A Space Daily column

Deep Field

Astronomy and cosmology

Deep Field covers astronomy and cosmology. Telescopes and what they find, planets near and far, and the strange physics of the deep universe, traced back to the journal papers and observatory data behind the headlines.

Outer Planets

Two of Neptune’s tiny inner moons contain clay minerals that could not have formed on worlds so small and cold — suggesting they’re built from the exposed interiors of much larger moons shattered when the captured Kuiper Belt world Triton tore through Neptune’s original satellite system billions of years ago.

Webb's clay signature on Larissa and Galatea links today's small moons to warm, water-altered interiors inside a much larger satellite generation destroyed long ago.

Aug 21, 2026

Science

Right now, without moving a muscle, you are aboard a planet orbiting the Sun at 107,000 kilometres per hour, inside a solar system orbiting the galaxy at 720,000 kilometres per hour, while the Milky Way and Andromeda close on each other at roughly 400,000 kilometres per hour — and you cannot feel any of it.

Earth's solar orbit, the Sun's galactic path and Andromeda's approach are real motions in different reference frames. They cannot be simply added, and constant shared motion is not something the body can feel.

Aug 21, 2026

Deep Impact

Astronomers announced in January 2026 that they had found a 710-metre asteroid — nearly eight football fields across — spinning once every 1.88 minutes. A normal rubble-pile asteroid should tear itself apart at anything close to that speed, meaning 2025 MN45 must have internal strength comparable to solid rock.

Rubin Observatory measured a 710-metre main-belt asteroid turning once every 1.88 minutes, implying cohesion comparable to rock under the study's model.

Aug 21, 2026

Science

A moon does not need sunlight to keep its interior warm. Io is ablaze with volcanoes, Europa hides an ocean, and Enceladus leaks heat and water from its south pole into space — worlds kept active by the gravitational grip of planets that never lets go.

Tidal heating turns orbital motion into internal energy. The same mechanism drives Io's lava, helps preserve Europa's ocean and powers Enceladus's south-polar vents.

Aug 21, 2026

Marsdaily

Mars may hold enough liquid water to cover the entire planet to a depth of 1 to 2 kilometres — trapped in tiny cracks and pores in rock roughly 11.5 to 20 kilometres underground, far beyond anything we’ve ever been capable of drilling on Mars.

InSight data can be modelled as water-saturated rock deep beneath Mars, but a 2026 reanalysis shows the planet-wide estimate remains highly sensitive to assumptions about the unseen crust.

Aug 21, 2026

Science

Astronomers traced just three stars flung out of the Large Magellanic Cloud and used them like cosmic breadcrumbs to reconstruct 800 million years of the galaxy’s motion — narrowing its possible past trajectory by about 50%.

Three hypervelocity stars give astronomers dated points along the Large Magellanic Cloud's past orbit, halving the allowed trajectory corridor in a new model.

Aug 20, 2026

Constellations

On 19 August 2026, SpaceX pushed its Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites in orbit — meaning a single network now accounts for roughly two-thirds of all active satellites circling Earth.

A 24-satellite launch appears to have taken Starlink beyond 11,000 spacecraft in orbit, while active-satellite indexes continue to put its global share near two-thirds.

Aug 20, 2026

Science

The only spacecraft ever to directly sample Jupiter’s atmosphere was a single probe dropped into the planet in 1995. It transmitted for just 58 minutes before being destroyed — meaning our only in-situ measurements of Jupiter’s clouds come from one brief descent through one unusually dry patch of an atmosphere larger than Earth itself.

Galileo's only direct descent into Jupiter sampled an unusually dry hot spot. Its 58 minutes of data remain invaluable, but some results were local weather, not a global average.

Aug 20, 2026

Exo Worlds

At 23.5 times Earth’s mass, GJ 523b is massive enough that standard planet-formation models struggle to explain why it didn’t accumulate a huge hydrogen-helium envelope — yet the planet is extraordinarily dense and apparently mostly rock, and astronomers still don’t know how it ended up that way.

GJ 523b packs 23.5 Earth masses into a world only 2.55 Earth radii wide, challenging models that expect such a massive young planet to retain a deep hydrogen-helium envelope.

Aug 20, 2026

Science

The faint smudge of Andromeda you can see with your naked eye on a dark night is 2.5-million-year-old light — photons that left another galaxy around the time the earliest members of our genus were walking Earth.

Andromeda's faint central glow has travelled for roughly 2.5 million years, placing its departure near the emergence of the genus Homo.

Aug 19, 2026

Space Scopes

A camera the size of a small car, sitting on a mountain in Chile, began taking a new image of the southern sky every 40 seconds on 30 June 2026 — building a ten-year time-lapse of the universe that will scan the entire southern sky every few nights and issue up to seven million alerts a night whenever something moves or flickers.

Rubin Observatory's ten-year survey turns a 3.2-billion-pixel camera, rapid image processing and public alert brokers into a searchable record of the changing sky.

Aug 19, 2026

Deep Space

Every energetic supernova of this type that astronomers had confirmed came paired with some sign of a jet moving near light speed — a gamma-ray burst, or at least its afterglow — until a satellite caught only the second such explosion ever recorded in the act, 500 million light-years away, and it arrived with neither.

For decades, a telltale cosmic signature appeared with every energetic supernova—until astronomers spotted one that broke all the rules, suggesting our understanding of stellar explosions remains fundamentally incomplete.

Aug 19, 2026

Science

Astronomers reported a new kind of cosmic object in Nature on 12 August 2026: a “black hole star” roughly the scale of a solar system, whose star-like envelope is powered not by nuclear fusion but by a feeding black hole. The discovery may finally explain the hundreds of mysterious Little Red Dots JWST has been finding throughout the early universe.

MoM-BH*-1 may isolate the gas-wrapped accreting-black-hole component that, when mixed with a young host galaxy, produces the spectrum of a typical JWST Little Red Dot.

Aug 19, 2026

Aerospace

Every asteroid with a ‘neck’ that astronomers had ever found had exactly two lobes joined at one narrow waist — until new images of the asteroid Nysa this month revealed a third lobe nobody expected, and nobody yet knows whether it was born whole or built from three separate collisions

The asteroid that defied astronomers' expectations has three lobes instead of two, raising the question of whether it formed in a single cataclysm or assembled piecemeal over eons.

Aug 18, 2026

Science

On 13 April 2029, a roughly 375-metre asteroid named Apophis will pass closer to Earth than some of our own satellites — just 32,000 kilometres above the surface — and new calculations suggest up to 90% of humanity could potentially see it cross the sky with the naked eye.

New visibility maps put as much as 90% of humanity inside Apophis's cumulative naked-eye viewing region, but geography is only the first condition.

Aug 18, 2026

Science

A radar aboard ESA’s Mars Express detected an extraordinarily bright reflection beneath 1.5 kilometres of Martian polar ice, spread across a patch roughly 20 kilometres wide. Years later, a second radar aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter finally reached the same layer — and saw only a faint echo, deepening a debate over whether there is liquid water, unusual rock, or something else beneath Mars’s south pole.

MARSIS found an intensely bright boundary beneath Mars's south polar ice. SHARAD has now reached the same layer and returned a much fainter signal.

Aug 18, 2026