More info here- https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/national-academies-announce-2026-winners-of-eric-and-wendy-schmidt-awards-for-excellence-in-science-communications-640-000-awarded

To be clear, this is arguably the biggest award in science communication. Wasting time on Reddit has totally paid off!

In the outer reaches of our solar system, beyond the orbit of Pluto, NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has spotted 2026 ED138 — a large, bright trans-Neptunian object that scientists have identified as a dwarf planet candidate. The observations were announced today by the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center (MPC). If confirmed, ED138 would be among the largest dwarf planets ever discovered in this region of the solar system.

For more than a century, Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” was believed to have been the result of imagination, previous drawings and memories of scenes he had seen outside his barred asylum bedroom window in France.

However, the 1889 artwork was probably rooted much more in observation than fantasy, according to scientists in South Korea who say they have identified the actual night sky potentially depicted by the post-impressionist Dutch painter.

An exuberant pre-dawn sky — filled with large, bright stars, a luminous crescent moon, and blue and white swirls — dominates the landscape featuring a prominent cypress tree and distant hillside village.

This skyscape resembles the celestial arrangement present in the sky in the early hours of July 22, 1889, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

Researchers from South Korean space science company SLLAB and Kyung Hee University in Seoul used a separate van Gogh drawing considered to show the landscape of “The Starry Night” to identify the hilly site he saw.

They placed the landscape southwest of the asylum near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, southern France, where van Gogh created the oil on canvas during a 12-month stay.

The researchers created a simulation of the sky above that hilly site in the early hours of July 22, 1889. It showed the moon and Venus positioned in opposite corners of the frame, with the moon high in the top right corner and Venus at the bottom left.

In between them both lay the Hyades cluster, which is formed of hundreds of stars in the Taurus constellation. Five bright stars in this constellation are known to be visible to the naked eye without a telescope, and the Hyades star cluster is known to form a bright “V” shape.

In van Gogh’s painting, the moon is positioned in the top right corner, diagonally above Venus, which is center left, with other stars positioned left of the moon.

“A painter does not draw stars at their true size or orientation. A star cluster on the canvas may be larger or smaller than in reality, and slightly tilted,” lead study author Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim, an astronomer and engineer and the CEO of SLLAB, told CNN over email.

So, the researchers used a Procrustes shape analysis, which “removes differences in position, size and rotation and then compares only the ‘shape’ of two sets of points,” he said, enabling them to closely match five stars in the central arrangement in “The Starry Night” with the Hyades cluster arrangement that night.

“The relative positions of the stars preserve the skeleton of the Hyades,” the researchers concluded, adding that this indicates the “work did not invent a sky that was not there but transferred an observed arrangement onto canvas through stylistic amplification.”

The same statical shape analysis also allowed the researchers to map van Gogh’s 1888 oil painting “Café Terrace at Night” on to the Summer Triangle star pattern.

Interpret ‘with caution’

“The Starry Night” was painted in mid-June of 1889, according to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is housed.

This dating by art historians is based on a letter van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo around June 18, in which he mused, “At last I have a landscape with olive trees, and also a new study of a starry sky,” according to the researchers.

However, around that time, the moon appeared almost full, according to the study, rather than the waning crescent shape van Gogh depicted.

“Also, around June 19 is close to the summer solstice, when no impressive stars rise in the pre-dawn sky,” Kim told CNN. “Around July 22, by contrast, the Hyades rose in the east together with Venus, and the moon’s shape was close to the crescent in the painting.”

The newly proposed July time period is supported by a previous examination of van Gogh’s canvas, which suggests the artist left places for the stars unpainted, only filling in those gaps after the blue sky was done. The researchers said this confirms that his star pattern “was a structure intended in advance” and “deliberately planned.”

Van Gogh has long been thought to have had a seizure in mid-July that potentially left him incapacitated in the weeks following, which could have made it impossible for him to observe and paint the sky at that time, the researchers said.

However, they re-examined original French and Dutch letters, as well as contemporary weather records, finding that the seizure could have occurred in late July and potentially only lasted a day or two.

“The authors put forward an engaging framework that combines astronomical modeling, historical meteorological data, and letter analysis to propose a late-July 1889 observational window,” Yongxiang Huang, an associate professor at the Center for Marine Meteorology and Climate Change at Xiamen University in China, told CNN over email.

However, despite this “fresh” perspective, “astronomical alignments on a canvas must be interpreted with caution,” said Huang, who was not involved in the study.

He added that “Vincent van Gogh was a Post-Impressionist master, not an optical camera,” and “attempting to pinpoint an exact date primarily based on celestial coordinates painted onto a canvas remains fragile.”

55 years ago today, the UK achieved something it has never repeated: successfully launching a satellite into orbit on a British-built rocket.

Prospero rode the Black Arrow into orbit on October 28, 1971. It was a genuine technological milestone, making Britain the sixth nation to achieve orbit with its own launch vehicle.

But even then, the British government had already cancelled the Black Arrow program months before the launch. Prospero went ahead anyway, and the mission succeeded. It ended up being the only satellite ever launched by a British rocket.

Looking back, was cancelling the program a sensible economic decision, or did Britain give up a valuable capability just as it was proving itself?

A mysterious object 310 million light-years away contains 2 billion suns’ worth of hydrogen, yet astronomers cannot find its stars.

Astronomers have identified a massive reservoir of hydrogen roughly 310 million light-years from Earth, containing enough gas to form countless stars. Yet despite its enormous mass, the mysterious object, known as AGC 322753, shows no detectable starlight. It may be one of the most intriguing candidates for a dark galaxy discovered so far.

In most galaxies, enormous clouds of hydrogen provide the raw material from which stars eventually emerge. Gravity draws this gas together, allowing dense regions to collapse and ignite nuclear fusion.

Over billions of years, the resulting stars illuminate their host galaxies, making them visible to optical telescopes. But AGC 322753 appears to be following a very different path. Astronomers estimate that this distant object contains approximately 2 billion solar masses of neutral hydrogen.

That means its gas reservoir alone has a mass equivalent to roughly two billion suns, an enormous amount of material for a system that appears almost completely invisible in ordinary astronomical images. What makes the discovery particularly unusual is not simply the absence of detectable stars.

It is the apparent combination of a substantial gas reservoir and a potentially organized structure. Radio observations suggest that the hydrogen may be moving in a rotating disk, a configuration frequently associated with galaxies. Such a pattern could indicate that the gas is gravitationally organized rather than randomly distributed across intergalactic space.

This is a television report of the discoveries of the Voyager 1 spacecraft of Jupiter and it's system of moons.