Walkabout the Galaxy

An exoplanet has been discovered orbiting its star in the opposite direction of its star's rotation, a phenomenon that previously has only been observed in the presence of another star or massive sub-stellar object that can rotate the plane of planet's orbit. In this case, no such obvious explanation exists, suggesting that after the star formed an entire new planet formation disk accreted around the star of unknown origin. Planets...

An intriguing detection from a dark matter experiment may be the first direct detection of a dark matter particle. This detection would mean dark matter is made of WIMPs: Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles. There's a non-negligible chance that this is an odd background detection and not dark matter, but if it is, we'll see more like it in the next few years. We also take a look at a study of what might have happened to a moon of ...

What do you call a very-but-not-so-supermassive black hole completely encased in a warm dense cloud of hydrogen? A hot mess? How about "black hole star", a new category of crazy astronomical object that can explain some of the James Webb Space Telescope's mysterious findings from the early universe. And we're a step closer to understanding our own star with dazzling data from the Inouye Solar Telescope that shows evidence of a flui...

Supermassive have such voracious appetites that they create an energetic mess when eating which has a tendency to shoot their food off at very high speeds. New observations show the second course for these monsters as material falls back into them. A rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone has a confirmed atmosphere, checking another box for finding worlds that may have life. Join us for a whimsical tour of the universe on Walkabout ...

Quasars, the energetic engines driven by the voracious appetite of supermassive black holes, have been observed in the very early universe, upending ideas about how long it took to form these behemoths in the first place. New results on a peculiar object tagging along around the Sun with the Earth casts doubt on its origin as a possible fragment of the Moon. And the climate takes a swipe at strange quark for complaining about the h...

The astroquarks examine the oft-asked question of why the Moon sometimes looks huge and other times, not so much, and we take a look at the cool mission to grapple and boost the NASA Swift space telescope into a higher orbit. Plus, new observations reveal that the sky is much brighter at radio wavelengths than previously assumed, teaching us something about the population of free electrons. Join us for all this, space trivia, and m...

Exquisitely detailed measurements of the ripples in spacetime from the mergers of black holes now show that some of these merging black holes were, themselves, created by an earlier black hole merging event. While this had been suspected to take place, we now have clear evidence of it. On a less dramatic scale but much closer to home, new simulations of the early solar system suggest the large population of moons of Uranus needed h...

Mysterious bright blue flashes from relatively empty parts of the universe have a new possible explanation involving, what else, black holes. We explore this new idea to explain Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients (LFBOTs) with black hole collisions, take a peek at the black hole in our own Milky Way, and discuss some puzzling observations of two of the rings of Uranus. Plus, we have a stupid stumper, exoplanet trivia, space news...

A Plutino, an object that shares Pluto's orbit but which is much smaller than Pluto, appears to have a very thin global atmosphere. We discuss the detection and how such a small body could hold onto even a thin atmosphere, as well as a new model that describes many of Saturn's peculiarities with a recent collision between its big moon Titan and a precursor to the sponge-y moon Hyperion. Join us for all this, space news, astronomy t...

Gravitational waves and light combine to reveal what is suspected to be a superkilonova which is much cooler than the name suggests. Cool in the cool way, not the temperature way. Learn about splitting neutron stars and, in our Artemis II recap, we revisit the highs (awesome mission, great astronauts) and lows (broken space toilet) of the mission that took people a record distance from the Earth, and what's next. Plus, trivia, stum...

Supermassive black holes can be terrible neighbors. New research shows that their powerful jets of charged particles can shut down star formation in neighboring galaxies within the galaxy cluster, which is just plain rude. Closer to home, our own Down Quark Audrey Martin is part of a study shedding new light (with the James Webb Space Telescope) on the mysterious L type asteroids, that formed at very high temperatures early in our ...

There's always been a fuzzy line between asteroids and comets, and new observations of asteroids in the vicinity of Jupiter provide a hint to the origin of the mysterious active asteroids that look like asteroids but act like comets. Elsewhere in the galaxy, the famous ring nebula gets a new spectral image that shows the presence of band of iron. Could it be the remnants of a planet like Earth or Mercury that was vaporized when the...

The amazing discoveries from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have already started, and the astroquarks take a look at some close to home. Asteroids bigger than a city block spinning in fewer than 5 minutes are just the beginning, and will change our understanding of the collisional evolution of the asteroid belt. The astroquarks muse on the biggest questions in astronomy today, and one of those, the so-called "S8 Tension" has a possi...