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.

Deep Space

A massive star appears to have exploded twice — first as a supernova, and then again days later when the two neutron stars its first explosion had created violently crashed into each other — in what astronomers announced in December 2025 may be the first event of its kind ever observed, so unprecedented that physicists have invented a new word for it: “superkilonova”

The unusual sequence began with a signal from a routine source. On 18 August 2025, the LIGO gravitational wave detectors in the United States and the Virgo…

Jun 22, 2026

Solar Science

In February 2022, a geomagnetic storm so minor it barely rated a mention thickened the upper atmosphere just enough to drag 40 of SpaceX’s freshly launched Starlink satellites back to a fiery death

A minor G1 geomagnetic storm in February 2022 warmed Earth's upper atmosphere just enough to drag 40 newly deployed Starlink satellites back into a fiery reentry within days — the largest single-event satellite loss in Starlink history and a wake-up call for an industry whose forecasting models were built for the wrong customers.

Jun 22, 2026

Solar Science

During the 1859 solar storm, telegraph operators disconnected their batteries entirely — yet messages kept flowing on the storm’s own current as sparks showered from the machines and the paper caught fire

On September 2, 1859, telegraph operators George Wood in Boston and Frederick Royce in Portland unplugged their batteries during the Carrington Event and kept sending messages on the geomagnetic current induced by the storm itself — while elsewhere on the network, sparks jumped from keys and paper tape caught fire.

Jun 22, 2026

Constellations

When JWST looked at XLSSC 122, a galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light-years away, it caught gravity bending light from galaxies about 12 billion years in the past, and a dark matter core packed too tightly for cosmic noon

JWST has caught the galaxy cluster XLSSC 122 bending light from galaxies behind it into long blue-gray arcs, making a dark matter knot visible from a time when the universe was only about 3.3 billion years old.

Jun 22, 2026

Science

For a decade the Pink Planet was too faint for any ground telescope to study — and when James Webb finally caught its spectrum, the best fit to the light was an atmosphere hazed with salt clouds

GJ 504 b, the rosy world that defeated the world's biggest ground telescopes for years, gave up its first spectrum to JWST in a few hours of telescope time. The model that matched the light needed clouds made of salt.

Jun 22, 2026

Science

The June Bootids have flared to dozens of meteors an hour in rare years like 1998, but most years the shower is so weak it shows almost nothing — and no outburst is forecast for 2026

One of the year's most erratic meteor showers is active now. A handful of times it has stunned observers. Most years it barely registers, and the official 2026 calendar predicts nothing unusual.

Jun 22, 2026

Constellations

Our galaxy and its neighbours are racing through space at more than two million kilometres an hour, caught in a tug-of-war between the gravity of distant superclusters ahead and a vast, near-empty void shoving us from behind

Measured against the cosmic microwave background, the Local Group moves at about 631 km/s. The motion is a tug-of-war: pulled toward the Great Attractor and Shapley Concentration, and pushed from the Dipole Repeller void, identified in 2017. Why a void can 'push', and what is still being mapped.

Jun 21, 2026

Constellations

In the far future the expansion of space will carry every other galaxy beyond the reach of our telescopes, leaving the astronomers of that era with an empty sky and no way to ever discover that the Big Bang happened

Accelerating expansion will eventually push every galaxy beyond the Local Group past the cosmic horizon, erasing the three pillars of Big Bang evidence. As Krauss and Scherrer argued, future astronomers would reasonably conclude they live in a static, eternal galaxy. What that says about what we may have already lost.

Jun 21, 2026

Constellations

Deep inside Neptune and Uranus the pressure is thought to crush carbon into diamonds, which then sink slowly through the planet as a glittering rain

Deep in the ice giants, methane is thought to break apart and the freed carbon crystallise into diamond that sinks toward the core. In 2017 a team at SLAC recreated the key step in the lab. The evidence, and why it is a strong case rather than a sighting.

Jun 21, 2026

Constellations

HD 189733b looks deep blue from space, almost Earth-like at first glance — but its colour comes not from oceans, but from silicate particles in a scorching atmosphere where glass may rain sideways through winds of thousands of kilometres an hour.

HD 189733b is a deep cobalt blue, the first exoplanet to have its visible colour measured (Hubble, 2013). But the blue comes from silicate hazes, not oceans, in an atmosphere above 1,000C with winds near 7,000 km/h. Same colour as Earth, opposite cause.

Jun 21, 2026

Constellations

A Venusian day is 243 Earth days long — longer than the planet’s entire 225-day year — and because Venus rotates backwards, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east, though only once every 117 Earth days through its thick, cloud-choked sky.

Venus spins once every 243 Earth days, longer than its 225-day year, and backwards. But sunrise to sunrise takes only about 117 Earth days, because the orbital motion and slow retrograde spin pull against each other. And through its opaque clouds, a sunrise is really a slow, diffuse glow.

Jun 21, 2026

Science

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew in and out of the solar corona and found a source of high-energy particles that no existing model had predicted

When NASA's Parker Solar Probe passed through the solar corona during perihelion encounters at the heliospheric current sheet, its instruments recorded…

Jun 21, 2026

Constellations

Enceladus, a tiny Saturnian moon only about 500 kilometres wide, is actively venting water vapour and ice grains into space from a salty ocean hidden beneath its crust — and modelling suggests that ocean may have remained warm and chemically active for geological timescales, perhaps long enough for life to have had a chance to emerge.

Cassini found Enceladus venting its hidden salty ocean into space, complete with organics, hydrogen pointing to hydrothermal vents, and phosphorus. Modelling suggests the ocean could be long-lived and warm. But habitable conditions are not the same as life, and the ocean's age is still debated.

Jun 20, 2026

Science

In 2002 astronomers averaged the light of 200,000 galaxies and announced the universe was pale turquoise — then traced the color to a software error and corrected it to a beige they nicknamed cosmic latte

The color was an afterthought to a study of cosmic light. When color scientists spotted a mistake in the software's white point, the universe's average shade slid from turquoise to a milky beige, and the astronomers owned the error in public.

Jun 19, 2026

Constellations

Mercury was once expected to be far too hot for ice, sitting closest to the Sun — but radar observations revealed bright patches near its poles, and NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft later confirmed that many of them were water ice, preserved inside craters where sunlight never reaches.

Arecibo radar found bright polar patches on Mercury in 1991; MESSENGER confirmed water ice in 2012 through three converging measurements. The reason ice survives on the hottest planet is geometry: a near-zero axial tilt leaves crater floors in permanent shadow at about minus 170C.

Jun 19, 2026

Science

A dying star might never collapse into a black hole — a tiny Big Bang could ignite at its core and leave a gravastar with no singularity and no event horizon

Two Goethe University physicists have found a solution to Einstein's equations in which a collapsing star spawns an expanding speck of dark energy that halts its own ruin, producing a black hole lookalike with neither a singularity nor an event horizon. The catch: it only works under finely tuned conditions.

Jun 19, 2026