Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to determine that a nearby exoplanet is losing its atmosphere due to interactions with its star.

Webb is casting the universe in a new light, but the space telescope’s discovery of a cosmological question mark has us scratching our heads.

As the James Webb Space Telescope enters its second year of capturing images of the depths of space, it has already revealed a treasure trove of beauty from around the universe, both near and far from home.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched on Christmas Day in 2021, and sent back its first batch of images on July 12, 2022, making this July its functional birthday.

This telescope, now situated around 1 million miles from Earth as it photographs the cosmos, is the successor space telescope to Hubble, designed to peer far back into the universe’s history and study the earliest stars and galaxies.

Today, our observable Universe extends for 46 billion light-years in all directions. But early on in our history, things were much smaller.

Once in a blue moon, Earth’s skies host a ‘blue supermoon’, and the beautifully bright sight is one that you don’t want to miss.

Otherwise, you won’t have a chance to glimpse a similar phenomenon until 2032.

If your eyes are peeled for a blue-colored Moon, however, you’re going to be disappointed.

It isn’t just your refrigerator that has magnets on it. The Earth, the stars, galaxies, and the space between galaxies are all magnetized, too. The more places scientists have looked for magnetic fields across the universe, the more they’ve found them. But the question of why that is the case and where those magnetic fields originate from has remained a mystery and a subject of ongoing scientific inquiry.

Published in the journal Physical Review Letters, a new paper by Columbia researchers offers insight into the source of these fields. The team used models to show that magnetic fields may spontaneously arise in turbulent plasma. Plasma is a kind of matter often found in ultra-hot environments like that near the surface of the sun, but plasma is also scattered across the universe in low-density environments, like the expansive space between galaxies; the team’s research focused on those low-density environments.

Their simulations showed that, in addition to generating new magnetic fields, the turbulence of those plasmas can also amplify magnetic fields once they’ve been generated, which helps explain how magnetic fields that originate on small scales can sometimes eventually reach to stretch across vast distances.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope launched on 1 July, and now it has delivered its first stunning pictures of stars and galaxies across the cosmos.

By Leah Crane

When NASA’s Perseverance Rover observed an image from Mars of its moon Phobos eclipsing the Sun, it was a reminder that the astronomical body is doomed to crash into the planet. Phobos is the closest of Mars’ two moons and it is due to fall out of orbit relatively soon.