Telescopes & Astrophotography

Stories from Universe Today. Show all stories · All sources

• UUniverse Today2026-10-15✓ Read

  Host Stars Shape Their Planetary Systems Into Two Families

  New research draws a link between a host star and the characteristics of its planetary system. Higher mass stars create one family of systems, while lower mass stars create another. These results provide a new, more detailed template for understanding exoplanet systems.

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• UUniverse Today2026-10-15✓ Read

  SPHEREx Just Took the Fingerprints of Failed Stars Across Our Cosmic Neighborhood

  Brown dwarfs are the black (or brown?) sheep of astronomy. They’re too big to be considered a traditional gas planet, but they are too small to have started nuclear fusion and made the full transition to star-hood. They also change dramatically over time, cooling, shrinking, and spinning faster as they age.

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• UUniverse Today2026-10-14✓ Read

  The Perseverance Rover Reaches Another Milestone

  NASA's Perseverance Rover has reached another milestone. It now holds the record for the longest distance travelled on another world, meaning Mars and Earth's Moon. It's all thanks the ingenuity behind AutoNav, it's hazard-detection driving system. It's a win for science, as more distance travelled means more scientific objectives are reached.

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• UUniverse Today2026-10-14✓ Read

  Astronomers Observe The Limb Darkening Effect On Nearby Stars

  The edge of the Sun appears darker than its central region. This effect is known as limb darkening and tells us about the solar atmosphere. This same limb darkening effect has now been observed on several nearby stars and could help us improve our understanding of stellar atmospheres.

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• UUniverse Today2026-10-14✓ Read

  Curiosity Greets a Spectacular Dawn Sky on Mars

  Mars is a planetary geologist’s paradise. NASA’s Curiosity rover drove that home recently, with a captivating panorama seen from the slopes of Mount Sharp. The image shows a stunning vista, and was not white-balance adjusted during processing, to show just what a viewer might really see at sunrise standing of Mars.

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• UUniverse Today2026-10-13✓ Read

  ESA’s Hera Mission Targets Binary Asteroid Pair in November

  In just one more month, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will make history. Moving at 12 kilometers per second versus Earth, the mission is about to rendezvous with the binary Dimorphos-Didymos asteroid pair. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission slammed into Dimorphos in 2022, and now Hera will provide a follow up view of the mission’s resulting handiwork.

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• UUniverse Today2026-10-12✓ Read

  Hubble Spots a Suspected Second-Generation Planet

  Diligent sleuthing by astronomers has broken open a cold case in the data archive of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In a study published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers report uncovering a surprising chemical clue that indicates the white dwarf star HS 0209+0832 may host a second-generation planet.

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• UUniverse Today2026-10-12✓ Read

  Primordial Helium Further Confirms Our Understanding Of The Big Bang

  Most helium in the Universe is primordial helium, formed during the Big Bang. But a fraction of helium was formed by long-dead stars. Distinguishing between the two allows astronomers to further confirm our observations of the Big Bang.

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• UUniverse Today2026-10-12✓ Read

  How Will Water Flow on the Moon?

  Growing fresh food on the Moon is going to be crucial if astronauts there are ever going to eat anything other than freeze-dried rations. Since husbanding animals on the lunar surface is…difficult (to put it mildly), most mission planners believe that plants are the solution. But we still don’t entirely understand how one of the most fundamental materials to plant growth, water, operates under partial gravity.

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