Astronomy news

• 'Aliens' at 40: James Cameron's sequel is a sci-fi icon, but did you know he quit the movie twice?

  19-07-2026 19:00 via space.com
  
  Where does James Cameron's "Aliens" rank among the other Alien movies? That depends on who you ask. Some might say it's the best, while others put it just behind the original (spoiler alert: it's the best). Regardless, there's no denying that this 1986 film shifted gears, moving the franchise from horror to horror-tinged sci-fi action and paving an alternate path for the future.As Cameron stated in an interview with Lofficier, the plan always was "to do a film that was not as scary... it's scary
  
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• Should we trust AI in the search for alien life? Scientists aren't so sure

  19-07-2026 17:00 via space.com
  
  Artificial intelligence could easily fall into the trap of identifying non-life as life on other worlds, claim two researchers from Michigan State University who have tested AI on simulated life in a computer program."We had previously seen that AI has a big Achilles heel when it is trying to classify things that are unlike the things in its training examples," Michigan's Christoph Adami told Space.com. "We call these 'out-of-distribution' samples and it is just incredibly easy to get AI to misc
  
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• How Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar' turned general relativity into the bad guy

  19-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  The biggest blockbusters of 2014 threw up a varied rogues' gallery of bad guys. In "Transformers: Age of Extinction", it was a reincarnated version of Optimus Prime's perma-nemesis, Megatron, while Captain America faced off against a reborn Hydra infiltrating the upper echelons of the US government in "The Winter Soldier". For Spider-Man, it was Electro, while Maleficent showed up in live-action to give Sleeping Beauty nightmares. Christopher Nolan has never been one to go with the Hollywood cro
  
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• 10 places in the US and Canada to see August's partial solar eclipse and Perseid meteor shower in 1 trip

  19-07-2026 15:00 via space.com
  
  Aug. 12, 2026, offers a rare double-header for skywatchers across northeastern North America: a partial solar eclipse during the afternoon followed, hours later, by the peak of the Perseid meteor shower beneath dark summer skies. The eclipse is part of a total solar eclipse happening in eastern Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain. "The neat thing about seeing a partial eclipse, especially one that is total somewhere else, is that you get to join in with the whole event that's going on,
  
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• James Webb Space Telescope discovers how black holes feed themselves

  19-07-2026 14:00 via space.com
  
  Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves. The observations could help scientists discover how supermassive black holes with masses millions, often even billions, of times that of the sun grew so fast so soon after the Big Bang.While all large galaxies have supermassive black holes at their hearts, some are slumbering giants, consuming little surrounding gas and dust, while others
  
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• Scientists told them, 'No, it's too dangerous,' but they did it anyway: Inside Japan's super-close asteroid flyby

  19-07-2026 12:00 via space.com
  
  Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft returned spectacular images of a near-Earth asteroid following a super-close flyby on July 5, but heated debate was needed before teams signed off on the daring attempt.When images of the asteroid Torifune arrived on the morning of July 6 Japan time, Makoto Yoshikawa and his team at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) got two surprises at once. Torifune turned out to be a contact binary, in which two chunks of rock have come together under gravity, and the
  
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