The first images captured by a powerful space telescope designed to create the most detailed 3D map of the “dark side” of the universe have been revealed.

Launched by the European Space Agency in July, the Euclid telescope’s initial release includes five observations made from its orbital home 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth, including views of a stellar nursery and massive clusters of galaxies and stars.

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The sun – our blazing star – has a metaphorical dark side. It has the potential to cause our modern technological civilization to falter. We had a taste of our sun’s destructive effects on September 2, 1859. On that day, around the world, compasses at sea failed to work, causing some ships to become lost. Telegraph networks experienced disruption, with some telegraph lines catching fire. Tellingly, people as far south as the Caribbean and Mexico saw auroras. Scientists now believe that what happened on that day – 164 years ago – was an extreme geomagnetic storm. Since then, the 1859 storm has become known as the Carrington Event.

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Link contributed by Gene Savoy.

Could our planet be something other than a living thing? Could it have a mind of its own? In a recent article that appeared in the International Journal of Astrobiology, a group of scientists posed these queries. Their “planetary intelligence” theory investigates the possibility that Earth has a collective knowledge and intellect. 

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An international team of astronomers has found 62 new moons around Saturn using an innovative technique. These irregular moons contribute to Saturn’s total moon count of 145, surpassing Jupiter, and provide insights into the planet’s moon system’s collisional history. 

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Self-sustaining chemical reactions that could support biology radically different from life as we know it might exist on many different planets using a variety of elements beyond the carbon upon which Earth’s life is based, a new study finds.

On Earth, life is based on organic compounds. These molecules are composed of carbon and often include other elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur.

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The coronal heating problem is one of the long-standing astrophysical puzzles. The Sun’s core is the sole place where heat is produced. However, the photosphere, the surface of the Sun, is only around 200 times hotter than the corona, the solar atmosphere‘s outermost layer.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is aweing scientists and the public alike with its spectacular images of distant galaxies and its discoveries of dozens of new black holes. Yet JWST is also rewriting scientists’ understanding of objects on a slightly smaller, more relatable scale: how planets form from swirls of gas and dust around young stars. Such ‘protoplanetary’ disks are what the environs of the Sun would have been like 4.6 billion years ago, with planets coalescing from the whirling material around an infant star

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Elusive dark matter particles may lurk deep within the heart of the sun, and researchers have discovered that we can use a detector buried in the Antarctic ice sheet to find them.

Dark matter is the inescapable conclusion from decades of cosmological observations. Everything from the rotation speed of stars within galaxies to the growth of the largest structures in the universe points to the existence of some kind of particle, currently unknown to physics, that rarely interacts with light or with normal matter, despite exerting a powerful gravitational influence all across the universe.

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A huge invisible mass could be the reason the Milky Way’s disk is warped and twisted.

A new study shows that a tilted, misaligned dark halo – the large blob of dark matter that wraps around and permeates our home galaxy – is the only explanation to date that explains all the features of the shape of the Milky Way.

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A new measurement of the Universe has confirmed dark energy makes up close to 69 percent of the sum of everything.

That leaves the remaining 31 percent to matter; both of the normal variety – that’s the particles and forces making up everything we can see – and dark matter, the mysterious gravitational poltergeist responsible for movements and effects that can’t currently be explained any other way.

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