A Road Trip with Commander Chris

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Radio Observations Find Nothing at Omega Centauri's Heart December 15, 2025
Astronomers have performed the deepest radio observations ever of Omega Centauri, searching for signs of an intermediate mass black hole thought to lurk at its center. Despite 170 hours of observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array achieving unprecedented sensitivity, they detected absolutely nothing where the black hole should be. If an intermediate mass black […]
Did a Rogue Planet Reshape Our Solar System? December 15, 2025
Researchers have discovered that a close encounter with a rogue planet or brown dwarf during the Sun's early years could have triggered the reshuffling of our Solar System's giant planets. Running 3000 simulations of stellar flybys, the team found that substellar objects passing within 20 astronomical units of the young Sun could destabilise the planets' […]
A New Window on the Expansion of the Universe December 15, 2025
Astronomers at the University of Tokyo have used gravitational lensing to measure how fast the universe is expanding, adding weight to one of cosmology's most intriguing mysteries. Their technique exploits the way massive galaxies bend light from distant quasars, creating multiple distorted images that arrive at different times. The measurement supports recent observations showing the […]
Scientists Find the Strongest Evidence Yet of an Atmosphere on a Molten Rocky Exoplanet December 14, 2025
Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected the strongest evidence yet for an atmosphere on a rocky planet outside our solar system. Observations of the ultra-hot super-Earth TOI-561 b suggest that the exoplanet is surrounded by a thick blanket of gases above a global magma ocean.
Forget Stardust - It Was Star-Ice All Along December 14, 2025
Carl Sagan famously said that “We’re all made of star-stuff”. But he didn’t elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been created in massive supernovae explosions - hence the saying. Scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled - the isotopes created […]