With a little imagination, you can see the stars of Scorpius tracing the shape of a scorpion. The bright red star Antares marks the Scorpion’s Heart. There’s even a Stinger. Think constellations don’t look like their names? Meet the Scorpion! Night sky veteran Deborah Byrd has details.
When you look at the night sky, all the light you see is what astronomers call ordinary matter. It represents only 15% of the matter (mass) in the universe. A mysterious substance called dark matter makes up the other 85%. So when you look at a galaxy through a telescope, all the light you see is ordinary matter. But is it possible to have a galaxy made out of dark matter? On June 20, 2025, the University of Innsbruck in Austria said researchers have discovered a dark-matter galaxy candidate in a cluster of galaxies some 240 million light-years away.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has just dropped its very first images. Expected to revolutionize our understanding of the Universe, the new eye on the sky hasn’t disappointed.
For 10 hours, the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy facility stared deep into the cosmos, using its powerful camera to record in near-ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared wavelengths. The result is a tantalizing and exciting set of observations that bode well for the years to come.
Another clue about the whereabouts of the missing matter in the Universe has just emerged from amid the largest local cosmic structure.
X-ray observations have revealed a massive filament of hot gas, measuring some 23 million light-years in length, in the space between four sub-clusters of galaxies in the enormous, 8,000-galaxy strong Shapley Supercluster.
On June 18, 2025, astronomers shared a 1,000-color image of the Sculptor galaxy from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The rich colors of the galaxy come alive in this image, which took more than 100 exposures and 50 hours of observations. The details in the color help astronomers understand what is happening inside the galaxy, which lies 11 million light-years away.
The sun is the brightest object in the solar system, and also the loudest. It emits a low-frequency hum in the range of 140 decibels. We don’t hear it because there is no air between the sun and the Earth to carry the sound.
Link submitted by Gene Savoy, Jr.
A supermassive black hole in the early Universe has been spotted blasting out powerful jets of plasma that are at least twice as long as the Milky Way is wide.
Its host galaxy is a quasar called J1601+3102, and we’re seeing it as it was less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Spanning 215,000 light-years from end to end, this is the largest structure of its kind seen in those early stages of the Universe’s formation, and astronomers think it can answer some questions about how they grow.
After many hours of staring unblinking at a small patch of sky, JWST has given us the most detailed map ever obtained of a corner of the Universe.
It’s called the COSMOS-Web field, and if that sounds familiar, it’s probably because an incredible image of it dropped just a month ago. That, however, was just a little taste of what has now come to pass.
A giant hole has opened in the atmosphere of the Sun, and it’s blasting out a high-speed wind that is directed right at Earth.
The incoming blast of solar particles is worth getting excited about: we’re in for a moderate (G2) geomagnetic storm starting around Saturday June 14, according to the NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.
A coronal hole is a region where the magnetic fields on the surface of the Sun weaken and open up. This allows the wind of charged particles that constantly gusts from the Sun out into the Solar System to escape more freely.
A giant conundrum has been found orbiting a teeny tiny red dwarf star just a fifth of the size of the Sun.
Such small stars were thought to be incapable of producing giant planets. But there, in its orbit, appears to be unmistakable evidence of an absolute unit: a gas giant around the size of Saturn.