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Category: space – Page 2

A new, expansive view of the Milky Way reveals our galaxy in unprecedented radio color

Astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) have created the largest low-frequency radio color image of the Milky Way ever assembled. This spectacular new image captures the Southern Hemisphere view of our Milky Way galaxy, revealing it across a wide range of radio wavelengths, the colors of radio light.

A paper describing this work appears in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

It provides astronomers with new ways to explore the birth, evolution, and death of stars in our galaxy.

The Red Spider Nebula, caught by Webb

This new NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features a cosmic creepy-crawly called NGC 6537—the Red Spider Nebula. Using its Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam), Webb has revealed never-before-seen details in this picturesque planetary nebula with a rich backdrop of thousands of stars.

Planetary nebulae like the Red Spider Nebula form when ordinary stars like the sun reach the end of their lives. After ballooning into cool red giants, these stars shed their outer layers and cast them into space, exposing their white-hot cores. Ultraviolet light from the central star ionizes the cast-off material, causing it to glow. The planetary phase of a star’s life is as fleeting as it is beautiful, lasting only a few tens of thousands of years.

The central star of the Red Spider Nebula is visible in this image, glowing just brighter than the webs of dusty gas that surround it. The surprising nature of the nebula’s tremendously hot and luminous central star has been revealed by Webb’s NIRCam.

A Fibre Optic Breakthrough Reveals the Universe in Sharper Detail

Astronomers have discovered a clever way to make a single telescope capture sharper details than should be physically possible. The technique involves feeding starlight through a special optical fibre called a photonic lantern. Anyone else thinking of a certain glowing green lantern from a movie? Alas not, instead of special powers, it splits light according to its spatial patterns like separating a musical chords into individual notes. The researchers achieved resolution that has never been achieved before without linking multiple telescopes together. When they tested the technique on a star 162 light-years away, they not only proved it works but stumbled upon an unexpected discovery, that the star’s surrounding gas disc is mysteriously lopsided.

“I Mapped the Invisible”: American High School Senior Baffles Scientists by Uncovering 1.5 Million Celestial Objects Hidden in Deep Space

A teenage student digging through old NASA data has uncovered a hidden trove of over a million cosmic objects using AI—reshaping what scientists thought they knew about the night sky.

Starship could cut the travel time to Uranus in half

The ice giants remain some of the most interesting places to explore in the solar system. Uranus in particular has drawn a lot of interest lately, especially after the 2022 Decadal Survey from the National Academies named it as the highest priority destination. But as of now, we still don’t have a fully fleshed out and planned mission ready to go for the multiple launch windows in the 2030s.

That might actually be an advantage, though, as a new system coming online might change the overall mission design fundamentally. Starship recently continued its recent string of successful tests, and a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference by researchers at MIT looked at how this new, much more capable launch system, could impact the development of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) that the Decadal Survey suggested.

Uranus is one of the least explored planets—the last probe to visit it was Voyager 2 during a flyby 40 years ago. Neither it, nor its ice giant cousin Neptune, have ever had an orbiter visit it, nor any consistent mission presence in their system, marking them out as the only two planets that haven’t been studied in detail up close so far.

Distributed quantum sensor network achieves ultra-high resolution near Heisenberg limit

Precise metrology forms a fundamental basis for advanced science and technology, including bioimaging, semiconductor defects diagnostics, and space telescope observations. However, the sensor technologies used in metrology have so far faced a physical barrier known as the standard quantum limit.

A promising alternative to surpass this limit is the distributed quantum sensor—a technology that links multiple spatially separated sensors into a single, large-scale quantum system, thereby enabling highly . To date, efforts have primarily focused on enhancing precision, while the potential for extending this approach to has not yet been fully demonstrated.

Dr. Hyang-Tag Lim’s research team at the Center for Quantum Technology, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), has demonstrated the world’s first ultra-high-resolution distributed quantum sensor network. The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

AI restores James Webb telescope’s crystal-clear vision

Two Sydney PhD students have pulled off a remarkable space science feat from Earth—using AI-driven software to correct image blurring in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Their innovation, called AMIGO, fixed distortions in the telescope’s infrared camera, restoring its ultra-sharp vision without the need for a space mission.

Astronomers Stunned by Bizarre Three-Planet System That Rewrites the Rules of Space

An international team of scientists has announced the discovery of three Earth-sized planets orbiting within the binary star system TOI-2267, located approximately 190 light-years from Earth. An international group of scientists has announced the discovery of three Earth-sized planets orbiting wi

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