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Astronomers have found that a relatively close white dwarf – the remaining hot, dense core of a dead star – is having a planetary snack. An international team of researchers, led by the University of Warwick in the U.K., said on September 18, 2025, that a white dwarf is consuming a fragment of a former Pluto-like object. The researchers said they found evidence of the cosmic meal when viewing the white dwarf WD 1647+375 in ultraviolet light with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The white dwarf’s strong gravity pulled in the icy Pluto-like world and then tore it to pieces. ... read full post
Most of the ordinary matter in the universe is hydrogen. But surprisingly, less than 20% of this hydrogen sits inside galaxies. The rest lies in the vast spaces between them – the so-called intergalactic medium. ... read full post
No one could accuse the European Space Agency and its various contractors of moving swiftly when it comes to the development of reusable rockets. However, it appears that Europe is finally making some credible progress. ... read full post
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, with a substantial contribution from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), has unveiled new, detailed images of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. These reveal a dynamic environment with changing polarization patterns near the black hole. For the first time in EHT data, scientists have also detected signatures of extended jet emission near the jet base, where it connects to the ring around the black hole. ... read full post
There’s a new, fairly bright comet in the sky, and it was just discovered on Friday, September 12, 2025. The Solar Wind Anisotropies (SWAN) instrument on the SOHO spacecraft detected it. And it’s relatively bright (as comets go), shining at around magnitude 7.4. That’s not bright enough to see with the eye. But it’s bright enough to detect using binoculars, or a camera with a 200-mm lens.