxies linked to JWST's Quintet that have not yet been detected. But discovering these galaxies may require advanced multi-wavelength observations.

Early universe mergers involving more than two galaxies are extremely rare, said Christopher Conselice, a professor of extragalactic astronomy at the University of Manchester who was not involved in the study.

"If you look at all galaxies, then 20-30% of them will be in a merger. This will be just two galaxies. The fraction of these multiple merger systems will be much, much lower, and we don't have stats on it quite yet, but certainly lower than 1%," Conselice told Live Science.

The team found that the two main galaxies in the system appear to be separated by a distance of 43,300 light-years, and the most distant pair among all the galaxies in the system appear to be 60,700 light-years apart. (For comparison, our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years end to end.)

"The fact that the galaxies are spatially close together is the indication that they probably will merge," Conselice said. "There is some room for interpretation regarding whether some objects might be parts of the same galaxy," he added.

The distant cousin

This system is similar to its local universe counterpart, Stephan’s Quintet, which is a merger of four galaxies, with a fifth galaxy that appears in the same part of the sky but isn't merging.

"A striking similarity is the presence of a bridge of material connecting two galaxies in JWST's Quintet — a feature also seen in Stephan’s Quintet, indicative of tidal tails produced by the galaxy interaction,” Hu said. "However, the star formation rate of JWST's Quintet is much higher."

While all the galaxies in Stephan’s Quintet are much older systems in the nearby universe, and therefore are less active, the galaxies in JWST's Quintet are rich in gas and are vigorously forming new stars at a rate higher than expected for that period.

JWST's Quintet, with at least five galaxies and 17 galaxy clumps, has a total stellar mass of 10 billion suns. The study suggests that the high mass and star formation rate indicate that the galaxies in the merger may evolve into a massive quiescent galaxy, occurring approximately 1 billion to 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. Quiescent galaxies are those that stop forming new stars. Previous JWST studies have detected several of them in the early universe, which raised questions about how galaxies could become "dead" so early in the universe.

Conselice said that the future of merging galaxies is a big question. They might end up as star-forming galaxies but with less activity, or they could just become "dead" or passive over time. The future of the system will also depend on whether the galaxies host actively feeding black holes, which may nudge the system to extinguish star formation very quickly.

If the merging galaxies turn into a dead system, JWST's Quintet could potentially explain how massive quiescent galaxies can form rapidly through the merger of smaller, starbursting galaxies in the early universe.

Hu noted that JWST's NIRCam images show clear details of shapes and structures of the objects, but they do not offer precise information like the intensity of spectral lines. Without these spectroscopic details, it's hard to accurately measure properties such as metallicity, motion and dynamics of the system, or the nature of the gas inside these galaxies and clumps.

If more systems like JWST's Quintet are found in future JWST surveys, researchers can study how often these merging groups of galaxies appear, their nature, and examine the conditions in which they form. This will enable researchers to verify whether these systems belong to a rare class that the current standard model of the universe predicts, or if they suggest new mechanisms in action.

During the event, which will last about five hours, the full Corn Moon will move through Earth's shadow in space. It will gradually be engulfed by that shadow, taking on a copper-reddish color — hence the name "blood moon" — for 82 minutes, making it the longest total lunar eclipse since 2022.

Unlike a total solar eclipse, which can be seen only from within a narrow path of totality, a total lunar eclipse is visible from anywhere on Earth's night side. Unfortunately for North America, it's on the day side during this eclipse.

Despite that, this will be a highly visible eclipse: The total and partial phases will be observable by 5.8 billion people — about 71% of the world's population. Among the first cities to experience totality will be Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, Australia; Tokyo; and Seoul. The last will include Moscow; Ankara, Turkey; and Bucharest, Romania, with an eclipsed moon seen at moonrise from Western Europe.

Lunar eclipses are visible to the naked eye, and no special equipment is necessary. However, to zoom in on details of the lunar surface and really watch Earth's shadow creep by, a good backyard telescope or a pair of stargazing binoculars will work wonders.

The last time a total lunar eclipse was visible from North America was a 65-minute eclipse on March 14, 2025, and the next one will be a 58-minute event on March 2-3, 2026, according to Time and Date.

Related: How to photograph the moon: Tips on camera gear, settings and composition

The Sept. 7-8 lunar eclipse will last a total of 5 hours, 27 minutes. The event begins at 11:28 a.m. EDT (15:28 UTC) on Sept. 7, with the full moon moving through Earth's outer shadow, the penumbra, during which it will lose much of its brightness. As it begins to enter Earth's darker inner shadow, the umbra, at 12:26 p.m. (16:26 UTC), a curved projection of Earth's shadow will be seen gradually engulfing the moon.

Once the moon is fully inside the umbra, at 1:30 p.m. EDT (17:30 UTC), it will appear copper-red for 82 minutes, until 2:52 p.m. EDT (18:52 UTC). The spectacle will then go into reverse as the moon gradually exits the umbra and then the penumbra, before ending at 4:55 p.m. (20:55 UTC), according to EarthSky.

Livestreams of the total lunar eclipse will be provided from Cyprus by Time and Date and from Italy by The Virtual Telescope Project.

In a new study, published Aug. 28 in the journal Science, researchers analyzed "Marsquake" data collected by NASA's InSight lander, which monitored tremors beneath the Martian surface from 2018 until 2022, when it met an untimely demise from dust blocking its solar panels. By looking at how these Marsquakes vibrated through the Red Planet's unmoving mantle, the team discovered several never-before-seen blobs that were much denser than the surrounding material.

The researchers have identified dozens of potential structures, measuring up to 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) across, at various depths within Mars' mantle, which is made of 960 miles (1,550 km) of solid rock that can reach temperatures as high as 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius).

"We've never seen the inside of a planet in such fine detail and clarity before," study lead author Constantinos Charalambous, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London, said in a NASA statement. "What we're seeing is a mantle studded with ancient fragments."

Based on the hidden objects' size and depth, the researchers think the structures were made when objects slammed into Mars up to 4.5 billion years ago, during the early days of the solar system. Some of the objects were likely protoplanets — giant rocks that were capable of growing into full-size planets if they had remained undisturbed, the researchers wrote.

Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there

The researchers first noticed the buried structures when they found that some of the Marsquake signals took longer to pass through parts of the mantle than others. By tracing back these signals, they identified regions with higher densities than the surrounding rock, suggesting that those sections did not originate there.

Mars is a single-plate planet, meaning that its crust remains fully intact, unlike Earth's, which is divided into tectonic plates. As pieces of Earth's crust subduct through plate boundaries, they sink into the mantle, which causes the molten rock within our planet to rise and fall via convection. But on Mars, this does not happen, which means its mantle is fixed in place and does not fully melt.

The newly discovered blobs are further proof that Mars' interior is much less active than Earth's.

"Their survival to this day tells us Mars' mantle has evolved sluggishly over billions of years," Charalambous said. "On Earth, features like these may well have been largely erased."

Because Mars has no tectonic activity, Marsquakes are instead triggered by landslides, cracking rocks or meteoroid impacts, which frequently pepper the planet's surface. These tremors have also been used to detect other hidden objects beneath the Red Planet's surface, including a giant underground ocean discovered using InSight data last year.

In total, InSight captured data on 1,319 Marsquakes during its roughly four-year-long mission. However, scientists were still surprised that they could map the planet's insides in such great detail.

"We knew Mars was a time capsule bearing records of its early formation, but we didn't anticipate just how clearly we'd be able to see with InSight," study co-author Tom Pike, a space exploration engineer at Imperial College London, said in the statement.

The asteroid, dubbed 2025 QV5, was first spotted on Aug. 24. It is approximately 35 feet (11 meters) across, or around the same width as a school bus is long, and is hurtling toward us at more than 13,900 mph (22,400 km/h), according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Asteroid Watch.

The space rock will make a close approach to Earth on Wednesday, passing within 500,000 miles (805,000 kilometers) of our planet — or around twice as far away from us as the moon, according to JPL's Small-Body Database Lookup.

2025 QV5 has a roughly circular orbit around the sun, circling our home star every 359.4 days. During this time, it drifts between the orbits of Earth and Venus as it is subtly pulled from side to side between the two planets. As a result, it is unlikely to ever hit us. And even if it did, it is too small to be considered "potentially hazardous" and most of its material would likely burn up in the atmosphere.

Nevertheless, scientists are still keen to learn as much as they can about the space rock, and it has been listed as a target for NASA's Goldstone radar telescope in Barstow, California — which specializes in tracking and imaging near-Earth asteroids — over the coming days.

Related: NASA's most wanted: The 5 most dangerous asteroids to Earth

2025 QV5 will make several more "close approaches" to Earth over the next century, including flybys in 2026 and 2027. However, these flybys will occur at much greater distances from our planet. Next year, for example, the asteroid will only come within 3.3 million miles (5.3 million km) of us and will be three times further away again when it passes by in 2027.

The next time that the space rock will get anywhere near this close again is on Sept. 4, 2125 — approximately 100 years, 1 day and 2 hours after its current flyby — when it will reach a distance of around 830,000 miles (1.3 million km) from Earth, according to current calculations from the Small-Body Database Lookup.

However, the future date and distance of this cosmic coincidence are not fixed in place.

As researchers collect more data on the movements of 2025 QV5, they may refine a more accurate orbital trajectory for the object, which will change when it is likely to return. For example, the odds of the potential "city killer" asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth in 2032, which made headlines earlier this year, frequently changed before eventually dropping to zero as researchers collated more observations of the space rock.

Asteroids can also be knocked off course by gravitational interactions with other objects, such as planets and larger space rocks. If 2025 QV5 were to drift past an undiscovered asteroid between Earth and Venus over the next 100 years, we may not even know it has been redirected until it fails to show up on its expected trajectory in the future.

On Saturday (Aug. 30), sunspot 4204, located near the sun's equator, unleashed a long-duration, M-class solar flare — the second most powerful type of eruption our home star's surface is capable of producing. The M2.7 magnitude blast, which occurred over more than 3 hours, also spat out a fast-moving cloud of magnetized plasma, known as a coronal mass ejection (CME), which NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft revealed was "heading straight for Earth," according to Spaceweather.com.

However, less than 24 hours later, further analysis of the Earthbound solar storm revealed that it was actually made up of two different CMEs that had been ejected back-to-back during the flare, space weather expert and forecaster Tabitha Skov, wrote on X. Since then, the second and largest of the two plasma clouds has caught up to and consumed the first, creating a larger and more chaotic mass, known as a cannibal CME, that will hit Earth's magnetic field in the later hours of today (Sept. 1).

When the conjoined solar storms arrive, the resulting impact will temporarily disrupt our planet's protective shield, allowing charged particles to penetrate deep into the atmosphere where they can excite gas molecules and trigger the Northern Lights.

The disturbance, known as a geomagnetic storm, will likely reach G2 (moderate) class, but could also escalate to a G3 (strong) storm at its peak, according to a recent forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center.

Related: A mysterious, 100-year solar cycle may have just restarted — and it could mean decades of dangerous space weather

The resulting auroras will be visible much farther south in the U.S. than normal, potentially appearing in as many as 18 states. These will include Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, South Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, New York, Wyoming, Iowa, Nebraska and Illinois, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

The auroras will likely be most visible in the early hours of tomorrow (Sept. 2) and will be clearest in areas away from major cities, where there is minimal light pollution. But if you cannot see them with the naked eye, you may still be able to photograph them.

Cannibal solar storms are rare. However, there have been several examples in recent years, including a significant event in December 2023 and another example in August last year.

There have also been several major geomagnetic storms in the last 18 months, including a supercharged G5 (extreme) disturbance in May 2024, which painted widespread auroras across the globe, scrambled GPS systems and birthed a new "radiation belt" around our planet. Experts have since revealed that the damages from this storm exceeded $500 million.

The recent peak in solar activity can be attributed to solar maximum — the most active phase of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycle, when the number and size of sunspots and solar storms rise sharply.

Experts now believe that the current solar maximum has likely come to a close. However, there has been a mini-resurgence in activity in recent weeks, such as a giant solar tornado that raged on the sun's surface for multiple days in late August.

Solar activity will also likely remain high in the coming months and years due to continued instability within the sun's magnetic field.

Although it's often called the Harvest Moon, September's full moon is named the Corn Moon this year. That's because the closest full moon to the equinox on Sept. 22 is traditionally called the Harvest Moon, and this year, that's October's full moon (rising Oct 6). This switch-up happens every three years, according to Time and Date.

Other names for September's full moon include the Wine Moon, the Song Moon and the Barley Moon, while Anishinaabeg people call the September moon "Wabaabagaa Giizis," which means the "Changing Leaves Moon," according to the Center for Native American Studies.

Although the moon will be officially full at 2:10 p.m. EDT (18:10 UTC) on Sept. 7, a full moon is best observed as it rises in the east shortly after the sun has set in the west. This month, that happens a few hours after the moon has become full, with the Corn Moon rising a few minutes after sunset across North America.

This year's Corn Moon is also a total lunar eclipse for viewers in some areas of the world. From Australia, Asia, Africa and parts of Europe, a "blood moon" will be visible for 82 minutes — the longest total lunar eclipse since Nov. 8, 2022. It will be almost identical to the total lunar eclipse seen in North America for 65 minutes on March 14, 2025. However, the Sept. 7 eclipse will occur before moonrise in North America.

You can look at the full moon without any optical aids, but if you catch it at moonrise, stargazing binoculars and backyard telescopes can help reveal details on the lunar surface that are not visible to the naked eye. As the full moon rises, its glare increases significantly, making it difficult to view the moon directly.

The following evening, on Monday, Sept. 8, the waning gibbous moon will have Saturn close by. The ringed planet will be particularly bright because it reaches its annual opposition — when it's closest to Earth — on Sept. 20.

After September's Corn Moon, the next full moon will be the Harvest Moon, which will turn full on Monday, Oct. 6.

Humanity's first look at Earth from the moon didn't come until Aug. 23, 1966, when this grainy, black-and-white image showed our planet as a crescent above the lunar horizon, appearing to rise as the camera-toting spacecraft moved in orbit.

At the time, it was a landmark image — and totally unplanned, according to NASA. The first view of Earth from the moon came from NASA's Lunar Orbiter 1, which transmitted the image to a tracking station at Robledo De Chavela near Madrid.

Lunar Orbiter 1, the first U.S. spacecraft to orbit the moon, launched on an Atlas-Agena D rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Aug. 10, 1966, and entered lunar orbit four days later. It was on a cartographic mission, designed to photograph potentially safe landing sites on the moon for NASA's Surveyor and Apollo missions, according to NASA. Although the spacecraft's camera system wasn't highly detailed, it took far more detailed views from lunar orbit than were possible from Earth through even the largest telescopes at the time.

Lunar Orbiter 1's camera, manufactured by Eastman Kodak, featured an automated system that developed exposed film, scanned the images, and transmitted them to Earth. The camera was originally developed by the National Reconnaissance Office and was flown on the Cold War-era Samos spy satellites that were launched by the U.S. in the 1960s, according to NASA.

Lunar Orbiter 1 orbited the moon for 76 days until it deliberately crashed into the moon on Oct. 29, 1966.

Related: James Webb telescope captures one of the deepest-ever views of the universe

Lunar Orbiter 1's camera snapped photographs of nine potential Apollo landing sites and seven backup sites. Earth as a crescent was photographed Aug. 23, 1966, at 16:35 GMT, when the spacecraft was on its 16th orbit, moments before it passed into the darkness of the moon's far side.

Over two years later, on Christmas Eve, 1968, Bill Anders, a lunar module pilot on Apollo 8, the first lunar orbit mission, snapped the iconic "Earthrise" photo. This higher-resolution color image captured humanity's attention as a cultural milestone, but it was Lunar Orbiter 1's very similar photo of Earth as a crescent rising behind the moon, taken over two years earlier, that was the technical first.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Below are five of the most common mistakes beginners often make when photographing the night sky, and how to avoid them. Knowing these can save you time, frustration and wasted shoots. While technique is key, having the best astrophotography camera and astro lens will help you get the best shots possible.

1. Not nailing the focus

Nothing kills an astro shot faster than missing focus — and it’s happened to the best of us at one point or another. When you miss the focus, the stars won’t just look ‘soft’, they’ll look wrong. For sharp pinpoints, you need to focus at infinity, but that’s not always as simple as twisting the lens all the way — you still need to fine-tune your focus.

To focus to infinity, look at your LCD screen (or turn on live view) and magnify the brightest star in your frame. Gently adjust the focus ring until that star is at its smallest, most defined point. To make sure your focus is correct, take a test exposure and zoom in on the result to confirm. It does become easier the more you do it, so keep practicing.

Some newer cameras even feature Starry Sky Autofocus — we tested it out during our OM System OM-1 Mark II review and were dumbfounded by how well it worked. It’s always a good idea to get comfortable with manual focusing as a backup, but if you want sharp stars every time, OM System has your back.

2. Not using the correct shutter speed

Shutter speed can also make or break your astro shots. Too short, and you’ll capture time, lifeless stars. Too long, and the stars will stretch into trails instead of staying sharp. The sweet spot depends on your focal length and the camera’s sensor size — this is where the 500 rule comes in.

For a full-frame camera, divide 500 by your lens’ focal length to get the maximum shutter speed. If you’re using a 20mm lens, 500 divided by 20 equals 25 seconds. For APS-C models, use 300 instead of 500, and if you’re using a Micro Four-Thirds, use 250.

If you push past these limits, you’ll end up with unintentional star trails. If you go much shorter, you’ll end up having to boost your ISO to compensate, which adds image noise.

3. Not composing for the sky's movement

The night sky isn’t static; it’s constantly on the move, and if you don’t plan for that, your perfect composition can vanish before you’ve even set up your tripod. A bright section of the Milky Way might be right above that mountain ridge now, but 20 minutes later, it could have drifted out of frame. The same goes for the Moon.

Before you head out, use a free app to predict where your subject will be and when. Stellarium is a free app you can download on your phone that lets you fast-forward the night-sly for any date and location. Others, like PhotoPills or SkySafari, give similar tools with extra photography-focused features.

By planning in advance, you can position yourself so the Milky Way’s core arches exactly where you want it, or time a shot so the moon rises behind a landmark. You’ll also avoid the disappointment of setting up in the wrong place entirely.

4. Using ISO that is too high

Cranking up the ISO might seem like an easy way to brighten the stars, but in astrophotography, more isn’t always better. A higher ISO not only increases your camera’s sensitivity to light, it also boosts image noise that eats away at fine detail. Push it too far, and your beautiful Milky Way turns into a grainy mess that’s impossible to rescue in editing.

The trick is to find your camera’s ‘sweet spot’ — the ISO that gives enough brightness without drowning the image in noise. For many modern full frame cameras, that’s somewhere between ISO 1,600 and 3,200. The best way to know is to run a few test shots and compare results.

Once you’re a bit more advanced, you can experiment with shooting various calibration frames to combat noise and showcase more details in your images.

5. Not shooting in RAW

Shooting the night sky in JPEG is like painting a nebula with a cheap box of 8 crayons — you’re throwing away most of the detail and color before you even start editing. JPEGs are compressed, so the camera decides which information to keep and which information to discard. That’s bad news when it comes to astrophotography, where subtle tones and faint stars matter.

RAW files, on the other hand, keep every bit of data your sensor captures. They contain more color, depth, dynamic range and greater flexibility for adjusting your exposure and noise. This is especially crucial when you’re pulling faint detail from the Milky Way or bringing out colors in star clusters and nebulas.

RAW files are bigger, and they need processing before sharing — but that’s the point. Astrophotography isn’t about quick snapshots; it’s about creating the best image possible from the best possible data. If you want your night skies to always look their best, start with RAW.

We previously reported on Vera Rubin's detection of 3I/ATLAS well before it was officially found, and now a new paper has found the interstellar object in TESS's data going back to early May — and it looks like it may have been "active" around that time.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) isn't designed to find interstellar visitors, or anything faint for that matter. As its name implies, it is designed to look at stars (which are bright) and watch exoplanets traverse in front of them, watching the host star's light curve dip as they do. But, data is data, and since TESS happened to be looking at a part of the sky where 3I/ATLAS was supposed to be earlier this year, researchers Adina Feinstein and Darryl Seligman from Michigan State and John Noonan from Auburn decided to see if they could find any data on it in the telescopes archives.

Turns out they could, going as far back as May 7th, 2025, over the course of two separate observational periods. Since TESS captures an image every 200 seconds, and 3I/ATLAS is moving much more quickly than the traditional stars TESS is designed to look at, the team had to use a technique known as "shift-stacking". They predicted where the interstellar object (ISO) would be in each picture, shifted the pictures so the ISO would be at the same spot in every picture, and then stacked multiple of the pictures together to get a clear signal of an object that would otherwise be too faint to find in a single picture.

3I/ATLAS started the observational period at about 6.35 AU, and moved to about 5.47 AU by the end of a second window on June 2nd. During that time, its flux increased by a factor of 5, though the decrease in distance would have only accounted for an increased brightness about 1.5

Related: James Webb telescope images reveal there's something strange with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS

There has already been plenty of speculation about what might be causing some of the more interesting features of 3I/ATLAS, ranging from mistakes in data collection to the object itself being alien technology. However, the authors have a much more mundane explanation for this seemingly bizarre occurrence — the ISO was likely outgassing "hypervolatile" materials like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. These have a much higher sublimation point than water ice, and can cause a significant increase in brightness, but most of the comets in our own solar system don't have any hypervolatiles left, so they wouldn't show the same dramatic increase in brightness that far away from the Sun. To the researchers, this is another data point that comets from other solar systems likely have a very different composition than those bound to ours.

In an effort to find even more differences, they also tried to look at the rotational period of the ISO's nucleus. However, there wasn't enough of a clear signal to delineate whether or not the nucleus was actually moving. Most likely this was caused by a coma obscuring any noticeable features, making it hard for TESS to detect any changes in brightness caused by its rotation.

As we continue to study every new interstellar object that comes across our path, we'll begin to find out more and more about them. This paper adds to that corpus of knowledge, and there will undoubtedly be more to come as astronomers start sifting through old data on every telescope they can find trying to unlock the mysteries of our enigmatic visitors.

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

That collision of the proto-Earth and a Mars-size body — nicknamed Theia — has been theorized for decades, especially in discussions of how our moon may have formed from the resulting pieces of the crash.

Now, in a new study, scientists say Theia also brought some of life's key ingredients to our world, more than 4 billion years ago.

"We conclude that the moon-forming impactor Theia originated further out in the solar system [than Earth] and was volatile-rich," study lead author Pascal Kruttasch told Live Science in an email. Kruttasch was a doctoral student at the University of Bern when he performed the study.

Volatiles are chemical compounds that can easily be vaporized, like hydrogen and carbon, but are also considered the building blocks of life. Closer to the sun, temperatures are too high for these materials to condense, meaning they remained in a gas phase near the early Earth and other rocky planets. Farther out, however, there is an abundance of volatiles for gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn — as well as comets and asteroids.

Theia was therefore a big deal for Earth, Kruttasch said: It likely shipped these volatiles, which are "essential ingredients for life."

In the study, the researchers used a chemical model to examine isotopes (element types) from meteorites, as well as rocks on Earth.

Related: James Webb telescope images reveal there's something strange with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS

The team zeroed in on the radioactive decay of an isotope of manganese, which existed in the early solar system and slowly decayed to chromium over several million years This decay timeline enabled the researchers to precisely track the first 15 million years of Earth's formation. (The solar system itself is roughly 4.5 billion years old.)

Figuring out how life got to Earth and remained for billions of years is a complex issue. "Earth is the only planet we know of that has produced life and sustained it for several billion years. It is unclear what processes took place in Earth's history to make this possible," Kruttasch said.

But peering back at the early solar system gave the team some clues. Proto-Earth and growing planets nearby (which today include Mercury, Venus and Mars) changed quickly in their first 3 million years in an exchange of dust and gas through evaporation and condensation.

However, this exchange process practically ceased after 3 million years because the first rocky planets and gas planets had taken up much of the free matter in our solar system. Simply put, planets closer to the sun were more depleted of volatile elements than those that were farther away due to the higher temperatures of the inner planets closer to the sun.

That's why Earth's volatiles must have come from a large source like Theia, which is estimated to have collided with our planet roughly 4.5 billion years ago. (In line with other studies, the new work assumes Theia is a type of chondrite, which is a stony material rich in carbon and organic compounds that tends to form far out from the sun.)

The larger implication of these findings is that life may be difficult to conjure on exoplanets that are similar to Earth, given that most volatiles may have formed in a different region of the solar system. "This [study] makes it clear that life-friendliness in the universe is anything but a matter of course," study co-author Klaus Mezger, a professor emeritus of geochemistry at the University of Bern, said in a statement.

The researchers published their findings Aug. 1 in the journal Science Advances. However, this wasn't the only recent study to discuss Theia and its impact on Earth's life.

Unrelated research slated to be published in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Icarus suggests Theia delivered a lot of water to our planet — and is still visible in the mantle of our planet.

This mantle water is a puzzle to geologists, because "water is less dense than the materials typically found in the Earth's mantle, and it was supposed to have come to the crust or oceans," study co-author Pedro Machado, an astrophysicist at Portugal's Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, said in a translated statement.

The simulation-based study suggested that Theia delivered much of the water in the mantle to the early Earth, "and there hasn't been time for this water to reach the surface," Machado added.

Glittering some 3,400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius, the Butterfly Nebula (officially designated NGC 6302) is the swan song of a dying star. At its center sits one of the hottest known stars in the Milky Way: a white dwarf (the collapsed husk of a once-sunlike star) smoldering at temperatures of more than 220,000 kelvins (nearly 400,000 degrees Fahrenheit). As it slowly dies, the star sheds its outer layers as twin lobes of hot, irradiated gas, which form the brilliant "wings" of the butterfly.

Scientists have observed the nebula before with the Hubble Space Telescope, which captured the cosmic butterfly's wing-like outflows and blazing stellar center. However, new infrared observations taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal details that were previously invisible — including the clear outline of the nebula's central star, a writhing "doughnut" of dusty gas swirling around it, and twin jets of energy firing off into space.

The JWST observations not only reveal new insights about the messy process of stellar death but could also help researchers better understand how the ingredients of Earth-like planets are recycled through space.

"This discovery is a big step forward in understanding how the basic materials of planets come together," lead study author Mikako Matsuura, an astrophysicist at Cardiff University, said in a statement. "We were able to see both cool gemstones formed in calm, long-lasting zones and fiery grime created in violent, fast-moving parts of space, all within a single object."

NGC 6302 is a planetary nebula — so named because early astronomers sometimes mistook the bright, round objects for planets when viewing them through telescopes of the time. In fact, there is no planet to be seen here — just a dying star throwing its final tantrum.

Related: James Webb telescope images reveal there's something strange with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS

When massive stars die, they fuse increasingly heavy elements in their cores, before finally exploding and casting that material out into the cosmos. By analyzing the nebula's various components with JWST, the researchers spotted traces of quartz, iron, nickel and carbon-based molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

According to the researchers, it's likely that these organic compounds form when a hot "bubble" of wind from the central star slams into the gas around it. These dusty particles may one day become the building blocks of rocky planets, the researchers said.

The research was published Aug. 27 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Ceres is the largest object within the solar system's main asteroid belt, which is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The wee world is around 600 miles (950 kilometers) wide, roughly one-quarter the moon's diameter, meaning it is not large enough to be considered a planet. But it is large enough to be considered a "dwarf planet" like Pluto, which lost its full planetary status in 2006.

There are five official dwarf planets in our cosmic neighborhood, with others waiting to be properly recognized by the International Astronomical Union, and many more discoveries expected in the coming decades. However, Ceres is the only one located within the inner solar system. The rest of the dwarf planets, which include Haumea, Makemake and Eris, are located far beyond the orbit of Neptune.

In recent years, scientists have learned a lot about Ceres thanks to NASA's Dawn probe, which visited the object between 2014 and 2018. One of the most intriguing discoveries from the Dawn mission is that the giant space rock is likely a water world: Traces of water and salty minerals on the dwarf planet's icy surface suggest a large reservoir of brine is trapped miles below. Other studies have hinted that this underground ocean could also contain organic carbon, which is a key component of all life on Earth.

However, until now, scientists thought that life was unlikely to have emerged on Ceres because the dwarf planet has no energy source capable of kick-starting life.

But in a new study, published Aug. 20 in the journal Science Advances, researchers revealed this was not always the case.

Related: James Webb telescope spots potential conditions for life on 2 dwarf planets beyond Neptune

The study team created computer models based on data collected by the Dawn mission to simulate how the rocky body's core changed over time. This revealed that the dwarf planet's innards probably used to emit large amounts of energy in the form of heat — raising hopes that tiny alien microbes could have emerged within Ceres' hidden ocean.

This could also have "big implications" for the potential of finding life in other parts of the solar system, study lead author Samuel Courville, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University and a former intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA statement.

The researchers believe that Ceres' core once emitted significant amounts of heat from the gradual decay of radioactive isotopes. The team believes that this heating lasted between 0.5 and 2 billion years after the giant rock was created, which was likely shortly after the rest of the solar system, around 4.6 billion years ago. At its hottest, the core likely reached around 530 degrees Fahrenheit (280 degrees Celsius), the researchers wrote.

This is not the first time that scientists have proposed that Ceres had a radioactive core. However, this is the best evidence yet that it generated enough heat to potentially support life.

In addition to heating the dwarf planet's subsurface ocean to a habitable temperature, the radiation could also have caused jets of hot, mineral-rich water to shoot up through the ocean's floor, similar to the hydrothermal vent systems on Earth that support diverse microbial communities in the crushing dark depths of our oceans.

"On Earth, when hot water from deep underground mixes with the ocean, the result is often a buffet for microbes — a feast of chemical energy," Courville said.

Astrobiologists have proposed that similar systems may support extraterrestrial life on other water worlds in the solar system, including Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan, as well as Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.

However, since Ceres' radioactive core went dead around 2.5 billion years ago, any alien microbes would likely have died out from the cold, meaning there is practically zero chance that the dwarf planet supports life today, the researchers said.

Astronomers have found something strange in the James Webb Space Telescope's first images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it hurtles toward our sun, according to a new study.

The telescope's initial observations suggested that 3I/ATLAS has one of the highest carbon dioxide (CO2) to water (H2O) ratios ever recorded in a comet. This unusual chemistry, if confirmed, could shed light on 3I/ATLAS' mysterious origins beyond our solar system.

Scientists have been using various telescopes to learn all they can about 3I/ATLAS since its discovery in July. The extremely rare comet is only the third confirmed interstellar object ever recorded, and researchers are keen to study its makeup before the intruder whizzes past our sun in October and exits the solar system for good.

The first James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations took place on Aug. 6, with researchers making use of the JWST's near-infrared spectrograph to decipher the comet's physical properties based on the light it emits. They reported their findings Monday (Aug. 25) in a preprint paper posted on the European research repository Zenodo, so they have not yet been peer-reviewed.

Comets develop an atmosphere, or coma, as they fly by stars. This cloud of gas and dust grows larger and brighter the closer a comet gets to a star, with ice and other materials on the comet heating up and releasing gas in a process called outgassing. The JWST imaging revealed that 3I/ATLAS' coma was dominated by carbon dioxide, according to the study.

The researchers noted that the high carbon dioxide content could be linked to exposure to radiation or where the comet formed in relation to the distance at which CO2 froze (the CO2 ice line) around its parent protoplanetary disk — the swirling gas and dust that surrounds young stars and from which planets, comets and asteroids are born.

"Our observations are compatible with an intrinsically CO2-rich nucleus, which may indicate that 3I/ATLAS contains ices exposed to higher levels of radiation than Solar System comets, or that it formed close to the CO2 ice line in its parent protoplanetary disk," the researchers wrote in the study.

Related: Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS transforms into a giant 'cosmic rainbow' in trippy new telescope image

Astronomers are learning more about 3I/ATLAS with each new observation. Their findings so far indicate that the comet is whizzing along at speeds in excess of 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) in an unusually flat and straight trajectory that is unlike anything else in the solar system.

Initial size estimates put the comet at around 7 miles (11 kilometers) wide. However, subsequent data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggested that 3I/ATLAS is probably closer to a maximum of 3.5 miles (5.6 km) across. Either way, it's likely the largest interstellar object ever seen. 3I/ATLAS could also be the oldest comet ever seen, with one study suggesting it's around 3 billion years older than our 4.6 billion-year-old solar system. It's currently unclear where the comet came from.

That hasn't stopped some from speculating. Last month, a controversial preprint study explored the idea that 3I/ATLAS could be a piece of "possibly hostile" extraterrestrial technology in disguise. However, experts told Live Science that the study's claims were "nonsense" and "insulting."

The speed of the comet, which has the highest velocity ever recorded for a solar system visitor, is evidence that 3I/ATLAS has been on the move for billions of years, gaining momentum from a gravitational slingshot effect as it whips by stars and nebulas, according to a NASA statement released earlier this month following the Hubble Space Telescope observations.

"No one knows where the comet came from," David Jewitt, an astronomer at UCLA and science team leader for the Hubble observations, said in the statement. "It's like glimpsing a rifle bullet for a thousandth of a second. You can't project that back with any accuracy to figure out where it started on its path."

The world's largest solar telescope just captured the highest-resolution images of a solar flare to date — and they're spectacular.

Researchers trained the Hawaii-based Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on the final stages of a powerful X-class solar flare on Aug. 8, 2024, capturing detailed images of chaotic loops of plasma at the sun's surface. The observations could help scientists understand the mechanics of solar flares and improve predictions of future flares.

"This is the first time the Inouye Solar Telescope has ever observed an X-class flare," study coauthor Cole Tamburri, a solar physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement. "These flares are among the most energetic events our star produces, and we were fortunate to catch this one under perfect observing conditions."

Solar flares are massive bursts of light emitted by the sun during solar storms. Twisting magnetic fields create large, bundled loops of plasma called arcades that extend into the corona — the hot, outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere. When the magnetic fields get so convoluted that they snap back into place (a phenomenon called magnetic reconnection), the sun blasts particles and energy in the form of solar flares into space. When aimed at Earth, energy from the flares can disrupt radio communications and spacecraft orbiting our planet.

Related: Bottom of the sun becomes visible to humans for the first time in history (photos)

But scientists don't know the size of the plasma loops that make up these arcades. Previous observations of the individual loops have been limited by the resolutions of older solar telescopes.

In a new study, published Aug. 25 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Tamburri and his colleagues collected high-resolution images of plasma loops in the last stages of a powerful solar flare using the Inouye's Visible Broadband Imager instrument. On average, the plasma loops spanned about 30 miles (48 kilometers) wide. But some were smaller, down to about 13 miles (21 km), which is about as small as the telescope can resolve.

"We're finally peering into the spatial scales we've been speculating about for years," Tamburri said in the statement. "This opens the door to studying not just their size, but their shapes, their evolution, and even the scales where magnetic reconnection — the engine behind flares — occurs."

According to the researchers, it's possible that the coronal loops observed here might be the building blocks of larger solar arcades. "If that's the case, we're not just resolving bundles of loops; we're resolving individual loops for the first time," Tamburri said in the statement. "It's like going from seeing a forest to suddenly seeing every single tree."

The new data on coronal loops could help scientists improve models of solar flares and better understand the magnetic field in the corona, the researchers wrote in the study.

"It's a landmark moment in solar science," Tamburri said. "We're finally seeing the sun at the scales it works on."

The uncrewed 403-foot-tall (123 meters) rocket, the largest ever built, blasted off from SpaceX's Starbase at Boca Chica, Texas, at 7:30 p.m. EST on Tuesday (Aug. 26).

Starship completed a nerve-wracking, hour-long flight, reaching a maximum altitude of 124 miles (200 kilometers) above Earth's surface, before its upper stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean. Earlier, after separation, the rocket's Super Heavy booster landed in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ecstatic applause erupted as SpaceX's engineering teams celebrated the rocket completing its journey. Unlike previous attempts, Starship was finally able to use its satellite deployment system to drop mock Starlink satellites into space for the first time.

Much more was riding on this 10th test launch than dummy satellites. The gargantuan rocket is key to SpaceX majority shareholder Elon Musk's ambitions to transport crewmembers, spacecraft, satellites and cargo into orbit around Earth — and eventually to the moon and Mars. SpaceX has a $2.9 billion contract with NASA to carry astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2027.

The latest test flight, coming two days later than planned due to issues with Starbase's ground systems and bad weather, marks a comeback for the company after a string of failures.

Starship's ninth launch fell short of its target, while its eighth and seventh launches ended in dramatic explosions that hurled fiery debris across the Caribbean. In June, a Starship rocket also exploded on the launch pad while preparing for a flight. Last year, scientists revealed that a previous explosion, during the second test flight in November 2023, temporarily ripped a "hole" in the atmosphere.

"Congratulations to @SpaceX on its Starship test. Flight 10's success paves the way for the Starship Human Landing System that will bring American astronauts back to the Moon on Artemis III," NASA's acting administrator Sean Duffy wrote on X following the flight. "This is a great day for @NASA and our commercial space partners."

Related: 'Catastrophic' SpaceX Starship explosion tore a hole in the atmosphere last year in 1st-of-its-kind event, Russian scientists reveal

Propelled by a record-breaking 16.5 million pounds (7.5 million kilograms) of thrust from its 33-engine Super Heavy booster rocket, Starship can carry 10 times the payload of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rockets.

Starship is designed primarily with cheap and efficient manufacturing in mind, using inexpensive stainless steel for its construction and methane — which SpaceX says can be collected on Mars — to power the rocket.

Yesterday's mission was intended as a test for the ship's new heat shield tiles and its ability to deploy payloads in orbit, alongside many other upgrades to improve on previous flights. It was also a demonstration of SpaceX's "fail fast, learn fast" mantra, where test rockets are flown beyond their technical limits — the company treats failures as opportunities to gather more data.

Despite the 10th launch's success, signs of stress on the rocket were evident during flight, with the rocket's flaps catching on fire and swinging back and forth.

The rocket's hexagonal heat shield tiles were also licked by fire during the rocket's blazing-hot supersonic reentry. They were developed as a fully reusable orbital heat shield, a historical departure from traditional shields that take refurbishment after each flight. For example, NASA's retired Space Shuttle took nine months to refurnish its heat shields between flights, Musk noted during a webcast on Monday (Aug. 25.)

"What we're trying to achieve here with Starship is to have a heat shield that can be flown immediately," he said.

The speed of the rocket's development is driven by SpaceX's NASA contract, which will see a modified version of the craft take humans to the moon as part of its Artemis programme in 2027. Musk has also suggested that the rocket could start uncrewed test flights to Mars in the next 12 months.

Yet remaining technical challenges could force these key dates to slip. SpaceX still needs to demonstrate that the rocket can be refueled in orbit, a key test before it can carry out missions further into space.

Scientists all over the world have been poring over samples of Bennu ever since material from the asteroid was brought to Earth in 2023, courtesy of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which flew alongside the asteroid before briefly landing on it and scooping up samples in 2020.

The findings provide a glimpse at the conditions in the cosmos before our solar system arose 4.6 billion years ago and reveal more about the parent body that generated the 1,600-foot-wide (nearly 500 meters) asteroid.

A violent past

The first of the three papers, published Aug. 22 in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests Bennu's ancestor broke apart in a violent collision, after a complicated history. That older body contained materials from a number of distinct environments: close to the sun, far from the sun but still within our solar system, and beyond our solar system in interstellar space.

Scientists spotted these locations by looking at isotopes, or element types, in the sample of Bennu's dust. Isotopes that originated in the solar system had a different makeup than those that came from interstellar stardust, for example.

"All of these constituents were transported great distances to the region that Bennu's parent asteroid formed," Ann Nguyen, co-lead author of the paper and a planetary scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a NASA statement.

Related: James Webb telescope reveals that asteroids Bennu and Ryugu may be parts of the same gigantic space rock

Scientists suggest the parent asteroid formed in the outer solar system, likely beyond Jupiter and Saturn. But then came a cataclysmic event: "We think this parent body was struck by an incoming asteroid and smashed apart," co-lead author Jessica Barnes, an associate professor at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said in a statement from the University of Arizona.

After the initial impact, "the fragments re-assembled, and this might have repeated several times," Barnes added. Eventually, some of the surviving materials coalesced into Bennu.

Bennu vs. Ryugu

The second paper, published Aug. 22 in the journal Nature Geoscience, compared Bennu with primitive meteorites, as well as with asteroid Ryugu, from which samples were collected by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 mission.

The parent asteroids for Ryugu, Bennu and the meteorites likely arose in a "similar, distant region of the early solar system," NASA officials wrote in the statement from the space agency. But Bennu differs from the other sampled bodies in some ways, suggesting that "this region changed over time, or did not mix as well as some scientists have thought," they said.

Specifically, Bennu's materials from the parent asteroid changed dramatically as they came into contact with water, the second study showed.

"Bennu's parent asteroid accumulated ice and dust," Tom Zega, co-leader of the second paper and a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona, said in the NASA statement. "Eventually that ice melted, and the resulting liquid reacted with the dust to form what we see today: a sample that is 80% minerals that contain water."

"We think the parent asteroid accumulated a lot of icy material from the outer solar system," Zega added, "and then all it needed was a little bit of heat to melt the ice and cause liquids to react with solids."

Micrometeorites

The third paper, published Aug. 22 in the journal Nature Geoscience, traced ample evidence of micrometeorites striking Bennu. These tiny rocks left behind microscopic craters and "impact melts" — bits of rock that used to be molten — on the surfaces of the sample. Researchers also saw traces of the solar wind — the constant stream of particles coming from the sun — represented in the samples.

"The surface weathering at Bennu is happening a lot faster than conventional wisdom would have it, and the impact melt mechanism appears to dominate, contrary to what we originally thought," said co-author Lindsay Keller, a planetary scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Additionally, while Bennu itself does not host life, the study could help scientists learn how life arose on our planet, said Michelle Thompson, second lead author of the paper and an associate professor at Purdue University who specializes in space weathering.

"Asteroids are relics of the early solar system. They're like time capsules," Thompson said in a statement from Purdue. "We can use them to examine the origin of our solar system, and to open a window to the origin of life on Earth."

"There's still a lot of questions that are open," Carly Howett, a planetary scientist at the University of Oxford and a New Horizons team member, said last month at the Progress in Understanding the Pluto Mission: 10 Years after Flyby conference in Laurel, Maryland. With such questions lingering, Howett and her colleagues designed a follow-up mission in hopes of finally solving some of Pluto's mysteries.

Such a mission, sent to investigate the outskirts of the solar system, would span several decades. But it's far from being approved. "This mission could operate for over 50 years, challenging engineering, mission operations, and data analysis in ways that have never been done before," Howett wrote in a 2021 study published in the Planetary Science Journal detailing the mission concept.

A subsurface ocean?

In Roman mythology, Pluto is the god and ruler of the dead. For a return mission to the dwarf planet, Howett and her colleagues opted for the name Persephone, after Pluto's wife and "queen of the underworld" in Greek mythology.

"Given that Pluto is named after the Roman god of the underworld, and that we wanted a female name to reflect our diverse team with many women in leadership roles, this name seemed apt," Howett wrote.

Persephone would carry 11 instruments, all based on tools flown on previous missions but with some alterations. The primary question it would seek to answer would be whether Pluto has a subsurface ocean today.

If that question had been asked before New Horizons sped by, most scientists would have said it was unlikely. While many icy worlds may start off with a watery layer, it freezes over time. To remain liquid for the 4.5 billion-year life of the solar system, that ocean must stay warm.

Related: Skyscraper-size spikes of methane ice may surround Pluto's equator

Some moons constantly flex as they gravitationally interact with their host planet and neighboring moons, keeping their ocean from freezing. Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is nearly as massive as Pluto; they are often called a "double planet" (though neither meets the criteria for a planet). Charon could potentially keep Pluto warm, if the ocean had a high enough nonwater component to lower its freezing point, scientists think.

It wasn't until New Horizons revealed the remarkably young, lightly cratered surface of Pluto that most scientists began to consider the possibility of an ocean (although some did before the spacecraft's arrival). New Horizons studied Pluto in depth for only a few hours, although it continued to observe the dwarf planet for months before and after its closest approach.

Persephone, by contrast, would aim to enter orbit around the tiny world for just over three years, allowing much longer close-up views. "There's no substitute for proximity," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said at the same conference.

What Persephone would study

Persephone would study the shape of Pluto to hunt for signs of a telltale fossil bulge — a "beer belly" of sorts caused when gravity pulls on the mass of a world. Bulges form more easily when the layers are liquid, and they can be frozen into place. New Horizons didn't observe such a pileup, but Persephone would send a more sensitive instrument that could make a more detailed examination.

"This mission should be able to image the whole of Pluto," Howett said at the conference. "It should be phenomenal."

Persephone would also seek to determine the composition of Pluto and Charon, using gravity and topography measurements similar to those taken of Saturn's moon Enceladus, and potentially calculate the thickness of the internal ice layers.

Pluto suffers from a century-long winter, and Persephone would arrive in the thick of it. Much of the dwarf planet would be shielded in darkness, so the mission would require instruments capable of peering through the veil. Cameras would map the surface of the entire world in greater depth and in varying wavelengths, including the half that was shrouded when New Horizons sailed past. They would search for hotspots, signs of ongoing activity and eruptions that might indicate a warm interior, as well as look for indications that the surface has changed since the 2015 observations. They would also provide a more detailed crater count on both Pluto and Charon, which would help scientists better understand how active the Kuiper Belt has been over the years.

Although icy worlds abound in the solar system, both Pluto and Charon have unusual surface features. In Pluto's Tartarus Dorsa region, blades of methane ice cover the surface. Scientists suspect that these spikes formed by sublimation as methane skipped instantly from solid to gas, but that's not definitive. And Charon has a strange ice mountain submerged in a frozen moat — a unique feature among icy peaks. Both surfaces are covered with exotic ices, and an understanding of their properties at the frigid temperatures on Pluto would be a key component of the mission.

Related: James Webb Space Telescope deciphers the origins of Pluto's icy moon Charon

In 1988, astronomers spotted a wispy atmosphere around Pluto, but its composition eluded them. New Horizons answered questions even as it raised more. Curiously, it appears that Pluto is slowly shedding part of its atmosphere onto Charon, creating a distinctive red pole that may shift hemispheres over time. One of the key objectives of Persephone would be to perform a direct detection of the atmosphere's composition through mass spectrometry.

Persephone would also study the space around the tiny world. Pluto is so far away that light from the sun takes just over 5.5 hours to reach it. From Pluto, the sun is a point-like spot in the sky.

Charon wouldn't be the only moon targeted by the mission. Persephone's launch time would determine how many of the smaller moons it could observe, but it would likely get a good look at the four other satellites as well.

New Horizons revealed bands of water ice on Nix, Hydra and Kerberos, as well as hints of ammonia on Nix and Hydra. Persephone would take a more detailed spectra for these three, as well as Styx, and try to determine how much of their surfaces, along with Charon's, is littered with debris from the collision that likely formed them. Although the best observations of the smaller satellites would most likely be of the close-orbiting moon Styx and the worst of Pluto's outermost moon, Hydra, a flyby of either Kerberos or Hydra might be possible, depending on when the mission launched and arrived at Pluto.

Persephone would remain at Pluto for just over three Earth years. During that time, the spacecraft could use orbits around the binary system to ultimately fling it from the pair.

Extending the mission by one year would allow the spacecraft to visit another Kuiper Belt object, much as New Horizons visited Arrokoth after the Pluto flyby. Such an extension would depend on when the mission launched and arrived, but it could provide significant insight into the debris left over from the solar system's formation. This would provide a big scientific return, because the distance of Kuiper Belt objects makes them challenging to study from Earth.

Pluto: The next generation

A return to Pluto would not be a casual undertaking. While it took New Horizons less than a decade to make the original trip, the changes in planetary alignment would make the next visit's flight alone take just over 27.5 years and would require five Next-Generation Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (NGRTGs), nuclear batteries that use the decay of radioactive material to power the spacecraft. The trip's extensive lifetime would require several NGRTGs to keep things warm in the freezing temperatures of space. That's a big ask at a time when plutonium for spaceflight is still at a premium. Currently, NASA's goal is to create 1.5 kilograms of plutonium per year; current RTGs use 4.8 kilograms.

That would require a significant investment in plutonium for outer-planet exploration. It would also take a financial investment. The estimated price tag for the Persephone mission is $3 billion, Howett said in her presentation.

With the potential of a half-century mission, the spacecraft carries several backup systems. But Stern pointed out that, although the timescale is long, it's not unheard of. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is still functioning after 35 years, and so are NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which launched 48 years ago.

Another challenge for the Persephone mission relates to the people working on it. With the potential for a 50-year mission, the researchers estimate that Persephone would be a three-generation mission that would cycle through three sets of scientists over their career lifetimes. Information and training would need to be passed from one generation to the next. In fact, Stern said delayed engagement was one of the hardest parts of planning the New Horizons mission.

"We know how to do these things," Stern said. "You have to be patient, and you have to plan for it."

Launch opportunities for the spacecraft are available every year from 2029 to 2032. After that, Jupiter's orbit prevents subsequent opportunities for a full decade.

Persephone was part of NASA's Planetary Mission Concept Study, which funds a range of projects to permit the decadal study to make informed decisions about potential future missions.

"While I think any mission needing more than one RTG is going to struggle to get selected at the moment, I do think the process of doing the mission proposal was useful," Howett said. Not only did the proposal show that such a mission is valid, parts of it, such as the orbital tour, could be used by other missions.

But don't look for Persephone to fly in the near future: the power request alone may keep it off the official books. Howett's mission proposal was one of several requested to help inform NASA's decadal survey about priorities and viabilities of future missions.

But the space agency is continuing to work to improve RTGs and their supporting technology. Howett is hopeful that ongoing technology developments will improve the mission's odds.

"One of the things that Persephone showed was that returning to Pluto to orbit was possible, but it wasn't cheap," she said. "It would have to be a Flagship-level mission."

Using deep-field images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), researchers at the University of Missouri identified 300 unusually bright objects in the early universe. While they could be galaxies, astronomers aren't yet sure what they are for certain. Galaxies forming so soon after the Big Bang should be faint, limited by the pace at which they could form stars. Yet these candidates shine far brighter than current models of early galaxy formation predict.

"If even a few of these objects turn out to be what we think they are, our discovery could challenge current ideas about how galaxies formed in the early universe — the period when the first stars and galaxies began to take shape," Haojing Yan, co-author of the study, said in a statement from the university.

To discover these objects, the team applied a method called the "dropout" technique, which detects objects that appear in redder wavelengths but vanish in bluer, shorter-wavelength images. This indicates the objects are extremely distant, showing the universe as it was more than 13 billion years ago.

To estimate distances, the team analyzed the objects' brightnesses across multiple wavelengths to infer redshift, age and mass. JWST's powerful Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument are designed to detect light from the farthest reaches of space, making them ideal for studying the early universe.

"As the light from these early galaxies travels through space, it stretches into longer wavelengths — shifting from visible light into infrared," Yan said in the statement. "This stretching, called redshift, helps us determine how far away these galaxies are. The higher the redshift, the closer the galaxy is to the beginning of the universe."

Next, the researchers hope to use targeted spectroscopic observations, focusing on the brightest sources. Confirming the newly found objects as genuine early galaxies would refine our current understanding of how quickly the first cosmic structures formed and evolved — and add to the growing list of transformative discoveries made by the JWST since it began observing the cosmos in 2022.

The findings were published June 27 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Captured by the rover's Mastcam-Z instrument on Aug. 5, 2025, the rock displays a pointed peak and pitted nodular texture that evokes an image of armor forged centuries ago. On Earth, similar nodule textures can form through chemical weathering, mineral precipitation or even volcanic processes. Perseverance found a similar rock in March 2025.

And it's these spherules that have scientists intrigued. "This hat-shaped rock is composed of spherules. This rock's target name is Horneflya and it's distinctive less because of its hat shape (which looks to me to be generally consistent with the pyramid shape we often see in of wind-eroded float blocks on the surface of Mars) and more because it's made almost entirely of spherules," David Agle, a spokesperson for the Perseverance team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Space.com.

Scientists think that in some rocks seen on Mars, these spherules form when groundwater passed through pores in sedimentary rocks. But they're not sure if all of them formed this way; Perseverance's science team will have its work cut out for it analyzing more rocks to search for answers to this Martian geology mystery and other burning Red Planet questions.

The Mastcam-Z instrument, a pair of zoom-capable cameras on Perseverance's neck-like mast, allows scientists to capture high-resolution stereo images and spot unusual features like this spherule-covered "helmet" rock from a distance.

Perseverance has uncovered a growing gallery of odd rock shapes, from donut-like meteorites to avocado-like stones. These types of images are examples of a phenomenon known as pareidolia, which describes the human brain's tendency to impose a familiar pattern on otherwise random visual data — whether that's a face in the clouds, a rabbit in the moon, or a medieval helmet on the Martian surface.

For now, the helmet rock remains a compelling snapshot of Martian history. Features like this help scientists piece together the Red Planet's environmental history, showing how wind, water and internal processes may have sculpted the landscape over billions of years.

Perseverance is currently exploring the northern rim of the Jezero Crater, having successfully completed a challenging ascent to the crest known as "Lookout Hill" late last year.

Mars has a huge network of canyons that stretches about 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) across its equator. This canyon system, called Valles Marineris, is the largest in the solar system, dwarfing Earth's largest canyon, which covers 460 miles (750 km) under Greenland's ice sheet. (Condolences to the Grand Canyon and its mere 277-mile length.)

First imaged by NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft in 1972, Valles Marineris has been captured by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter many times in its 19 years in orbit. However, this geological wonder still holds many secrets.

This latest photo, taken May 24 and published last week, is of the eastern side of Candor Chasma, one of the largest canyons within Valles Marineris. What it reveals could change how planetary geologists think about Mars' ancient environment.

Using its ability to see detail down to the size of a kitchen table, HiRISE produced an image that shows layered deposits of sediment several meters thick, scientists at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, which developed and operates the camera, said in a description of the image. Crucially, these layers of sediment must date to after the canyon itself formed, because they appear to have been eroded, warped and bent by tectonic movements.

Related: 32 things on Mars that look like they shouldn't be there

Mars doesn't have plate tectonics like Earth does. Instead, its crust is like one giant plate, according to NASA. But faults and fractures still form in the Martian crust as it cools. Unlike Earth's Grand Canyon, which was carved by a river, Valles Marineris — including Candor Chasma — is thought to have formed by volcanic activity, with landslides, floods and erosion later sculpting it into its present form.

In 2021, the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed that the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a collaboration between ESA and the Russian space agency, had found water beneath the surface in Candor Chasma. It's thought that up to 40% of the near-surface material in Valles Marineris could be water. That would make it akin to Earth's permafrost regions in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia, where water ice permanently persists under dry soil because of the constant low temperatures.

With its steep walls and chaotic landscapes, Candor Chasma would be challenging for a Mars rover to explore. However, the German Space Agency's Valles Marineris Exploration project would study the possibility of sending a swarm of autonomous rovers, crawlers and uncrewed aerial vehicles to this treacherous terrain.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Observations of IGR J17091-3624 — a black hole in a binary system roughly 28,000 light-years from Earth — were taken using NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). Nicknamed the "heartbeat" black hole for its dramatic, rhythmic pulses in brightness, the object feeds on matter stolen from a companion star. The black hole's pulses are the result of fluctuations in the superheated plasma swirling around it (also known as the accretion disk) and the inner region called the corona, which can reach extreme temperatures and radiate incredibly luminous X-rays.

IXPE measured the polarization — the direction of the black hole’s X-rays — to determine the alignment of its vibrations. The space probe recorded a surprising 9.1% polarization degree, which is much higher than theoretical models predicted, according to a statement from NASA.

Studying the polarization degree offers insight about the geometry of the black hole and motion of matter nearby. Typically, such high readings suggest the corona is viewed almost edge-on, where its structure appears highly ordered. However, other observations of IGR J17091-3624 don't seem to match that picture, leaving scientists with a puzzling contradiction.

Astronomers tested two different models to help explain the recent observations of IGR J17091-3624. One posits that powerful winds are being launched from the accretion disk, scattering X-rays into a more polarized state even without an edge-on perspective. The other suggests the corona itself is moving outward at extraordinary speeds, causing relativistic effects that amplify polarization. Simulations of both scenarios reproduce the IXPE results, but each model challenges long-held assumptions about black hole environments.

"These winds are one of the most critical missing pieces to understand the growth of all types of black holes," Maxime Parra, co-author of the study from Ehime University in Matsuyama, Japan, said in the statement. "Astronomers could expect future observations to yield even more surprising polarization degree measurements."

Their findings were published May 27 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The object has been named 'Punctum,' derived from the Latin pūnctum meaning "point" or
"dot," by a team of astronomers led by Elena Shablovinskaia of the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile. Shablovinskaia discovered it using ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

"Outside of the realm of supermassive black holes, Punctum is genuinely powerful,” Shablovinskaia told Space.com.

Astronomers don't know what it is yet — only that it is compact, has a surprisingly structured magnetic field, and, at its heart, is an object radiating intense amounts of energy.

"When you put it into context, Punctum is astonishingly bright — 10,000 to 100,000 times more luminous than typical magnetars, around 100 times brighter than microquasars, and 10 to 100 times brighter than nearly every known supernova, with only the Crab Nebula surpassing it among star-related sources in our galaxy," Shablovinskaia said.

Punctum is located in the active galaxy NGC 4945, which is a fairly close neighbor of our Milky Way galaxy, located 11 million light-years away. That's just beyond the confines of the Local Group. Yet, despite this proximity, it cannot be seen in optical or X-ray light but rather only millimeter radio wavelengths. This has only deepened the mystery, although the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has yet to take a look at the object in near- and mid-infrared wavelengths.

Related: Oops! Earendel, most distant star ever discovered, may not actually be a star, James Webb Telescope reveals

What could Punctum be?

Its brightness remained the same over several observations performed in 2023, meaning it is not a flare or some other kind of transitory phenomenon. Millimeter-wave radiation typically comes from cold objects such as young protoplanetary disks and interstellar molecular clouds. However, very energetic phenomena such as quasars and pulsars can also produce radio waves through synchrotron radiation, wherein charged particles moving at close to the speed of light spiral around magnetic field lines and radiate radio waves.

What we do know about Punctum is that based on how strongly polarized its millimeter light is, it must possess a highly structured magnetic field. And so, Shablovinskaia believes what we are seeing from Punctum is synchrotron radiation. Objects with strong polarization tend to be compact objects, because larger objects have messy magnetic fields that wash out any polarization.

Perhaps that synchrotron radiation is being powered by a magnetar, the team believes, which is a highly magnetic pulsar. However, while a magnetar's ordered magnetic field fits the bill, magnetars (and regular pulsars for that matter) are much fainter at millimeter wavelengths than Punctum is.

Supernova remnants such as the Crab Nebula, which is the messy innards blasted into space of a star that exploded in 1054AD, are bright at millimeter wavelengths. The trouble is that supernova remnants are quite large — the Crab Nebula itself is about 11 light-years across — whereas Punctum is clearly a much smaller, compact object.

"At the moment, Punctum truly stands apart — it doesn't fit comfortably into any known category," said Shablovinskaia. "And honestly, nothing like this has appeared in any previous millimeter surveys, largely because, until recently, we didn't have anything as sensitive and high-resolution as ALMA."

There is the caveat that Punctum could just be an outlier: an extreme version of an otherwise familiar object, such as a magnetar in an unusual environment, or a supernova remnant interacting with dense material. For now, though, these are just guesses lacking supporting evidence. It is quite possible that Punctum is indeed the first of a new kind of astrophysical object that we haven't seen before simply because only ALMA can detect them.

In the case of Punctum, it is 100 times fainter than NGC 4945's active nucleus that is being energized by a supermassive black hole feeding on infalling matter. Punctum probably wouldn't have been noticed at all in the ALMA data if it wasn't for its exceptionally strong polarization.

Further observations with ALMA will certainly help shed more light on what kind of object Punctum is. The observations that discovered Punctum were actually focused on NGC 4945's bright active core; it was just happenstance that Punctum was noticed in the field of view. Future ALMA observations targeting Punctum instead would be able to go to much lower noise levels without worrying about the galaxy's bright core being over-exposed, and it could also be observed across different frequencies.

The greatest help could potentially come from the JWST. If it can see an infrared counterpart, then its greater resolution could help identify what Punctum is.

"JWST's sharp resolution and broad spectral range might help reveal whether Punctum's emission is purely synchrotron or involves dust or emission lines," said Shablovinskaia.

For now, it's all ifs and buts, and all we can say for sure is that astronomers have a genuine mystery on their hands that has so far left them feeling flummoxed.

"In any case," concluded Shablovinskaia, "Punctum is showing us that there is still a lot to discover in the millimeter sky.”

A paper describing the discovery of Punctum has been accepted by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, and a pre-print is available on astro.ph.

Tracking the bright radio burst to the edge of a galaxy some 130 million light-years from Earth, the researchers used JWST's infrared eye to identify a powerful explosion of energy coming from a large, old star that may be the strange signal's progenitor. The team also zoomed in on specific stars clustered nearby, painting a picture of the radio burst's original environment with unprecedented clarity.

The findings, described in two papers published Aug. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, may mark a turning point in the study of fast radio bursts (FRBs), which to date have proved extremely challenging to trace to their original galaxies, let alone to the specific star systems that birthed them.

"The high resolution of JWST allows us to resolve individual stars around an FRB for the first time," Peter Blanchard, a research scientist at Harvard University and lead author of one of the papers, said in a statement. "This opens the door to identifying the kinds of stellar environments that could give rise to such powerful bursts, especially when rare FRBs are captured with this level of detail."

'Floating' new possibilities

True to their name, fast radio bursts are incredibly brief pulses of radio energy. They often last just a few milliseconds but emit more power in that time than the sun does in several days.

Since the phenomenon's discovery in 2007, scientists have detected more than 1,000 FRBs blasting outward from all corners of the sky. However, the pulses' ultrashort duration makes them difficult to study. Many of the strange signals seem to repeat, but some don't. There are several theories for what causes FRBs, with the leading contender being magnetars — fast-spinning, highly magnetized husks of dead stars called neutron stars. But this, too, is uncertain.

In March, astronomers at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) — an array of more than 1,000 radio receivers devoted to studying FRBs — spotted the single brightest radio burst ever detected at the facility. Officially named FRB 20250316A, the team dubbed the powerful burst "RBFLOAT," short for Radio Brightest Flash Of All Time.

Related: Fast radio burst traced to the outskirts of an ancient 'graveyard' galaxy — and the cause remains a mystery

The burst's extreme brightness hinted that the FRB originated relatively close to the Milky Way, according to the researchers — and made it a perfect target for CHIME's new Outrigger array, a suite of telescopes spanning North America, from California to British Columbia. Studying the powerful FRB from multiple vantage points, the researchers pinned its location to the galaxy NGC 4141, located inside the Big Dipper, and then further narrowed the burst's origin to a region of space measuring just 45 light-years across. (For comparison, our Milky Way galaxy spans about 100,000 light-years).

"The precision of this localization … is like spotting a quarter from 100 kilometres [62 miles] away," Amanda Cook, a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University and lead author of the second paper, said in the statement.

Following CHIME's initial detective work, the team enlisted the help of the mighty JWST, which zoomed in on the narrow region of space where RBFLOAT originated. The telescope not only detected a burst of infrared energy located in the exact spot where the FRB had been detected but also examined individual stars in the surrounding neighborhood to characterize the environment from which the radio burst emanated.

"This could be the first object linked to an FRB that anyone has found in another galaxy," Blanchard said in another statement.

JWST's data showed that the infrared object is either a red giant star (a star that has swelled as it nears the end of its life) or a massive, middle-aged star many times larger than the sun. While neither type of star is a viable source of FRBs, it's plausible that an unseen companion star — such as an energy-spewing neutron star — orbits the infrared object, the team added. If that's the case, the companion star may be siphoning material off of its larger host, which could have triggered the bright radio burst.

By studying the surrounding environment, which is replete with young-but-massive stars, the team also proposed a second hypothesis: that one of the larger stars in the cluster has already collapsed into a magnetar, which could have easily emitted the FRB but would be too faint to see directly with JWST.

"Whether or not the association with the star is real, we've learned a lot about the burst's origin," Blanchard said. "If a double star system isn't the answer, our work hints that an isolated magnetar caused the FRB."

Putting RBFLOAT aside, this research shows that the newly upgraded CHIME experiment is capable of localizing elusive FRBs with unprecedented precision — and that JWST makes a powerful partner in the hunt for these mysterious space phenomena. Further tracking FRBs to their origins will not only help solve one of the biggest outstanding mysteries in astrophysics but could also shed new light on stellar dynamics, revealing how different stars behave over their bright-but-tumultuous lives.

If true, the sibling space rocks — which have both recently been visited by spacecraft that successfully returned samples of them to Earth — could shed light on how asteroid families are created and dispersed throughout our cosmic neighborhood.

Bennu is a roughly 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid recently visited by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which touched down on the space rock in 2022 and collected samples that were returned to Earth in September 2023, and have since yielded several promising discoveries. Ryugu, meanwhile, spans around 2,950 feet (900 m) and was visited by Japan's Hayabusa2 probe in 2019, which delivered samples of the asteroid to our planet in December 2020.

Both space rocks are shaped like spinning tops and are considered "potentially hazardous asteroids" due to their size and relative proximity to Earth. Neither poses a perceivable threat to our planet for at least the next century — although NASA is keeping a close eye on Bennu, due to the slim chance it could collide with us in 2182.

There are several different ideas about where the two asteroids originate from, but one leading theory is that the pair belongs to the Polana asteroid family, which was created when a massive asteroid broke apart in the early solar system. The largest remaining chunk of this ancient asteroid is 142 Polana, a gigantic space rock spanning more than 34 miles (55 kilometers) wide that is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

In a new study, published Aug. 18 in The Planetary Science Journal, researchers compared spectroscopy data of 142 Polana, collected by JWST, with the samples of Bennu and Ryugu brought back to Earth. The researchers found that all three space rocks bear a striking resemblance to one another, suggesting they all originated from the same parent asteroid. However, it is still not 100% certain if this is the case.

Related: 'City killer' asteroid 2024 YR4 could shower Earth with 'bullet-like' meteors if it hits the moon in 2032

"Very early in the formation of the solar system, we believe large asteroids collided and broke into pieces to form an 'asteroid family' with Polana as the largest remaining body," study lead author Anicia Arredondo, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Texas, said in a statement. The findings "suggest that remnants of that collision not only created Polana, but also Bennu and Ryugu as well," she added.

All three asteroids share the same core composition of elements and minerals, such as carbon and magnetite, a rare form of iron oxide. However, there are some subtle differences in the concentrations of these substances between 142 Polana and the samples of Bennu and Ryugu, meaning a definite conclusion cannot be reached yet.

The study team believes that these discrepancies are likely caused by the asteroids' respective outer surfaces, which have each been slightly altered since they broke apart.

"Bennu and Ryugu are now much closer to the sun than Polana, so their surfaces may be more affected by solar radiation and solar particles," study co-author Tracy Becker, a SwRI planetary scientist, said in the statement. "Likewise, Polana is possibly older than Bennu and Ryugu and thus would have been exposed to micrometeoroid impacts for a longer period," she added. "That could also change aspects of its surface, including its composition."

Despite the differences, the researchers say that a shared parent asteroid is the best possible explanation for the space rocks' origins.

"They are similar enough that we feel confident that all three asteroids could have come from the same parent body, " Arredondo said.

Dubbed the "equinox eclipse," it will occur within the same 24 hours as September's equinox, the moment when the sun appears to cross the celestial equator, heading southward to bring spring to the Southern Hemisphere as autumn begins in the north.

While the equinox occurs at 2:19 p.m. EDT (18:19 UTC) on Sept. 22, the partial solar eclipse — the second one of 2025 — will happen from 1:29 p.m. to 5:53 p.m. EDT (17:29 to 21:53 UTC) on Sept. 21. That translates to sunrise on Monday, Sept. 22, local time in Antarctica, New Zealand and the South Pacific.

Unlike a total solar eclipse, where the moon completely blocks the sun and makes it possible to see the solar corona (our star's wispy outer atmosphere) with the naked eye, a partial solar eclipse leaves a portion still visible. The result is a crescent sun, which must be viewed through solar eclipse glasses at all times. While the sky won't darken, the spectacle of a heavily eclipsed sun on the horizon promises unforgettable views.

Related: Where can you see the Sept. 7 'blood moon' total lunar eclipse?

For this event, the coverage of our star's visible surface will be unusually deep, with up to 86% of the sun obscured in parts of Antarctica's Ross Sea and southern New Zealand. One of the key viewing locations on an otherwise remote eclipse track will be Dunedin, New Zealand, where the sun will rise already eclipsed at 6:27 a.m. NZST, reaching a maximum of about 72% coverage about 40 minutes later.

Only about 400,000 people will be able to see an eclipse of over 70%, according to Timeanddate.com. Further north in Auckland, the sun will rise already partially eclipsed at 6:10 NZST, and the maximum eclipse reaches 61% while in the South Pacific, viewers in Fiji and Tonga will see a much smaller partial eclipse at sunrise. From Hobart, Australia, a 3% partial eclipse will be visible just after sunrise at 6:00 a.m. AEST.

The next solar eclipse on Earth will take place on Feb. 17, 2026, when an annular solar eclipse will create a "ring of fire" visible for up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds as 92% of the sun is blocked by the moon at its most distant. Unfortunately, the stunning ring of fire will only be visible from a remote region of Antarctica. Sometimes penguins have all the luck.

Although the solar events are unrelated, both are the result of disturbances in the sun's invisible magnetic field, with some plasma forced into a tornado shape and some plasma released in a towering eruption known as an eruptive prominence.

Maximilian Teodorescu, a researcher at the Institute of Space Science in Romania, captured both events happening simultaneously Wednesday (Aug. 20). He told Live Science that a large solar tornado is pretty rare and he's never seen one at the same time as an eruptive prominence.

Spaceweather.com reported that astronomers around the world have been monitoring the tornado on the sun's surface this week, with the earliest images emerging Sunday (Aug. 17). Solar tornadoes look like tornadoes on Earth, but the two phenomena have little in common otherwise, particularly when it comes to size.

"[The solar tornado is] about 130,000 kilometers [80,000 miles] high," Teodorescu said. "Basically a tenth of the diameter of the sun."

To put that into perspective, Earth is around 7,926 miles (12,756 km) wide, so this tornado is a little taller than 10 Earths stacked on top of each other. Solar tornadoes are typically around 15,500 to 62,000 miles (25,000 to 100,000 km) tall, so this one is a whopper.

Teodorescu estimated that the eruptive prominence was around 124,000 miles (200,000 km) wide. That's roughly similar in size to a giant solar prominence observed in July, which was estimated at more than 100,000 miles (165,000 km) across and nicknamed "The Beast."

Related: Astrophotographer snaps 'once-in-a-lifetime' shot of solar flare photobombing the ISS

Teodorescu first saw the solar tornado on the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) website Monday (Aug. 18). GONG, which is operated by the National Solar Observatory, has six identical solar telescopes that monitor the sun in almost real time from different countries around the world, allowing amateurs and professionals to stay updated on solar activity.

Teodorescu's wife and fellow Institute of Space Science researcher Eliza Teodorescu helped him align a telescope's field of view with the tornado so he could capture images of the event. The eruptive prominence then emerged, allowing him to snap both at the same time.

Earth's tornadoes are whipped up by intense winds and move around, while solar tornadoes are made of ionized gas (plasma) that's rooted in place. They are formally called tornado prominences, with regular prominences also held in place by magnetic fields.

Prominences are attached to the visible surface of the sun, or photosphere, and extend into the star's outer atmosphere, or corona, according to NASA. An eruptive prominence occurs when the magnetic field holding the plasma becomes unstable and bursts outward. (Lucky skywatchers got a chance to see prominences erupting in real time during the April 8 total solar eclipse last year.)

In many cases, the plasma released in a prominence then flies into space as a coronal mass ejection (CME). This type of solar storm can collide with Earth's magnetic field and create auroras, as well as disrupt our satellites and communication systems.

Maximilian Teodorescu noted that the eruptive prominence he photographed released a CME. But it isn't heading for us, so it won't result in any disruptions or northern lights displays, he said. Earth is, however, currently being buffeted by solar winds because of other solar activity, so auroras could be visible at high latitudes tonight, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

The sun is currently in the most active phase of its roughly 11-year solar cycle — known as solar maximum — when the star's magnetic field weakens and flips. Maximilian Teodorescu noted that there's a lot of solar activity to see even with a small telescope — provided it is safely equipped with a solar filter.

"It's the most dynamic thing you can actually see as both [an] amateur and a professional in the sky," he said.

More than 3,300 readers responded to the poll, which was published Aug. 13. And at the time of writing, the results show that 45% of responders were willing to take the trip through deep space, no questions asked, while 30% gave a solid "no."

The rest? Well, it depends on the details, so we asked them what had them sitting on the galactic fence.

"It would depend on the living arrangements, as well as the work required and the rec facilities," Jason P. Harris wrote.

For some, the decision came down to comfort and recreation. "If I could go by myself, and if the ship had a racetrack, and I could bring a motorcycle with me, I would sign right now," S. Ravenscroft wrote.

And the chance to sleep the 400 years away was a deal-maker too. "If there was hypersleep then yes I'd go," Chris K X24 said.

Others tied their decision to Earth's future. "I guess if Earth was becoming uninhabitable I would," Captain Awesome wrote. "But it doesn't sound like fun, my ping back to Earth would just get worse and worse until gaming becomes impossible."

Gavin Chapple noted that technology could significantly advance in those 400 years, writing: "The silly part is, once they finally arrive, there will already be humans there who beat them to it with near light speed technology."

So what do you think? After weighing up all the options, would you be willing to leave Earth behind for Alpha Centauri? Let us know in the comments below.

Related stories

—Oops! Earendel, most distant star ever discovered, may not actually be a star, James Webb Telescope reveals

—Scientists think they detected the first known triple black hole system in the universe — and then watched it die

—Uranus has a new, hidden moon, James Webb Space Telescope reveals

The moon, for now dubbed S/2025 U1, is just 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter, which is why it was invisible to other telescopes and the Voyager 2 spacecraft when it made its 1986 flyby of the icy planet.

Now, the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) has detected glints of sunlight in a series of 10 40-minute long-exposure images of Uranus, which revealed the elusive moon's presence. The discovery hints that much more remains hidden around Uranus, the astronomers who found the moon say.

"No other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus, and their complex inter-relationships with the rings hint at a chaotic history that blurs the boundary between a ring system and a system of moons," Matthew Tiscareno, a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and a member of the research team, said in a statement. "Moreover, the new moon is smaller and much fainter than the smallest of the previously known inner moons, making it likely that even more complexity remains to be discovered."

First spotted in 1781 by the German-British astronomer Frederick William Herschel, Uranus is the seventh planet from our sun and orbits it at a distance of 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion km), nearly 20 times farther than Earth, according to NASA.

This extreme distance means that much of what we know about the far-flung, icy and lopsided planet comes from data gathered by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which zipped past the ice giant 40 years ago — yet even this information has been revised.

Related: Surprised scientists discover the 'dark sides' of Uranus' moons are the wrong way around

The newfound moon, the 14th member of a system of small moons inside the orbits of the largest moons Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon, is 35,000 miles (56,000 km) from Uranus' center. It has a nearly circular orbit, meaning it may not have moved far from where it formed. Its location within Uranus' dark inner rings (the planet has 13, divided into an inner system and an outer pair) likely explains why it went undetected for so long.

An official name for the newly discovered moon is awaiting approval by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), but it will most likely be named for a character from the works of Shakespeare or Alexander Pope, after which the planet's other moons are named.

The JWST has made a number of astounding observations into the furthest reaches of our universe. But scientists say this discovery, made as part of the space telescope's General Observer program, highlights the JWST ability to discover things at the outer limits of our own solar system.

"Looking forward, the discovery of this moon underscores how modern astronomy continues to build upon the legacy of missions like Voyager 2, which flew past Uranus on Jan. 24, 1986, and gave humanity its first close-up look at this mysterious world," Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist at Southwest Research Institute's Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado, said in the statement. "Now, nearly four decades later, the James Webb Space Telescope is pushing that frontier even farther."

The team identified this triplet, which is locked in a complex "waltz," after spotting a hidden supermassive black hole lurking in the background of a peculiar gravitational wave event first detected six years ago.

In 2019, the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected a series of faint ripples in the fabric of space-time, known as gravitational waves. They appeared to be given off by the distant merger of two black holes located somewhere between 544 and 912 light-years from Earth. The cosmic collision, dubbed GW190814, was particularly noteworthy due to the size of the merging singularities, which weighed 23 and 2.6 solar masses, respectively.

Normally, merging black holes have a similar mass to one another because this creates the right type of gravitational friction for them to come together. At the time, GW190814 was the "most unequal mass ratio yet measured with gravitational waves," according to a 2020 study of the event. Scientists were particularly surprised by the size of the smaller singularity, which is only just massive enough to be considered a black hole.

In a new study, published July 21 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers proposed that this uneven merger was caused by a hidden third object that provided the necessary gravitational kick for the two mismatched black holes to collide and transform into a single entity, despite their significant size difference.

Related: Accidental discovery of 1st-ever 'black hole triple' system challenges what we know about how singularities form

The team used simulations to predict how this interaction would influence the gravitational waves generated by the merger, and identified a unique "fingerprint" signal associated with the hidden object. They then reanalyzed the LIGO data from the initial discovery and found that this fingerprint signal was in fact present.

"This is the first international discovery of clear evidence for a third compact object in a binary black hole merger event," study co-author Wen-Biao Han, an astronomer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement. "It reveals that the binary black holes in GW190814 may not have formed in isolation but were part of a more complex gravitational system."

Based on the simulations, the team believes the most likely identity of the hidden compact object is a supermassive black hole. They don't yet know how large this behemoth may be, but the lower limit for supermassive black holes is around 100,000 solar masses, suggesting that it is at least that massive — and making it far larger than the other two objects initially identified in the system.

The smaller pair of merging black holes were likely part of a binary system that danced around the supermassive black hole as they spun around one another, similar to how Earth and the moon circle each other on their collective journey around the sun. This is the first time that this configuration has been seen in a black hole system.

The newly formed black hole from the merger will likely continue to dance around its supermassive partner for billions of years before eventually being swallowed by the larger object, the team added.

The new findings not only provide "significant insights into the formation pathways of binary black holes" but also provide a new way of identifying other hidden giants lurking in the background of other similarly uneven black hole mergers, Han said.

Since LIGO detected the first-ever gravitational waves in 2015, the observatory has spotted more than 100 additional gravitational wave events, most of which were caused by black hole mergers. Each new detection provides more data scientists can use to uncover new secrets about the universe's most massive objects, which are notoriously hard to study.

Black hole quiz: How supermassive is your knowledge of the universe?

Spanning more than five hours, the celestial event will peak with an impressive 82-minute totality phase, when Earth's massive inner shadow will plunge the moon's entire near side into a reddish darkness — earning it the eerie nickname "blood moon."

Sadly, unlike this year's previous blood moon lunar eclipse on March 13-14, viewers in the United States will not be invited to the show. By the time the eclipse begins at 11:28 a.m. EDT (15:28 UTC), the full moon will already have set over North and South America, cutting most of the Western Hemisphere out of the event, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Instead, the eclipse will be best seen from Asia and Western Australia, where more than 6 billion people (nearly 77% of the world's population) will be privy to the entire total phase of the eclipse, according to Time and Date. Skywatchers in most of Europe and Africa will be able to catch at least part of totality, which ends at 20:55 UTC globally, and most of the partial phase that follows it as the moon sneaks back out of Earth's shadow.

How to live stream the lunar eclipse

Skywatchers in North America who want to catch the blood moon in real time aren't totally out of luck, however. A free livestream of the event, courtesy of the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy, has been set for Sept. 7. The stream begins at 1:45 p.m. EDT (17:45 UTC), shortly after moonrise in Italy. The moon will rise partially eclipsed and will reach totality roughly 45 minutes later, according to Time and Date's eclipse map tool.

You can watch the entire stream on the Virtual Telescope Project's official YouTube page or via the video embedded below.

Why do 'blood moon' eclipses happen?

Total lunar eclipses always occur during the full moon, when the moon, Earth and the sun line up in a row. Once perfectly aligned, the innermost and darkest part of Earth's shadow — the umbra — falls across the visible surface of the moon, blotting out the sun's light.

The moon appears red during this phase thanks to a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering, in which particles in Earth's atmosphere preferentially scatter different wavelengths of light.

As incoming sunlight curves around Earth's perimeter, atmospheric particles scatter shorter-wavelength blue light while allowing longer-wavelength red light to pass through and strike the moon's surface, Live Science previously reported, giving the appearance of a "blood moon."

As is always the case on Earth, a solar eclipse will follow two weeks after its lunar counterpart. On Sept. 21, a partial solar eclipse will be visible from parts of New Zealand, Australia and Antarctica, with up to 80% of the sun's disk blocked by the moon during the peak. Several Pacific islands — including Fiji, Tonga and Samoa — will see a slimmer eclipse, with less than 30% of the sun's disk covered.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 10:45 a.m. EDT on Sept. 5 to include new information about the weekend's total lunar eclipse.

It's not something that can be seen in the sky, however. A new moon occurs when the moon passes roughly between Earth and the sun, making the surface of the moon invisible from Earth. So why is this particular new moon called a "black moon"?

A black moon is the opposite of a blue moon — and just as rare. As with blue moons, there are two types of black moon. A new moon can get that name if it's the second new moon in a single calendar month. That can happen when there's a new moon on or around the first day or two of a month. It's then guaranteed that a second new moon will occur later that month. This kind — called a monthly black moon — occurs approximately once every 29 months, according to Time and Date. (The next monthly black moon will occur on Aug. 31, 2027.)

However, astronomers also use the term "black moon" to refer to the third new moon in a season of four new moons. That particular calendar quirk is what's happening this weekend — and it's all down to a new moon occurring soon after a solstice or an equinox.

The current season — summer in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere — began with the solstice on June 20 or 21 (depending on your time zone) and will end with the equinox on Sept. 22. Within that period, there are new moons on June 25 (just four days after the solstice), July 24, Aug. 23 and Sept. 21 (one day before the equinox). It's a tight squeeze, but there's just enough time for four new moons to occur in a single summer.

The third of these new moons (on Aug. 23) is known as a seasonal black moon. This type of new moon occurs once about every 33 months — making it slightly rarer than a monthly black moon.

Related: The 10 best stargazing events of 2025

Although you won't be able to see the black moon with the naked eye, its timing offers a special opportunity for stargazers: a moonless night perfect for enjoying the summer stars just as the Milky Way is looking its best from the Northern Hemisphere.

The best way to get a good look at the arc of our galaxy overhead is to find a location away from light pollution, preferably somewhere with no cities on the southern horizon. Find the three bright stars of the vast Summer Triangle in the southeast — Vega, Deneb and Altair. The Milky Way will be streaming through the left side of the Summer Triangle, roughly from Deneb down to Altair and, from there, down to the southern horizon.

Although the Milky Way is visible in any moonless night sky, the night of the black moon is the perfect opportunity to see it at its best.

Discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2022, Earendel was thought to be a star that formed merely 900 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 7% of its current age.

Now, in a study published July 31 in The Astrophysical Journal, astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to take a fresh look at Earendel. They wanted to explore the possibility that Earendel might not be a single star or a binary system as previously thought, but rather a compact star cluster.

They found that Earendel's spectral features match those of globular clusters — a type of star cluster — found in the local universe.

"What's reassuring about this work is that if Earendel really is a star cluster, it isn't unexpected!" Massimo Pascale, an astronomy doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the study, told Live Science in an email. "[This] work finds that Earendel seems fairly consistent with how we expect globular clusters we see in the local universe would have looked in the first billion years of the universe."

Ancient object

Earendel, located in the Sunrise Arc galaxy 12.9 billion light-years from us, was discovered through a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity in which massive objects bend the light that passes by them. A massive galaxy cluster located between Earth and Earendel is so large that it distorts the fabric of space-time, creating a magnifying effect that allowed astronomers to observe Earendel's light, which would otherwise be too faint to detect. Studies indicate that the star appears at least 4,000 times larger due to this gravitational lensing effect.

This magnifying power is strongest in some special regions. If a star or galaxy happens to be right next to one of these regions, its image can be magnified hundreds or thousands of times brighter than normal. Earendel seems to sit extremely close to one of these "sweet spots," which is why we can see it even though it is almost 12.9 billion light-years away. Such near-perfect alignments are incredibly rare, which made astronomers consider alternative explanations beyond a single star.

Related: Giant, cosmic 'Eye of Sauron' snapped staring directly at us in stunning 15-year time-lapse photo

After Earendel's discovery in 2022, researchers analyzed the object using data from JWST's Near Infrared Imager (NIRCam). By examining its brightness and size, they concluded that Earendel could be a massive star more than twice as hot as the sun and roughly a million times more luminous than our star. In the color of Earendel, astronomers also found a hint of the presence of a cooler companion star.

"After some recent work showed that indeed Earendel could (but is not necessarily) be much larger than previously thought, I was convinced it was worthwhile to explore the star cluster scenario," Pascale said..

Using spectroscopic data from JWST's NIRSpec instruments, Pascale and team studied the age and metal content of Earendel.

The team looked at Earendel's spectroscopic continuum, which basically shows how its brightness smoothly changes across different wavelengths of light. This pattern matched what would be expected from a star cluster and, at the very least, matched the combined light of multiple stars.

"The new part of this study is the NIRSpec spectrum, which provides a bit more detail than was possible with the NIRCam data," said Brian Welch, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who led the team that discovered Earendel in 2022 but was not involved in the new study.

But Welch doesn't think the new data is enough to confirm that Earendel is a star cluster.

"At the spectral resolution of the NIRSpec [instrument], the spectrum of a lensed star and a star cluster can be very similar. It is therefore important to consider all available data when attempting to classify these highly magnified objects," Welch told Live Science in an email.

The researchers have only explored the "star cluster" possibility. They did not investigate all possible scenarios, like Earendel being a single star or a multiple star system, and compare the results.

"The measurement is robust and well done, but in only considering the star cluster hypothesis, the study is limited in scope," Welch noted.

Both Pascale and Welch agreed that the key to solving Earendel's mystery is to monitor microlensing effects. Microlensing is a subtype of gravitational lensing in which a passing object temporarily distorts the image of a distant object when a nearer object lines up in front of it as it passes by. Changes in brightness due to microlensing are more noticeable when the distant objects are small — such as stars, planets or star systems — rather than much larger star clusters.

"It will be exciting to see what future JWST programs could do to further demystify the nature of Earendel," Pascale said.

James Webb Space Telescope quiz: How well do you know the world's most powerful telescope?

This stunning image from astrophotographer Petr Horálek captures two of the night sky's most glorious sights in one — the glowing heart of the Milky Way and the elusive "zodiacal light." Despite appearing alongside one another, these two streaks of light could not be more different in origin and composition.

Astronomers have constructed some of humanity's best telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere to better see the bright core of the Milky Way — dense with stars and nebulae. That core passes through constellations including Scorpius, Sagittarius and Ophiuchus, which are higher in the sky the farther south they're viewed from.

This image was taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), located at an altitude of 7,200 feet (2,200 meters) in the Chilean Andes within the southern Atacama Desert. At this height, above the densest and warmest part of Earth’s atmosphere, incredibly clear and dark skies are the norm, enabling observers to see not only the bright band of the Milky Way but something less obvious that resides in the solar system — zodiacal light.

The biggest visible solar system phenomenon in the night sky, zodiacal light is a faint, diffuse glow in the night sky that casual observers often miss. It consists of sunlight reflecting off dust in our cosmic neighborhood, possibly from passing asteroids and comets or from the leftovers of planet formation. In 2020, a paper also claimed that zodiacal light may be primarily made of dust blown off Mars. Either way, the glow of the solar system is an arresting sight, but hard to see.

Zodiacal light is at its brightest around the equinoxes and is visible along the ecliptic — the apparent path the sun takes through the sky — as a triangular beam of light on the horizon a few hours before sunrise or after sunset. That timing has led to it being called either the "false dawn" or "false dusk," though its name comes from the fact that it’s visible over the 13 constellations that make up the zodiac.

Horálek’s spectacular image was taken in 2022 when he was an audiovisual ambassador for NOIRLab, which operates CTIO. In the photo, from left to right, are the U.S. Naval Observatory Deep South Telescope, the DIMM1 Seeing Monitor, the Chilean Automatic Supernova Search dome, the UBC Southern Observatory and the Planetary Defense 1.0-meter Telescope.

Astronomers have snapped a stunning shot of the complex magnetic field of a gigantic energy jet, dubbed the "Eye of Sauron," staring directly at us from across the cosmos. The incredible image, which took over 15 years to capture, also sheds light on the mysterious origin of neutrinos, ghostly particles that rarely interact with other matter.

The origin of this glowering cosmic eye is a blazar dubbed PKS 1424+240, located billions of light-years from Earth. A blazar is a type of quasar — a supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy that shoots out gigantic and superpowerful energy jets into space. These jets move at near light-speed and contain some of the highest concentrations of high-energy gamma rays and X-rays anywhere in the universe.

Blazars are unique because their energy jets are near-perfectly aligned with Earth, meaning their radiation hits our planet head-on, making them appear much brighter to us than most quasars and often causing them to outshine their home galaxies. In this photo, researchers have peered through one of PKS 1424+240's "jet cones" using radio waves, allowing them to visualize the magnetic fields within the energy beam.

PKS 1424+240 was first discovered as a radio source in the 1970s and was later identified as a blazar in 1988. Subsequent research revealed that the black hole's gigantic energy jets are pointed almost directly at us at an angle of less than 0.6 degrees. However, until now, scientists have been unable to map out these energy beams.

In a new study, published Aug. 12 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, researchers unveiled the first clear image of PKS 1424+240 after stitching together 15 years' worth of data collected by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), which combines the observing power of 10 radio dishes located in different U.S. states and territories.

"When we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning," study lead author Yuri Kovalev, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, said in a statement. "We have never seen anything quite like it — a near-perfect toroidal magnetic field with a jet, pointing straight at us."

Related: Supermassive black hole spotted 12.9 billion light-years from Earth — and it's shooting a beam of energy right at us

The new image was only possible because of the jet's near-perfect alignment with Earth, which amplifies its high-energy emissions thanks to the effects of special relativity — Einstein's theory that the speed of an object is relative to the person observing it. Researchers estimate that this makes the jet around 30 times brighter than it otherwise would be.

The researchers named the new image the Eye of Sauron because of its resemblance to the symbol of the dark lord from J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" series. This is not the first time scientists have named a discovery after this fictional entity: In recent years, a giant underwater volcano in the Indian Ocean and a new species of piranha in the Amazon River have also been named after the Eye of Sauron.

Understanding "ghost particles"

PKS 1424+240 has "long baffled astronomers" because it is the brightest known neutrino-emitting blazar of any blazar, researchers wrote in the statement.

Neutrinos, also known as "ghost particles," are superfast, high-energy subatomic particles that rarely interact with normal matter. They are one of the most abundant particles in the universe, and experts predict that trillions of these phantom particles shoot through our bodies every second.

But despite being able to infrequently spot neutrinos using giant underwater detectors and inside particle accelerators on Earth, these particles are still shrouded in mystery, meaning scientists have to look to the cosmos for clues to their nature.

Visualizing the magnetic field controlling the jet has helped researchers see into the "heart" of the PKS 1424+240, and they now believe that the blazar's own magnetic field accelerates protons to such high speeds that they become neutrinos, Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

However, more observations of similar jets are likely needed to unravel the mechanism of how this happens.

Black hole quiz: How supermassive is your knowledge of the universe?

While searching for "shooting stars" from the Perseid meteor shower, stargazers across large parts of the U.S. were recently treated to a stunning surprise: a giant spiral of ghostly white light. And while we know what phenomenon they saw, experts are not 100% sure of its exact oirgin.

At around 10:30 p.m. ET Tuesday (Aug. 12), right as the Perseid meteor shower started to peak, a faint point of light emerged in the skies over parts of the U.S. and Canada, before quickly growing and unfurling itself into a giant, luminous whirlpool. It then sailed across the sky for around 10 minutes, before dissipating into nothingness. It was spotted in at least 10 states, including Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio and Nebraska.

Photographer Joshua Thum captured a shot of the ethereal spectacle over Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin (see above), while astrophotographer Dan Bush recorded stunning footage of the spiral moving across the night sky in Albany, Missouri (see below).

The spiral consisted of rocket fuel that had been dumped from a spacecraft preparing to reenter Earth's atmosphere. In this type of maneuver, the fuel freezes into a cloud of tiny crystals that reflect sunlight onto the planet's surface, making it shine in the night sky until the crystals dissipate and become invisible to the naked eye. What's left of the rocket is normally spinning by the time the fuel is released, which is what causes the resulting cloud of crystals to form a spiral shape.

Related: 10 bizarre phenomena that lit up the sky (and their scientific explanations)

Initial reports suggested that the spiral was triggered by a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket that launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 8:56 p.m. ET Tuesday and released two military satellites into orbit, according to Spaceweather.com.

However, it was later revealed that one of the European Space Agency's Ariane 6 rockets had been launched from a spaceport in French Guiana only 19 minutes earlier, before eventually releasing a European weather satellite into orbit around our planet. This led to confusion about which rocket triggered the spiral.

"There's a lot of debate about this one as to where it came from and what we were witnessing as far as the geometry of what was going on, so I'm not making any guesses as to what it was," Bush told Spaceweather.com.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking rocket launches for more than three decades, told ABC News that he believes the Ariane 6 rocket is the most likely candidate, based on its trajectory. However, it is still not entirely clear which rocket triggered the spiral.

Glowing spirals and similar light shows have become more common in recent years as the number of rocket launches has increased sharply, thanks largely to the emergence of private companies like SpaceX.

Most of these glowing structures have been triggered by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets and thus have been dubbed "Space X spirals." One of the most recent examples was a gigantic whirlpool that shone above the U.K. and parts of Europe in March.

Other striking SpaceX spirals include a super-rare "horned" spiral that emerged over Europe in May 2024; a large, white whirlpool that appeared over the Arctic in March 2024; and a striking blue structure that glowed alongside auroras in April 2023. The phenomenon was also spotted by the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii in April 2022 and again in January 2023.

The AI unearthed signs of what could have been a huge star blowing up just as it was attempting to gulp down a nearby black hole.

The stellar explosion, dubbed SN 2023zkd, was spotted in July 2023 with the Zwicky Transient Facility, a full-sky astronomical survey based at the Palomar Observatory in California. But Zwicky didn't find the explosion through happenstance. Rather, it was guided to the right spot using an algorithm optimized to find weird night-sky activity.

Spotting the signs of a supernova early is key to catching how supernovas start, evolve and then fade away — providing insight into how these explosions work.

In this case, the AI found unusual brightenings months before the explosion happened, study co-lead authors Alex Gagliano, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute For AI and Fundamental Interactions, and Ashley Villar, a supernova researcher and assistant professor at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Live Science in an email.

This quick alert enabled a number of large observatories to get in on the action and provide observations across a large spectrum of wavelengths.

Related: 2 'new stars' have exploded into the night sky at once — potentially for the first time in history

While there are a couple of ideas about what these telescopes actually saw, the scientists behind the new study say the explosion was most likely from a huge star orbiting the black hole. As these two objects tugged at each other, the separation between them decreased. Eventually, the star attempted to consume the black hole and exploded in the process, due to gravitational stress.

Alternatively, it could have been that the black hole shredded the star via a process known as "spaghettification," causing the explosion, but the data does not suggest that as strongly, Gagliano said.

By looking at the massive star's chemical composition, the team also found that it had not lost all of its outermost material before it exploded.

"This suggests that binary interaction is a lot messier than astronomers have thought," Gagliano said. "Upcoming events will tell us how the explosions of massive stars are shaped by companion interaction, which is very difficult to model at present."

Gagliano cautioned that nobody has seen enough of these explosions to fully predict how a huge star and a black hole might interact. The data, however, is "very hard to explain without a binary system," meaning that a black hole and star were very likely involved in some way.

AI assistance

The AI used in the discovery is called Lightcurve Anomaly Identification and Similarity Search (LAISS). The astronomy AI is based on the Spotify algorithm, so LAISS recommends astronomical observations in a similar way that Spotify users are guided to songs they may enjoy.

The latest explosion came to the attention of LAISS due to properties from the light of the binary system, and its location 730 million light-years from Earth. Features of SN 2023zkd were "compared against a large reference dataset of known objects to identify statistical outliers," Gagliano said. "Anomalous signals may indicate rare or previously unseen phenomena."

Once LAISS finds something interesting, a bot in Slack, an instant messaging service, flags candidates and posts them into a dedicated channel, enabling team members to check out the findings in real time.

"This streamlined system enables astronomers to rapidly target the most promising and unusual discoveries," Gagliano said.

After the explosion, the light pattern of SN 2023zkd became very strange. At first it brightened just like a typical supernova, then declined. But astronomers really began to pay attention when it brightened once again. Archival data showed more strange behavior: The star, which had been at a consistent brightness for a while, was gradually getting brighter in the four years before it exploded.

Astronomers think the light comes from the excess material the star was shedding. At first, it got brighter as the shockwave from the supernova plowed into lower-density gas in the region. Another brightness peak later came as the shockwave continued into a cloud of dust.

As for the presence of the black hole, astronomers inferred it both from the structure of the gas and dust, as well as the strange stellar brightening in the years before the explosion.

LAISS helped astronomers to see all this extra detail. "If we had waited until a human flagged 2023zkd, we would have missed the early signatures of the surrounding disk and the existence of a black hole companion. AI systems like LAISS help us regularly find rare explosions, without relying on luck, and early enough to uncover their origins," Gagliano said.

The results were published on Wednesday (Aug. 13) in The Astrophysical Journal.

Black hole quiz: How supermassive is your knowledge of the universe?

However, there is currently no evidence to suggest that such a moon exists or that it could support life. In fact, scientists are still unsure if its host planet is actually where they think it is.

A study published Aug. 11 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters revealed the potential discovery of a Saturn-size gas giant, dubbed S1, orbiting Alpha Centauri A — one of three stars that make up the Alpha Centauri system, which lies roughly 4.25 light-years from our own solar system.

The potential exoplanet, which likely orbits its home star at up to twice the distance between Earth and the sun, was initially spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in August 2024. However, the powerful telescope failed to spot the world again when it was expected to become visible in February and April this year, leading to it being dubbed a "disappearing planet."

Researchers believe that S1's orbit may have moved it in front of Alpha Centauri A, making it much harder for JWST to spot the gas giant. By their calculations, it should become visible again in 2026 and 2027, meaning we will need to wait a few more years before we can be certain of its existence.

But if it is eventually confirmed, "It would be the most significant JWST discovery to date," study co-author Stanimir Metchev, an exoplanet researcher at Western University in Ontario, told Live Science.

Related: Proposed spacecraft could carry up to 2,400 people on a one-way trip to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri

To date, only two planets have been confirmed within our adjacent neighborhood, both of which orbit Proxima Centauri — the closest star to Earth, which circles the binary star pair of Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. But as our closest stellar neighbors, the idea of traveling to Alpha Centauri and potentially establishing a human colony there has long piqued humanity's interest in both science and science fiction.

The triple stars' most notable sci-fi inclusion is probably in the "Avatar" franchise, as the home system of Pandora — the fictional homeworld of the blue-skinned aliens, known as the Na'vi, who go to war with humans who invade the moon (which purportedly orbits a gas giant) after traveling to Alpha Centauri on interstellar starships in the 22nd century.

Interestingly, S1 is likely around the same size as Polyphemus, the fictional gas giant orbited by Pandora. And both S1 and Polyphemus also supposedly reside within Alpha Centauri A's habitable zone, where there are suitable conditions for extraterrestrial life to emerge.

Real-life Pandora?

Until now, the idea that there could be a real-life Pandora in Alpha Centauri seemed like a very long shot. But if S1 is confirmed to be a real planet, there is a high chance that it could have a number of moons.

"I would expect that there are probably moons there," Mary Anne Limbach, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the new study, told NPR. "Moon formation around giant planets generally should be quite common."

In our own solar system, for example, the largest gas giants Jupiter and Saturn have a combined 369 natural satellites at the latest count, including sizable moons such as Titan, Europa, Io, Ganymede, Enceladus and Mimas, some of which may even be capable of supporting life themselves.

Related: 32 alien planets that really exist

But if S1 does have a moon, what are the chances that it can support some form of extraterrestrial life? The answer likely lies in how large it is. Limbach said she is "optimistic" that S1 could support a Mars-size moon, which would make it large enough to have its own atmosphere and large surface oceans, similar to those found on Earth.

However, David Kipping, an exoplanet researcher at Columbia University in New York who was not involved in the new study, is more skeptical and told NPR that any moon around S1 would likely only grow to the size of Titan, which is around two-thirds the size of Mars but slightly larger than Mercury.

At this size, the moon is unlikely to be able to hold together an atmosphere, making extraterrestrial life — especially on the scale seen in the "Avatar" movies — very unlikely. Therefore, to get a real-life Pandora, "you need this planet to have an unexpectedly big moon," Kipping said, though he added that "it's not impossible."

The next challenge, if and when S1 is confirmed to exist, will be to spot any potential exomoons surrounding it. However, this could be tricky as exomoons are notoriously hard to spot, as they are so much smaller and colder than planets. Therefore, we may need to wait for a space telescope several orders of magnitude more powerful than JWST to see anything, which could take decades.

This is the bold vision behind Chrysalis, a hypothetical spacecraft that could transport 2,400 people over 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers) to the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b. The project won first place in the Project Hyperion Design Competition on July 23, a contest among engineers to design a hypothetical multigenerational spacecraft built for long-duration interstellar travel and capable of sustaining a closed society over centuries.

Although this plan is purely hypothetical, it leaves a pressing question for us all: Would you be willing to join this extraordinary journey? Take our poll and let us know what you think in the comments below.

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The galaxy, nicknamed "Cosmic Grapes," is believed to have formed just 930 million years after the Big Bang. A new study has revealed that the galaxy has at least 15 massive star-forming clumps in its rotating disk, forming what appears to be a bunch of bright purple grapes in space.

Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers discovered the galaxy through a technique known as gravitational lensing, in which a foreground galaxy — in this case, an object known as RXCJ0600-2007 — serves as a magnifying glass for more distant objects.

"This object is known as one of the most strongly gravitationally lensed distant galaxies ever discovered," study lead author Seiji Fujimoto, said in a statement from the University of Texas at Austin's (UT Austin) McDonald Observatory.

"Thanks to this powerful natural magnification, combined with observations from some of the world's most advanced telescopes, we had a unique opportunity to study the internal structure of a distant galaxy at unprecedented sensitivity and resolution," added Fujimoto, who started the research while at UT Austin but is now at the University of Toronto.

The researchers collected more than 100 hours of telescope observations to study the primordial Cosmic Grapes galaxy. Earlier Hubble Space Telescope images of the object suggested a smooth, rotating disk, but the powerful resolution of ALMA and JWST revealed something juicier — the most detailed view yet of the galaxy's inner structure and massive clumps of dense gas primed for star formation.

Related: 'Time machine' reveals hidden structures in the universe's first galaxies

"Our observations reveal that some early galaxies' young starlight is dominated by several massive, dense, compact clumps rather than one smooth distribution of stars," study co-author Mike Boylan-Kolchin, an astronomy professor at UT Austin, said in the same statement.

The discovery reshapes our understanding of early galaxy growth by revealing the first clear connection between a galaxy's small internal structures — in this case, massive star-forming clumps — and its overall rotation, hinting that many seemingly smooth galaxies observed before may actually be filled with similar hidden clumps.

Their findings were published Aug. 7 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Scientists found the cosmic monster by peering through a halo of light called an "Einstein ring," which is a kind of gravitational lens. Lensing happens when a massive foreground object, such as a galaxy cluster or a black hole, warps space-time, magnifying the light of more distant objects behind.

The ultramassive black hole finding was described Aug. 7 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

When it comes to measuring young and large black holes, the field is full of uncertainty. We can't directly see black holes (they are visible through their effect on radiation, or nearby objects) so instead scientists use models to gauge their size. But because the young ones are so far away from us, and every model has an "error bar," size estimations can't be considered completely accurate.

"It's one of the biggest, but not the very biggest," Thomas Connor, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian who was not involved in the research, told Live Science. Connor added that the new paper shows at least one other black hole possibly surpassing the one in the Horseshoe galaxy.

As for what is likely the biggest black hole we know about, a study in The Astrophysical Journal in 2019 suggested TON 618 is the supreme-sized singularity, weighing in at roughly 40 billion solar masses.

To astronomers, however, it is not only the size of the black hole that is interesting. More broadly, big black holes in young galaxies highlight how little we know about the early universe.

Most massive galaxies are thought to host supermassive black holes. It's possible that galaxies and black holes therefore co-evolve, the authors of the new study wrote. However, it's not clear if the evolution remains coupled among host galaxies and "ultramassive black holes."

Increasingly, observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are spotting ultramassive black holes in the very early universe — raising big questions about how such monstrous objects could form in so little time.

Connor said there aren't any easy answers to that question yet.

He likened the size of the Cosmic Horseshoe's black hole — and those like it — to finding a toddler-aged LeBron James at a daycare full of children. Figuring out how the galaxies got that big that quickly is "theoretically and computationally, incredibly challenging," Connor added.

It could be that galaxies and their black holes go through a more extensive growth spurt than expected during their earlier days, gobbling up most of the material available and then remaining quiescent for billions of years. But this idea still challenges "fundamental limitations about how quickly things can grow," Connor said.

Connor said this paradox of massive black holes in a young universe is forcing astronomers to look at the environments in which they grew, to learn more about evolution. Dark matter may play a role that is not clearly understood, for example.

This latest black hole find at the Cosmic Horseshoe was possible partly by chance, involving stellar motions paired with gravitational lensing, Connor said. The issue is there are likely other massive galaxies out there with supermassive black holes that we cannot easily see, as lensing is not always available to astronomers.

"Are there massive galaxies out there that we would need to find a way to measure their black holes in a comparable manner?" he said.

Black hole quiz: How supermassive is your knowledge of the universe?

What's more, signals from these "black hole morsels" could potentially be detected by current instruments, scientists reported in the study, which was published in the journal Nuclear Physics B.

"Our work shows that if these objects are formed, their radiation might already be detectable using existing gamma-ray observatories," Francesco Sannino, a theoretical physicist at the University of Southern Denmark and co-author of the study, told Live Science via email.

Hawking radiation and the smallest black holes

One of the deepest mysteries in modern physics is how gravity behaves at the quantum level. The new study offers a bold proposal to explore this regime by looking for the glow produced by tiny black holes created in the aftermath of giant black hole collisions.

The idea that black holes are not entirely black, and therefore could emit faint radiation, was first proposed by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. His calculations revealed that quantum effects near a black hole's event horizon would cause it to emit radiation and lose mass — a process now known as Hawking radiation. The black hole temperature is predicted to be inversely proportional to its mass. So for massive astrophysical black holes, the effect is minuscule, with temperatures so low that the radiation is effectively undetectable. But for very small black holes, the situation is different.

"Black hole morsels are hypothetical micro-black holes that could be formed during the violent merger of two astrophysical black holes," Giacomo Cacciapaglia, a senior researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and co-author of the study, said in an email. "Unlike the larger parent black hole, these morsels are much smaller — comparable in mass to asteroids — and thus much hotter due to the inverse relationship between black hole mass and Hawking temperature."

Related: Scientists detect most massive black hole merger ever — and it birthed a monster 225 times as massive as the sun

Because of this elevated temperature, these morsels would evaporate relatively quickly, releasing bursts of high-energy particles such as gamma-rays and neutrinos. The team's analysis suggests that this radiation could form a distinct signal that may already be within reach of present-day detectors.

A new handle on quantum gravity

Although no such morsels have been observed yet, the researchers argue that the formation of these tiny black holes is theoretically plausible. "The idea is inspired by analogous processes in neutron star mergers," Stefan Hohenegger, senior researcher at the Institut de Physique des Deux Infinis de Lyon and co-author of the study, explained in an email. "It's supported by estimates from beyond-General Relativity frameworks, including string theory and extra-dimensional models."

In such extreme environments, small-scale instabilities might pinch off tiny black holes during the merger process. These objects, in turn, could evaporate through Hawking radiation over timescales ranging from milliseconds to years, depending on their mass.

Crucially, if such radiation is detected, it could open a window into new physics. "Hawking radiation encodes information about the underlying quantum structure of spacetime," Sannino said. "Its spectral properties could reveal deviations from the Standard Model at extreme energy scale, potentially leading to discoveries of unknown particles or such phenomena as extra dimensions predicted by various theories."

Such energy scales lie far beyond the reach of even the most powerful particle colliders, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The possibility that black hole morsels might provide a natural "accelerator" for probing these physics is what makes them so compelling.

According to the team, the signature of a black hole morsel would be a delayed burst of high-energy gamma-rays radiating in all directions — unlike typical gamma-ray bursts, which are usually beamed.

Instruments capable of detecting such high-energy signals include atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, like the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS), in Namibia; the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC), in Mexico; and the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) in China, as well as satellite-based detectors, like the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. "Some of these instruments already have the sensitivity required," Hohenegger noted.

The researchers didn't stop at theorizing. They used existing data from HESS and HAWC to place upper bounds on how much mass could be emitted in the form of morsels during known black hole mergers. These limits represent the first observational constraints on such phenomena.

"We showed that if black hole morsels form during mergers, they would produce a burst of high-energy gamma rays, with the timing of the burst linked to their masses," Cacciapaglia said. "Our analysis demonstrates that this novel multimessenger signature can offer experimental access to quantum gravitational phenomena.”

What comes next

While the study provides a compelling case for morsels, many uncertainties remain. The exact conditions for their formation are still poorly understood, and no full simulations have been performed at the scales necessary to model them. But the researchers are optimistic.

"Future work will involve refining the theoretical models for morsel formation and extending the analysis to include more realistic mass and spin distributions," Sannino said. The team also hopes to collaborate with observational astronomers to perform dedicated searches in both archived and upcoming datasets.

"We hope this line of research will open a new window into understanding the quantum nature of gravity and the structure of spacetime," Hohenegger said.

If black hole morsels exist, they may not only illuminate the sky with exotic radiation but could also shed light on some of the deepest unsolved questions in physics.

The observations, made in the galaxy cluster Abell 3667, revealed a faint, million light-year-long bridge of stars connecting its two brightest galaxies. Astronomers say the cluster is actually the result of two smaller clusters that began merging about a billion years ago, each with its own dominant central galaxy. As these giants — and their satellite galaxies — continue to merge, the bridge of stars between them offers rare insights into the clusters' history and the powerful gravitational forces at play.

"This is the first time a feature of this scale and size has been found in a local galaxy cluster," Anthony Englert, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University in Rhode Island, who led a new paper describing the observations, said in a statement. "It was a huge surprise that we were able to image such a faint feature."

The bridge is made of intracluster light, or ICL, a diffuse glow from stars that have been stripped from their home galaxies by intense gravitational forces. Englert and his team were able to detect this dim bridge by stacking 28 hours of observations taken over several years using the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

"It was just a happy coincidence that so many people had imaged Abell 3667 over the years, and we were able to stack all of those observations together," Englert said in the statement.

At the top of the bridge lies the lenticular (disc-shaped) galaxy IC 4965, along with a small group of galaxies that are still falling into the cluster. At the bottom of it is JO171, a striking "jellyfish galaxy" named for the long tendrils of gas trailing from one side. As it merges into Abell 3667, JO171 is being stripped of gas, shutting down star formation in part of its ring-like structure, according to the statement.

Beyond its visual beauty, the light bridge also provides a valuable probe of dark matter, the invisible substance believed to make up roughly 80% of the universe's mass. Because intracluster light tends to trace the same paths as dark matter, it offers an indirect way to map its distribution, astronomers say.

"The distribution of this light should mirror the distribution of dark matter, so it provides an indirect way to 'see' the dark matter," study co-author Ian Dell'Antonio of Brown University said in the statement.

The study also highlights the kind of discoveries that are expected to soon become routine with the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to begin full operations later this year or in early 2026. Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will map the southern sky in unprecedented detail over a 10-year period using the world's largest digital camera, bringing to light galaxy clusters like Abell 3667.

"What we did is just a small sliver of what Rubin is going to be able to do," Englert said in the statement. "It's really going to blow the study of the ICL wide open."

This research is described in a paper published Aug. 5 in The Astrophysical Journal.

The black hole and its home galaxy, together dubbed CAPERS-LRD-z9, existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang. Its properties could help researchers understand what the universe was like in that elusive early era, according to a study published August 6 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"When looking for black holes, this is about as far back as you can practically go," study coauthor Anthony Taylor, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin, said in a statement. "We're really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect."

CAPERS-LRD-z9 is a type of galaxy called a "Little Red Dot," so named because they're small (as galaxies go) and appear to emit red light when observed with JWST's powerful infrared sensors. Little Red Dots shine brightly, which might suggest they contain a lot of stars — except they formed in the early universe, when an abundance of stars was unlikely, according to current leading theories of cosmology.

"The discovery of Little Red Dots was a major surprise from early JWST data, as they looked nothing like galaxies seen with the Hubble Space Telescope," study coauthor Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at UT Austin, said in the statement. "Now, we're in the process of figuring out what they're like and how they came to be."

To better understand the nature of CAPERS-LRD-z9 and Little Red Dots like it, researchers investigated the galaxy with the JWST. The team found a distinct pattern of wavelengths of light created when fast-moving gas falls into a black hole. Though astronomers have found a few objects farther away than CAPERS-LRD-z9 that might be black holes, this pattern makes CAPERS-LRD-z9 the earliest confirmed black hole to date and suggests that black holes might lie at the center of other Little Red Dots.

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The black hole at the center of CAPERS-LRD-z9 is pretty hefty. It's some 38 million times more massive than the sun or about 10 times more massive than Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way — though there's considerable wiggle room in that estimate. The scientists also think that the black hole has as much mass as about 5% of all the stars in its galaxy put together, a ratio far exceeding that of modern galaxies.

"This adds to growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible," Finkelstein said. "Or they started out far more massive than our models predict."

CAPERS-LRD-z9 could also help explain why Little Red Dots are red. A dense cloud of gas surrounding the black hole could shift any emitted light into longer, redder wavelengths, the researchers predicted.

Further studies of CAPERS-LRD-z9 could offer even more information about black holes and galaxies in the early universe, the scientists wrote in the study.

"This is a good test object for us," Taylor said in the statement. "We haven't been able to study early black hole evolution until recently, and we are excited to see what we can learn from this unique object."