October is shaping up to be an unforgettable month for stargazers! This month has everything: a solar eclipse, two spectacular comets, the year’s closest Supermoon, dazzling conjunctions, and more. With so many celestial events happening, all you need is our free Sky Tonight app to easily track celestial objects. Whether you’re a seasoned observer or…

Any day now, our night sky will host a guest star. Stargazers and astronomers around the world continue to gaze toward the Corona Borealis constellation 3,000 light-years from Earth, where a long-dead star is expected to reignite in an explosion so powerful it will briefly rival the brilliance of Polaris, the North Star. The stellar…

In about 11 years, one of humankind’s most ambitious missions is set to launch into space. Decades in the making, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, could revolutionize our understanding of the universe through its detections of gravitational waves. This is your in-the-weeds walkthrough of the science that will make this intrepid project possible.…

The latest generation of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are leaking even more potentially disruptive radiation into low-Earth orbit than their predecessors, a new study shows. Researchers warn that the continuing unchecked deployment of the spacecraft could lead to an irreversible “inflection point,” beyond which we can no longer properly study the universe’s most exciting objects. In…

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a bizarre galaxy in the early universe whose gas outshines its stars, marking  it out as a possible missing link in galactic evolution. The galaxy, called GS-NDG-9422 (9422), was spotted just one billion years after the Big Bang and is filled with massive stars burning nearly twice…

Astronomers have discovered a distant planet that has offered them a rare glimpse of what our planet may look like 8 billion years in the future. The planet, called KMT-2020-BLG-0414 and located 4,000 light-years from Earth, is a rocky world orbiting a white dwarf — the embering husk of a star. Our sun is expected…

Astronomers have created the most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way — and it contains more than 1.5 billion objects.  Made using 13 years of observations across 420 nights, the new map charts a vast number of stars, “failed” brown dwarfs, free-floating planets and hypervelocity suns launched into space after close encounters with our…

Astronomers spotted a potential Earth-size rocky world orbiting a white dwarf, suggesting a future in which our planet outlives its star. In six billion years the sun will expand into a red giant. That process should consume Mercury, and maybe Venus. For a long time we have thought it might incinerate Earth, too. But perhaps…

Who knew a dragon’s tongue could be so long? Astronomers announced last week that they had discovered a black hole spitting energy across 23 million light-years of intergalactic space. Two jets, shooting in opposite directions, compose the biggest lightning bolt ever seen in the sky — about 140 times as long as our own Milky…

<a href="https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/endurance-launch-photo.jpg" data-fancybox data-src="https://physicsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/endurance-launch-photo.jpg" data-caption="Lift off The Endurance rocket ship launches from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. (Courtesy: Andøya Space/Leif Jonny Eilertsen)”> Lift off The Endurance rocket ship launches from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. (Courtesy: Andøya Space/Leif Jonny Eilertsen) A drop in electric potential of just 0.55 V measured at altitudes of between 250–768 km in the Earth’s atmosphere above the North…