https://phys.org/space-news/ en-us The latest science news on astronomy, astrobiology, and space exploration from Phys.org. An international team led by researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil has developed an innovative method to identify stars that have consumed the planets around them. The technique detects variations in the abundance of beryllium, a relatively rare chemical element, and could open a new window into studying the evolution of planetary systems. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-beryllium-stars-swallowed-rocky-planets.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:30:01 EDT news708191461 Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have discovered a new class of objects behaving unlike any they have seen before. Astronomers suggest these newly spotted objects in other galaxies may help solve not one, but two long-standing questions in astrophysics. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-chandra-uncovers-hypersoft-ray-sources.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:20:09 EDT news708182461 Toward the end of their lives, low-mass stars undergo an abrupt dip in brightness, also known as the luminosity bump. While the endpoint of this bump is well understood, its onset has remained elusive. Now, in a paper published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Saskia Hekker, leader of the Theory and Observations of Stars group at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), finds that entropy is the key driver of the bump. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-discontinuity-disorder-luminosity-evolved-stars.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:00:01 EDT news708172681 New observations of the composition of distant galaxies offer insights into the earliest phases of the universe and confirm decades of scientific understanding of the elements and particles produced by the Big Bang, according to a new study. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-helium-conditions-seconds-big.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:40:03 EDT news708172561 Until just over a decade ago, ring systems were thought to be exclusive to the giant planets of the solar system, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. However, in 2013, a small body barely 250 kilometers (155 miles) in diameter, located at nearly 17 times the Earth–sun distance, joined this small group. The object is Chariklo, a small body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus, around which astronomers discovered two dense rings. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-jwst-chariklo-invisible.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:00:04 EDT news708089366 Astronomers have found the first direct evidence that a wandering black hole can feed itself by dragging gas along in its wake as it moves through its galaxy. It's the first direct evidence of an accretion channel long predicted in theory but never before observed. The paper describing this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 11. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-black-hole-caught.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:30:02 EDT news706964431 An international team of astronomers has discovered the most distant progenitor to a galaxy supercluster ever. The discovery supports existing theories of how galaxy clusters evolve and reveals how they are connected to the larger cosmic web. The study relies largely on data from the ODIN survey, conducted with the U.S. Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-extremely-massive-galaxy-proto-supercluster.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:00:03 EDT news708101641 Intense, brief flashes of radio light called fast radio bursts (FRBs) travel across billions of light-years to reach Earth, passing through a fog of matter along the way. The bursts' origins are unclear but may originate from highly magnetized dead stars called magnetars. The denser the fog through which FRBs travel, the more dispersed their signals become—similar to the way a prism splits white light into a rainbow of colors. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-fast-radio-disentangle-galactic-feedback.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:00:10 EDT news708093601 Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists used simulations to understand the role disruptive impacts play on icy moons with subsurface oceans in our solar system. A recent paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy concludes that disruptive impacts can affect the presence and persistence of subsurface oceans in these moons but do not seem to create new oceans. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-giant-impacts-small-icy-moons.html Astrobiology Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:40:10 EDT news708093484 As NASA prepares to send humans to Mars as early as the 2030s, University of Mississippi researchers are working on one of the key questions: How will they get back? https://phys.org/news/2026-09-martian-air-yield-methane-rocket.html Space Exploration Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:20:01 EDT news708092281 For the first time, scientists used the combined power of NASA's Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to study some of the most far-flung bodies in our solar system, trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Some are the smallest and faintest ever directly seen. The researchers unexpectedly found fewer small TNOs than expected and that the colors of these bodies followed the same relationships as those of their larger family members. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-hubble-webb-solar.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:05:13 EDT news708087880 UK astronomers have uncovered new clues about the origin of 3I/ATLAS—only the third known object from beyond the solar system ever spotted. In a new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers reveal that the comet formed in extremely cold conditions, far from any star. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-interstellar-visitor-3iatlas-clues-frozen.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:50:01 EDT news708080978 Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have captured one of the most detailed three-dimensional views yet of a massive binary star system while it is still being born. By tracking the motions of two young, massive stars over nearly eight years, the team found that the pair follows a highly stretched-out orbit and is surrounded by strongly tilted gas disks, both relative to each other and to the stars' orbit. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-alma-massive-binary-real.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:20:02 EDT news708077941 There are nearly 1 million pieces of debris larger than 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) in near-Earth orbit. As we continue launching spacecraft and telescopes to explore the universe, this debris poses a significant threat of high-speed impact damage. In the Journal of Applied Physics researchers from Dalian University of Technology in China explored an eggshell-inspired design as a potential spacecraft protection material. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-eggshells-aluminum-material-significant-space.html Space Exploration Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:00:06 EDT news707991301 The most comprehensive catalog of exploding white dwarf stars ever assembled has revealed new clues about dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe's accelerating expansion. Researchers at The University of Queensland's School of Mathematics and Physics have led a global effort to compile a dataset containing information on 2,884 Type Ia supernovae used to measure cosmic distances. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-big-supernova-dataset-dark-energy.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:20:03 EDT news708075721 A new study finds that two early-universe objects thought to be faint quasars are actually extraordinarily luminous galaxies powered by bursts of star formation. James Webb Space Telescope observations of the galaxies, seen when the universe was less than a billion years old, reveal signatures of extremely massive stars, including some potentially more than 200 times the mass of the sun. The paper outlining this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 18. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-jwst-extreme-star-galaxies-masquerading.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:00:01 EDT news707748999 We usually think of auroras as beautiful lights in the night sky. I see them as visible traces of a connection between the sun, Earth's magnetic field and the atmosphere. This led me to an origin-of-life question: Could the planetary structure that produces auroras also have organized chemical reactions on early Earth? https://phys.org/news/2026-09-early-earth-auroral-belts-natural.html Astrobiology Mon, 07 Sep 2026 20:40:04 EDT news707989182 In 1967, a solar storm nearly triggered World War III by jamming early-warning radar systems in the United States, causing U.S. leaders to think the Soviet Union was responsible. Though society averted catastrophe thanks to timely information from solar forecasters, the threat from space weather remains real. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-economic-solar-storms-pose-power.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 07 Sep 2026 11:40:01 EDT news707994751 Astronomers have detected extreme, never-before-seen behavior from a rare kind of pulsar and stumbled on a surprising link to one of astronomy's biggest current mysteries. Using 174 hours of radio observations, researchers detected PSR J1227-4853, a rapidly spinning neutron star known as a "transitional millisecond pulsar," which unleashes hundreds of ultrashort, ultrapowerful "giant pulses." Their paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 31. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-rare-pulsar-unleashes-giant-pulses.html Astronomy Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:50:01 EDT news707042987 Using more than 15 years of observations from the Parkes radio telescope, astronomers detected three rotational glitches in the pulsar PSR J1637−4642—a young neutron star that had shown no signs of glitches since its discovery. The three glitches included one that changed its rotation rate by nearly 3 parts per million. Their paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 20. It has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-quiet-pulsar-suddenly-reveals-glitches.html Astronomy Sun, 06 Sep 2026 08:40:03 EDT news707748985 Astronomers have found two clouds of hydrogen near the Whirlpool galaxy that appear to contain almost no stars. The clouds, discovered with China's FAST radio telescope, each contain roughly 3 million times the mass of the sun in hydrogen but have no detectable optical counterpart. Their properties are outlined in a new paper published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal on Aug. 4. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-fast-mysterious-hydrogen-clouds-visible.html Astronomy Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:40:02 EDT news707748935 In 1974, Stephen Hawking made a prediction that transformed our understanding of black holes. Black holes, he showed, are not truly black: They slowly lose energy through a quantum process now known as Hawking radiation. The lighter the black hole, the faster it evaporates. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-black-hole-tons-star-dark.html Astronomy Sat, 05 Sep 2026 13:00:01 EDT news707737356 As the BepiColombo mission prepares to enter the final phase of its journey to Mercury, a series of studies conducted by researchers at the University of Liège and KU Leuven sheds new light on the early stages of the evolution of the planet closest to the sun. Using experimental petrology, the researchers are reconstructing in the laboratory the formation of Mercury's core, the crystallization of its magma ocean and the formation of its mantle. The studies are published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Nature Communications and Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-mercury-graphite-crust-core.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:00:01 EDT news707746443 In a new Nature Communications study, researchers developed a universal scaling framework for the strength of granular asteroids, showing that their tensile strength can be predicted from the size and shape of their constituent particles. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-particle-size-asteroid-strength-revealing.html Planetary Sciences Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:20:06 EDT news707737328 Star formation in galaxies is closely linked to molecular gas. In the distant past, when galaxy interactions were more common, these encounters compressed molecular gas, causing dense clouds to collapse under their own gravity and form new stars. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-turbulent-star-formation-stephan-quintet.html Astronomy Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:40:04 EDT news707739181 For the first time since its dramatic dimming in 2020, a team of astronomers has observed the inner atmosphere of Betelgeuse using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). Led by Bill Dent at the University of Manchester, the team found that the giant star's inner atmosphere has become increasingly uneven and asymmetric, in a way that could be connected to a far smaller companion star. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-betelgeuse-atmosphere-spotty-asymmetric-nearby.html Astronomy Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:20:03 EDT news707734879 There are myriad ways of "being a star," and scientists spend years trying to uncover and understand them. One unusual type is the so-called hot subdwarf—small stars that burn mysteriously hot for their size. Scientists from the Faculty of Physics and the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Vilnius University (VU) are working to explain this strange phenomenon and recently made important breakthroughs. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-hot-subdwarfs-focus-ai-scans.html Astronomy Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:40:05 EDT news707660641 A potentially history-altering finding by a University of Limerick researcher may provide the most detailed technical analysis of a telescope demonstrably made by the famous astronomer and scientist Galileo Galilei. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-newly-manuscript-lens-telescope-galileo.html Astronomy Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:20:04 EDT news707659021 Venus is one of the solar system's most unusual planets. It may sometimes be called "Earth's twin" because of its similar size and density, but it rotates on its axis in the opposite direction of most planets, has surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and lacks a moon. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-doesnt-venus-moon.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:10:02 EDT news707657547 Two Mercury-bound spacecraft left their mother ship behind on Thursday and headed down the home stretch of their nearly decade-long voyage to the solar system's smallest and closest-to-the-sun planet. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-pair-spacecraft-closer-mercury-decade.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:30:02 EDT news707656831