Image (Credit): Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. (MoMA)
This week’s image is from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. It shows Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night. Created during his time at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, it is believed Van Gogh painted the piece in June 1989. But is it a true recreation of the night sky that June?
In a recent study, scientists from South Korea stated they now believe the painting shows the night sky on July 22, 1989 with its portrayal of the Moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus. The team of scientists used various pieces of evidence, including letters from the artist, to get a better idea of the night sky and weather during that summer.
You can read more about this new study, The Actual Sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a Multidisciplinary Reconstruction, at this link.
If you are simply interested in the art itself, this link at MoMA will tell you more.
Image (Credit): Suspected space junk discovered in Minnesota on October 14, 2026. (Stevens County Minnesota Sheriff’s Office)
US farmers have it tough enough these days without the added fear of space junk falling on their heads, yet that is what appears to be the case in a Minnesota cornfield. The farmer bumped into the debris, about 11 feet in diameter, while harvesting his crop.
So where did it come from? One astrophysicist believes it is the upper stage of a Zhuque-2E rocket launched from China in last month. These rockets belong to a Chinese commercial space company called LandSpace, which successfully launched 10 satellites into orbit on September 15th.
What is surprising is that this doesn’t happen more often given the increased number of launches around the world as well as the debris tossed over the side of the International Space Station (ISS). The New York Times reported this summer that in 2025 the US Space Force issued alerts related to about 820 pieces of debris falling to Earth. Fortunately, most of it burns up during reentry or hits the ocean.
Should you be a worried farmer, or just someone interested in what is coming down in the near future, you can visit the Satellite Re-entry Tracker. The image below shows the rocket bodies currently in orbit being tracked by the site.
Image (Credit): Rocket bodies being tracked by the Satellite Re-entry Tracker as of October 21, 2026. (Satellite Re-entry Tracker)
Do you need something to do tonight? How about spending some time searching for a black hole or two in our Milky Way?
If you don’t believe me, then check out the website for Black Hole Hunters. You will be searching data obtained from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Within this data are an black holes that can be detected through gravitational microlensing where a large object passes in front of a star and bends that star’s light.
The site states it has already worked with about 23,300 volunteers who have completed about 23 percent of the workload. That means there is still plenty of work still remaining. You do not need any special training, just your eyes and your curiosity.
It it not clear why they have not turned this over to AI. Maybe humans can still do something that AI cannot yet do. Or maybe this work is training the AI. Whatever the case, it is still something fun and unique. And when someone asked you waht you did the other night, you have an answer that may turn a head or two.
So start searching.
Image (Credit): Sample light curve graph you would view as a volunteer. (Black Hole Hunters)
A two-stage, H3-24L rocket lit up the predawn skies over Tanegashima Space Center on the southern tip of Japan early on Tuesday, October 20th (3:41 p.m. EDT on October 19th), carrying a mission headed for the Red Planet: the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Martian Moons eXploration (MMX)…The mission is complex, set to explore the moons of Mars with a series of flybys past Deimos before rendezvous with and landing on Phobos. If all goes well, MMX will collect and return a sample from Phobos and return it to Earth. The agency’s goal is nothing less than to understand the potato-shaped moons’ origins.
One side of WASP-17b’s atmosphere extends farther into space than the other, giving this intensely hot giant planet an uneven outline. Astronomers have now mapped that distortion with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), finding a pattern consistent with predictions of how heat and powerful winds shape a world with permanent day and night sides. WASP-17b is a hot Jupiter, a giant planet that orbits close to its star, about 1,300 light-years from Earth. The study, co-led by Cornell University in the United States and the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, was published in Nature Astronomy. It marks the first application of a method called transmission strings, developed at Bristol by astrophysicists Dr. David Grant and Dr. Hannah Wakeford.
Astronomers at the University of Warwick have discovered that white dwarf stars can display a surprising variety of colors, including green, pink, purple, yellow, and cyan. Among their findings is the first known star that would appear genuinely green to the human eye. For most stars, color is closely tied to temperature. Cooler stars appear orange, stars like our Sun look white, and the hottest stars shine pale blue. The relationship is similar to heating a piece of iron, which changes from red to orange and eventually white as its temperature rises.
The rapidly growing census of exoplanets now includes over a thousand multi-planet systems, revealing architectures that span more than four orders of magnitude in mass and five in orbital scale. Explaining the origin of this striking diversity remains a central challenge for planet formation theory, compounded by observational biases that limit access to Solar System-like regimes. Here we introduce architecture-agnostic metrics to uniformly analyse four independently defined samples of multi-planet systems, uncovering unifying patterns across their diversity. We identify a clear bimodality in system masses, dividing known architectures into two distinct families. The lower-mass family, predominantly hosted by subsolar-to-solar stars, exhibits tightly packed configurations with mass distributions consistent with the ‘peas-in-a-pod’ pattern and modal dynamical excitation comparable with that of the Solar System. By contrast, the high-mass family forms in metal-rich environments around solar-to-supersolar stars, displays gravitationally compact architectures and is an order of magnitude dynamically hotter than both the Solar System and the lower-mass counterparts. Their high level of dynamical excitation points to violent evolutionary pathways driven by global instabilities and planet–planet scattering. Together, these results show that the architectures of planetary systems are born from the combined influence of formation processes and host star properties. Signatures of these roots are preserved across the post-formation dynamical evolution that reshaped most known multi-planet systems.
Citation: Turrini, D., Danielski, C., Polychroni, D. et al. Two families of multi-planet systems with distinct architectures and stellar hosts. Nat Astron (2026).
