Astronomy

Get ready for a month packed full of thrilling Moon-related events! From occultations of stars and planets, and even an eclipse, the Moon has some treats in store for astronomers around the world. List organised by date: In New York, Regulus is swallowed up on 2 February at 20:53 EST, reappearing at 21:49. Credit: Astronomy Now/Greg Smye-Rumsby 2 February, North America: Regulus engulfedThe early evening of 2 February sees magnitude +1.36 Regulus, Leo’s alpha star, move behind the bright limb of dazzling waning gibbous Moon just a day removed from full phase. This event is visible across most of the USA and Canada. In New York, Regulus is swallowed up on 2 February at 20:53 EST, only to reappear at 21:49 at the slither of darkness of the Moon’s dark limb. 14 February, New Zealand: Moon in...

How does one acquire star dust? One option, as the Perry Como song suggests, is to catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, so to speak.Thousands of tonnes of cosmic dust bombard the Earth each year, mostly vaporising in the atmosphere. The asteroid and comet fragments that do not burn up – known as meteorites and micrometeorites if they hit Earth – provide scientists with valuable clues about the cosmos.Planetary scientists in the UK, kitted in Ghostbusters-like vacuum backpacks, have scoured cathedral roofs for microscopic specks of the space stuff.Another option is to recreate a bit of the universe in a bottle.Linda Losurdo, a PhD candidate in materials and plasma physics at the University of Sydney, has done exactly that, producing cosmic dust in the lab from scratch. It is a fe...

Surrounded by metal pipes and tangles of cables, two researchers point to bright orange squiggles on a computer screen. The squiggles are a poem written in ancient Greek about heavenly phenomena, seen for the first time by human eyes in nearly a millennium and a half. “There’s an appendix which includes coordinates of the stars discussed in the poem, and then little sketches of the star maps,” says Minhal Gardezi, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. input[type="radio"].svelte-wecxzzdisplay:none.payment-option-wrapper.svelte-wecxzz.svelte-wecxzzdisplay:flex;flex:1 0 28%;width:100%.payment-option-wrapper.svelte-wecxzz.svelte-wecxzz:only-chi...

For a long time, scientists assumed that Earth's water was delivered by asteroids and comets billions of years ago. This coincided with the Late Heavy Bombardment (ca. 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago), a period when planets and bodies in the Solar System experienced a much higher rate of impacts. According to this theory, the planets of the inner Solar System were unable to retain volatile elements such as water due to their proximity to the Sun. However, recent findings from the analysis of lunar rocks and regolith returned by the Apollo missions have cast doubt on this assumption. After examining a large suite of lunar samples using high-precision triple oxygen isotopes, researchers from the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) concluded that meteorites in the Late Heavy...

by Neil Norman A potentially large member of the Kreutz family comets is speeding its way to a perihelion encounter during the first week of April this year. The object was discovered on 13 January 2026. Although not fully confirmed yet, if it is a Kreutz family comet, it will be an unprecedented discovery. Image of comet candidate 6AC4721 (centre), taken via the LCO-SAAO LO9 35-cm reflector on 14 January 2026. Credit: Alan Hale A Kreutz family comet is a member of a group of ‘sungrazing’ comets, whose orbits carry them to within a few solar radii of the Sun’s surface. They are thought to be fragments of a single giant comet that broke apart centuries ago during a close solar encounter. Each fragment now follows a similar, extremely elongated orbit, returning to the inner Solar System eve...