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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Evidence of giant rings in Venus’s atmosphere uncovered in archived observations

    July 29, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Scientists discover evidence of giant rings in Venus's atmosphere
    Venus as observed in total flux F (left) and polarized flux U (right) through the Hα continuum filter (see Table 1). Due to Venus’s orientation, the planetary scattering plane makes an angle of about 45° with ExPo’s optical plane (the two orthogonal directions along which ExPo measured U are indicated below the image). The spatial resolution is approximately 775 km at the subobserver point on Venus’s disk. Credit: The Planetary Science Journal (2026). DOI: 10.3847/psj/ae7e6f

    In 2010, scientists waiting to use the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands captured a brief 36 minutes of images of Venus. They were waiting for the sun to set so they could look at distant stars and dust disks around young stars...

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    Could we send a spacecraft to a black hole?

    July 28, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist's depiction of a stellar black hole in a binary system. Credit - ESO/L. Calçada/M.Kornmesser
    Artist’s depiction of a stellar black hole in a binary system. Credit – ESO/L. Calçada/M.Kornmesser

    Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields, allowing us to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity to an extent impossible with small objects. But we are also reaching the limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So, various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eventually send a probe directly to a black hole to observe it up close. One of the most vocal of those authors is Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai—and he recently released a paper, available as a preprint on arXiv, about what it would take to send a gram-sized probe to a nearby black hole.

    Unfortuna...

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    Rare blue optical transient points to possible new class of cosmic explosion

    July 27, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Chinese astronomers discover a peculiar optical transient displaying unique emission properties
    Artist’s conception illustrating the aftermath of an intermediate-mass black hole tearing apart a passing star, resulting in an accretion disk and narrow relativistic jet (top left). The dotted line indicates our line of sight from Earth. The jet’s off-axis afterglow only became visible once the expanding radio emission (bottom right) had grown wide enough to sweep into our line of sight, causing that emission to brighten dramatically years after the initial event. Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/M.Weiss

    Chinese astronomers report the detection of a peculiar optical transient event that occurred in the center of a dwarf galaxy. The newly discovered event, designated AT2019ijncn a paper published July 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    One of the rarest transients
    Among astronomical tra...

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    Astronomers catch massive galaxy assembling piece by piece 1.2 billion years after Big Bang

    July 26, 2026, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Astronomers have discovered a remarkably tiny group of six young galaxies just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. This may be a rare glimpse of how some of the universe’s largest galaxies formed. The paper outlining the findings was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on July 13.

    Chaotic patches
    The widely accepted cosmological model of the universe known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model suggests that galaxies primarily form hierarchically through mergers. That means they grow piece by piece, as smaller galaxies merge over billions of years. In this context, dense regions in the early universe serve as natural laboratories to test this idea.

    These dense patches, known as protoclusters and proto-groups, are young clusters of galaxies packed into a region just tens of tho...

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