u/demolcd

The observed filament stretches roughly 3 million light-years and links two distant galaxies whose light has travelled for nearly 12 billion years to reach us. Astronomers detected the extremely faint glow of hydrogen gas filling the space between them.

The cosmic web is the largest known structure in nature. Galaxies and galaxy clusters are concentrated along enormous filaments surrounding vast, comparatively empty regions called cosmic voids.

Most of the web’s mass is thought to be dark matter. Its gravity provides the underlying framework, while ordinary gas flows along these filaments and supplies galaxies with material for forming new stars.

Astronomers have mapped the cosmic web indirectly for decades by measuring galaxies, gravitational lensing and absorption in the light of distant quasars. Directly detecting the faint gas between galaxies is far more difficult because its glow is incredibly weak.

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and its MUSE instrument, researchers accumulated more than 140 hours of observations to reveal this filament in unprecedented detail.

One important clarification bitch: images showing the entire Universe as a dense web of countless filaments are generally simulations or reconstructed maps. The direct observation captures a specific filament — not a photograph of the entire cosmic web at once.

Source: Nature Astronomy; ESO; Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

HOPS-315 lies about 1,300 light-years from Earth. Like our Sun billions of years ago, it is surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust—the raw material from which planets can eventually emerge.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope and ALMA, astronomers detected silicon monoxide in both gaseous form and as newly condensed crystalline silicate minerals. This suggests they are witnessing the moment when hot material begins solidifying into some of the first building blocks of planets.

This stage is especially important because similar ancient minerals survive inside meteorites in our own Solar System. Scientists use them as a timestamp for when planet formation around the young Sun began roughly 4.6 billion years ago.

Even more remarkably, the minerals around HOPS-315 appear in a region comparable to the location of our asteroid belt. That makes the system one of the closest analogues astronomers have found for studying what our own Solar System may have looked like at its beginning.

The image itself doesn’t show completed newborn planets. The orange material traces carbon monoxide flowing away from the young star, while blue traces a narrow silicon-monoxide jet. The crucial discovery comes from analyzing the chemistry of material surrounding the star.

For the first time outside our Solar System, astronomers are observing the earliest solid materials appearing at the beginning of the planet-building process—the raw ingredients that could eventually grow into asteroids, planetary cores, entire worlds and ultimately bitches.

Source: Nature; ALMA; ESO; JWST

The Canadian flag wasn’t really necessary.

You’re free to pass 🫡

The source is Beta Pictoris b, a young giant planet about 63 light-years away and roughly 10 times the mass of Jupiter. Using South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope array, researchers observed the system on four occasions and detected rapid, repeating bursts between 0.85 and 3.5 GHz.

The signals were strongly circularly polarized—a characteristic expected from powerful auroral radio emission. By precisely measuring where the radio waves originated relative to distant quasars, the team localized them to the planet rather than its host star.

This is not evidence of extraterrestrial technology. The researchers say the emission is consistent with the electron cyclotron maser process, the same basic mechanism responsible for intense planetary radio emissions associated with auroras in our own Solar System.

That makes the discovery scientifically powerful for another reason: radio auroras can reveal a planet’s magnetic field. The observations indicate Beta Pictoris b possesses an extraordinarily strong magnetic field, thousands of times stronger than Earth’s, providing what the researchers describe as the first direct measurement of an exoplanet’s magnetic-field strength.

Beta Pictoris b also rotates incredibly quickly, completing a day in only about 8–9 hours. Its rapid rotation, youth and enormous mass may help drive the powerful magnetic dynamo responsible for the observed emission.

If confirmed through further observations, astronomers could eventually use planetary radio signals to study magnetic fields around worlds that are otherwise just tiny points of light—revealing information about their interiors, atmospheres, potential Alien space bitches in quasar beam bikini bottoms and interactions with their stars.

The research is currently available as a preprint and has not yet completed peer review.

Source: Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian; University of Oregon; MeerKAT; arXiv

We need an EU post flair 🔥

Edit: Shoutout to the mods for the EU post flair 🫡

Edit edit: Shoutout to the mods for making the EU post flair a long time ago. I’ll see myself out 🤣

Edit edit edit: I was responsible for the EU post flair. 🔥 I’ll see myself back in. 😎

Artemis IV is planned for early 2028 and would mark humanity’s first return to the lunar surface in more than half a century. Two astronauts are expected to descend near the lunar South Pole and spend roughly a week conducting science, collecting samples and testing equipment.

Then, by late 2028, NASA is targeting Artemis V as another crewed surface mission. After that, the agency intends to maintain roughly one lunar surface mission every year, with plans eventually moving toward an even faster cadence.

Before either landing, Artemis III will serve as a major rehearsal in Earth orbit. Astronauts will practice rendezvous and docking with commercial lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin, testing critical systems before crews rely on them around the Moon.

The South Pole is especially important because permanently shadowed craters there contain water ice. That resource could eventually provide drinking water, oxygen and potentially hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant, reducing how much material future explorers need to bring from Earth.

NASA is also sending robotic missions, science instruments, possibly bitches and mobility systems ahead of astronauts as part of a broader effort to establish sustained operations on the lunar surface.

The goal is fundamentally different from Apollo. Instead of visiting the Moon a few times and leaving, Artemis is being designed around repeated missions, infrastructure and a long-term human presence that can also prepare technologies needed for future missions to Mars.

Source: NASA Artemis Program

Launched in 1977, it is now the most distant human-made object ever created, more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth and travelling through interstellar space. A radio message currently takes about 23 hours to travel between Voyager 1 and Earth.

The spacecraft is powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. But that power supply weakens with age. Voyager loses roughly 4 watts of available power every year, forcing NASA engineers to progressively shut down heaters and scientific instruments. In April 2026, NASA switched off another Voyager 1 instrument to buy the spacecraft more operating time.

The year 2036 isn’t a guaranteed shutdown date. NASA says the spacecraft could remain within communication range of the Deep Space Network until roughly 2036, depending on whether it still has enough power to transmit a detectable signal. Science operations may end considerably earlier.

And when Voyager finally goes silent, it won’t stop moving. There is no destination programmed into it and no engine guiding it toward another star. It will simply continue along the trajectory gravity and momentum have given it, orbiting through the Milky Way for immense stretches of time. NASA calculates that around the year 40,272, Voyager 1 will pass within about 1.7 light-years of the star AC+79 3888.

Even after humanity can no longer hear it, Voyager will still carry the Golden Record containing sounds, music, images of bitches and greetings from Earth.

One day the signal will disappear into the noise, but the spacecraft itself may continue wandering between the stars long after the civilization that launched it is gone.

Source: NASA Voyager Mission and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

New Canadian heritage moment just dropped 🇨🇦

Absolute gold.

The Lion Nebula, officially NGC 2392, is a planetary nebula created when a Sun-like star reached the end of its normal life and expelled its outer layers into space.

At the very center is the star’s exposed remnant: an incredibly hot white dwarf. Its intense ultraviolet radiation is ionizing the surrounding gas and sculpting the expanding shells and bubbles that form the nebula’s distinctive “face.” The larger blue-purple region resembling a mane contains gas and dust expelled by the dying star.

Webb observed the nebula using both NIRCam and MIRI, combining near- and mid-infrared light. That infrared vision reveals structures that are difficult to see in visible light, including compact dust clumps, ionized gas and strange comet-like features whose denser heads help shield material behind them from the white dwarf’s radiation.

The structure we see didn’t appear overnight. NASA says the gas and dust have been developing into this form for several thousand years, and the nebula is still changing. Astronomers estimate that in roughly another 10,000 years, NGC 2392 will disperse into interstellar space.

And that material won’t necessarily be wasted. Elements expelled by dying stars become part of the interstellar medium, where they can eventually contribute to future generations of stars, planets and ultimately bitches. In that sense, this beautiful object isn’t simply the remains of a dead star. It is part of the recycling process that continually reshapes our galaxy.

Source: NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, STScI.

Hubble observations have revealed an enormous 10-sided atmospheric wave, a decagon, around Saturn’s south pole, while its famous north-polar hexagon has been known for more than four decades.

This isn’t a solid structure or a perfectly drawn shape sitting on the clouds, bitch. The decagon is a huge wave embedded inside one of Saturn’s powerful jet streams, centered around 63° south latitude. Hubble observations at different wavelengths show that the pattern extends through multiple atmospheric layers, meaning it has real vertical structure rather than being just a surface cloud pattern.

And the scale is ridiculous. Researchers report that a single side of the decagon can stretch more than 16,700 kilometers, making one side alone wider than Earth. Unlike Saturn’s remarkably stable northern hexagon, the southern decagon appears more dynamic and slowly moves eastward at roughly 10 km/h.

Scientists found hints of the structure in Hubble observations from 2023, with the shape becoming increasingly obvious in later observations. That raises the fascinating possibility that we’re actually watching a giant planetary weather pattern develop in real time. Hubble’s OPAL program has been monitoring Saturn and the other outer planets annually, making this kind of long-term comparison possible.

Why Saturn produces polygon-shaped atmospheric waves remains an open question. Other planets have powerful jets, vortices and atmospheric waves, but Saturn appears uniquely good at turning them into enormous geometric patterns. Scientists now have two very different natural laboratories, a long-lived hexagon in the north and an evolving decagon in the south, to figure out why.

Source: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, STScI, Science Advances.

Located about 100 light-years away in the constellation Draco, this confirmed super-Earth is roughly 1.67 times Earth’s radius and about 4.8 times its mass.

What makes it extraordinary is its density. Models suggest that water could account for roughly 20–30% of the planet’s entire mass. For comparison, despite oceans covering about 70% of Earth’s surface, water represents less than 1% of Earth’s mass.

If the ocean-world interpretation is correct, there might be no continents at all, just an enormous global ocean potentially far deeper than anything on Earth. The planet completes an entire orbit around its small red-dwarf star every 11.1 days, yet because the star is much cooler than our Sun, temperatures could still potentially allow liquid water.

Astronomers haven’t yet confirmed that the planet is actually covered by an ocean. NASA notes that its composition could have other explanations, so further atmospheric observations are needed. But researchers consider TOI-1452 b one of the strongest known candidates for an ocean planet and an excellent target for Webb observations.

Imagine an entire planet with no familiar coastline, no continent on the horizon and no bitches—only an ocean stretching around the whole world.

Source: NASA / Université de Montréal / The Astronomical Journal.