More info here- https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/national-academies-announce-2026-winners-of-eric-and-wendy-schmidt-awards-for-excellence-in-science-communications-640-000-awarded

To be clear, this is arguably the biggest award in science communication. Wasting time on Reddit has totally paid off!

A mysterious object 310 million light-years away contains 2 billion suns’ worth of hydrogen, yet astronomers cannot find its stars.

Astronomers have identified a massive reservoir of hydrogen roughly 310 million light-years from Earth, containing enough gas to form countless stars. Yet despite its enormous mass, the mysterious object, known as AGC 322753, shows no detectable starlight. It may be one of the most intriguing candidates for a dark galaxy discovered so far.

In most galaxies, enormous clouds of hydrogen provide the raw material from which stars eventually emerge. Gravity draws this gas together, allowing dense regions to collapse and ignite nuclear fusion.

Over billions of years, the resulting stars illuminate their host galaxies, making them visible to optical telescopes. But AGC 322753 appears to be following a very different path. Astronomers estimate that this distant object contains approximately 2 billion solar masses of neutral hydrogen.

That means its gas reservoir alone has a mass equivalent to roughly two billion suns, an enormous amount of material for a system that appears almost completely invisible in ordinary astronomical images. What makes the discovery particularly unusual is not simply the absence of detectable stars.

It is the apparent combination of a substantial gas reservoir and a potentially organized structure. Radio observations suggest that the hydrogen may be moving in a rotating disk, a configuration frequently associated with galaxies. Such a pattern could indicate that the gas is gravitationally organized rather than randomly distributed across intergalactic space.

All shot from a backyard telescope in Utah. Each sequence is roughly 3-4 hours of real time. When you watch this video, remember that 1,300,000 earths could fit inside the sun. It is hard to comprehend how massive these solar limbs are.

55 years ago today, the UK achieved something it has never repeated: successfully launching a satellite into orbit on a British-built rocket.

Prospero rode the Black Arrow into orbit on October 28, 1971. It was a genuine technological milestone, making Britain the sixth nation to achieve orbit with its own launch vehicle.

But even then, the British government had already cancelled the Black Arrow program months before the launch. Prospero went ahead anyway, and the mission succeeded. It ended up being the only satellite ever launched by a British rocket.

Looking back, was cancelling the program a sensible economic decision, or did Britain give up a valuable capability just as it was proving itself?

In the outer reaches of our solar system, beyond the orbit of Pluto, NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has spotted 2026 ED138 — a large, bright trans-Neptunian object that scientists have identified as a dwarf planet candidate. The observations were announced today by the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center (MPC). If confirmed, ED138 would be among the largest dwarf planets ever discovered in this region of the solar system.

This is a television report of the discoveries of the Voyager 1 spacecraft of Jupiter and it's system of moons.

For more than a century, Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” was believed to have been the result of imagination, previous drawings and memories of scenes he had seen outside his barred asylum bedroom window in France.

However, the 1889 artwork was probably rooted much more in observation than fantasy, according to scientists in South Korea who say they have identified the actual night sky potentially depicted by the post-impressionist Dutch painter.

An exuberant pre-dawn sky — filled with large, bright stars, a luminous crescent moon, and blue and white swirls — dominates the landscape featuring a prominent cypress tree and distant hillside village.

This skyscape resembles the celestial arrangement present in the sky in the early hours of July 22, 1889, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

Researchers from South Korean space science company SLLAB and Kyung Hee University in Seoul used a separate van Gogh drawing considered to show the landscape of “The Starry Night” to identify the hilly site he saw.

They placed the landscape southwest of the asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, southern France, where van Gogh created the oil on canvas during a 12-month stay.

The researchers created a simulation of the sky above that hilly site in the early hours of July 22, 1889. It showed the moon and Venus positioned in opposite corners of the frame, with the moon high in the top right corner and Venus at the bottom left.

In between them both lay the Hyades cluster, which is formed of hundreds of stars in the Taurus constellation. Five bright stars in this constellation are known to be visible to the naked eye without a telescope, and the Hyades star cluster is known to form a bright “V” shape.

In van Gogh’s painting, the moon is positioned in the top right corner, diagonally above Venus, which is center left, with other stars positioned left of the moon.

“A painter does not draw stars at their true size or orientation. A star cluster on the canvas may be larger or smaller than in reality, and slightly tilted,” lead study author Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, an astronomer and engineer and the CEO of SLLAB, told CNN over email.

So, the researchers used a Procrustes shape analysis, which “removes differences in position, size and rotation and then compares only the ‘shape’ of two sets of points,” he said, enabling them to closely match five stars in the central arrangement in “The Starry Night” with the Hyades cluster arrangement that night.

“The relative positions of the stars preserve the skeleton of the Hyades,” the researchers concluded, adding that this indicates the “work did not invent a sky that was not there but transferred an observed arrangement onto canvas through stylistic amplification.”

The same statical shape analysis also allowed the researchers to map van Gogh’s 1888 oil painting “Café Terrace at Night” on to the Summer Triangle star pattern.

Interpret ‘with caution’

“The Starry Night” was painted in mid-June of 1889, according to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is housed.

This dating by art historians is based on a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo around June 18, in which he mused, “At last I have a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky,” according to the researchers.

However, around that time, the moon appeared almost full, according to the study, rather than the waning crescent shape van Gogh depicted.

“Also, around June 19 is close to the summer solstice, when no impressive stars rise in the pre-dawn sky,” Kim told CNN. “Around July 22, by contrast, the Hyades rose in the east together with Venus, and the moon’s shape was close to the crescent in the painting.”

The newly proposed July time period is supported by a previous examination of van Gogh’s canvas, which suggests the artist left places for the stars unpainted, only filling in those gaps after the blue sky was done. The researchers said this confirms that his star pattern “was a structure intended in advance” and “deliberately planned.”

Van Gogh has long been thought to have had a seizure in mid-July that potentially left him incapacitated in the weeks following, which could have made it impossible for him to observe and paint the sky at that time, the researchers said.

However, they re-examined original French and Dutch letters, as well as contemporary weather records, finding that the seizure could have occurred in late July and potentially only lasted a day or two.

“The authors put forward an engaging framework that combines astronomical modeling, historical meteorological data, and letter analysis to propose a late-July 1889 observational window,” Yongxiang Huang, an associate professor at the Center for Marine Meteorology and Climate Change at Xiamen University in China, told CNN over email.

However, despite this “fresh” perspective, “astronomical alignments on a canvas must be interpreted with caution,” said Huang, who was not involved in the study.

He added that “Vincent van Gogh was a Post-Impressionist master, not an optical camera,” and “attempting to pinpoint an exact date primarily based on celestial coordinates painted onto a canvas remains fragile.”

Victus Haze is a US Space Force exercise in rendezvous and proximity operations: getting one satellite up close to another, quickly. It has two players about 500 km up in the same sun-synchronous orbit. Jackal, built by True Anomaly, launched on 3 May. Puma, built by Rocket Lab, launched on 19 June on an Electron with under 17 hours' notice.

My tracker logs orbit changes and close approaches from Space-Track's public orbit data. On 22 and 23 October it logged three small burns by Jackal. Since then the distance between the two at each daily check has gone 189 km, 83, 54, 69, 47.

The clearer sign is speed. The tracker forecasts each close pass and re-runs the forecast with every orbit update. On 23 October it predicted passes of about 2 km at 11 to 14 metres a second. By 24 October that had slowed to 7.6 m/s, by 26 October to 3.5 m/s. The latest forecast puts the next close point at 12:41 UTC on 27 October, about 2.3 km apart at 3.4 m/s, roughly jogging pace. Two satellites matching speeds like that is what a rendezvous looks like from the outside.

The log also shows bursts of large orbit changes by Puma in late July and at the end of August. Public reporting describes a July sortie and a later one in which Puma manoeuvred to evade, though the Space Force hasn't confirmed the second.

Caveats: public orbit data updates a few times a day and is good to about a kilometre at this height. Anything closer than that, or a burn between updates, won't show. The pair's page has the full forecast history: https://overhead24.com/proximity/69012-69646

Study: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ae9763

A rocky lava planet once thought to be too extreme to have an atmosphere appears to be wrapped in one with a reflective layer of vaporized silicate mineral clouds, the same family of compounds that make up quartz and sand.

University of Waterloo Physics and Astronomy Professor Lisa Dang and collaborators used the James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) to observe the lava planet TOI-561 b for 37 hours, capturing nearly four complete trips of the planet around its star.

The paper, "A Highly Reflective Atmosphere on the Lava World TOI-561 b Revealed by JWST/NIRSpec Phase Curve," was published in The Astronomical Journal.

"We measured how the planet's brightness and heat changed throughout its orbit," says Dang.

"This technique, known as a phase curve, revealed that the planet reflects a significant amount of light from its star, and that heat is being redistributed around the planet instead of only on the sunlit side. Together, these point to the presence of an atmosphere."

Link to the available report by ESO: https://www.eso.org/public/videos/potw2643a/

For decades, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers measure how fast the universe is expanding. But as those measurements have become more precise, scientists have uncovered a cosmic mystery: the universe appears to be expanding at different rates depending on how we measure it.

Known as the Hubble tension, this discrepancy challenges our understanding of the cosmos and could point toward something missing from our current model of the universe.

In this video, NASA scientists Jennifer Wiseman and Julie McEnery explore how Hubble helped transform our understanding of cosmic expansion, the mysterious role of dark energy, and how NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help investigate some of the biggest unanswered questions in cosmology.

Missed out on yesterday's full moon, (and probably today too) but still proud of this one from 28th September.

Captured using Nikon D5300, 300mm telephoto lens. 75 shots stacked on Autostakkert, best 72% on final stacking. This image is 100% zoomed and cropped to content, and some final touch in GIMP

This isn't my first attempt but this is the first time I used a decent tri-pod and software to stack and enhance the picture. Would love to capture Moon with a telescope to create the Mineral Moon. Appreciate any advice on how do I go on achieving that.

You can submit your questions now: https://www.reddit.com/u/UCBerkeley/s/we4fFYuTje