Humankind is getting very good at looking deep into space: We have already seen two neutron stars colliding, we have encountered mysterious radio blasts and we are about to see, for the first time, the event horizon of a black hole.

But there are still some surprises out there, right here in our own corner of the Universe.

A star orbiting a supermassive black hole at the centre of a distant galaxy was ripped apart in a tidal disruption event, the furthest ever observed.

Red giants are dying stars, in advanced stages of stellar evolution, which have depleted the hydrogen in their cores. In a study published today in Nature Communications, a team of astronomers mainly from Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA), have found new evidence that red giant stars experience “glitches”—sharp structural variations—in their inner core.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to look directly inside a star. However, a technique dubbed asteroseismology, which measures oscillations similar to “earthquakes” in stars, can provide indirect glimpses of stellar interiors. The “glitches” can affect these oscillations, or the frequencies and paths of gravity and sound waves traveling through the stellar interior.

As IA researcher Margarida Cunha explains, “Waves propagating inside stars induce minute stellar brightness variations that can be detected with highly precise space-based instruments. These waves reveal the conditions of the medium where they propagate, which is to say, the physical properties of the stellar interiors.”

The European Space Agency recently announced a new mission of its science program: a small telescope orbiting the Earth dubbed Arrakhis.

The European Space Agency (ESA) recently announced a new mission of its science.

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Instead, this nimble satellite will punch hugely above its weight and try to track down one of the most elusive and mysterious substances in the universe: dark matter. This is the term given to the hypothetical invisible matter that is thought to be more abundant than normal matter and has a similar gravitational effect on its surroundings.