Space News & Blog Articles

Galaxy clusters aren’t supposed to be scorching hot when they’re young. Like infants, they should need time to mature before developing their full characteristics. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array have just discovered that nature doesn’t always follow the same script.

Galaxies don’t always die dramatically. Sometimes they fade away, slowly strangled by the very black holes at their hearts. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimetre Array have caught one such death in progress, revealing a surprisingly subtle method of galactic murder.

Newborn stars aren’t gentle. They blast ionised gas into space, carving luminous paths through the darkness. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has just captured fresh images of one of these stellar outbursts, showing bright ribbons of pink and green gas stretching across 32 light years of space.

NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula in the Perseus Molecular Cloud. The cloud is relatively nearby in astronomical terms, only about 1000 light-years away. The nebula is a very active star-forming region, and since it's so close, it's very well-studied. Most of the cloud is basically invisible, but NGC 1333 is one of two visible structures.

Betelgeuse is the star that everybody can't wait to see blow up, preferably sooner than later. That's because it's a red supergiant on the verge of becoming a supernova and there hasn't been one explode this close in recorded human history. It's been changing its brightness and showing strange surface behavior, which is why astronomers track its activity closely. Are these changes due to its aging process? Do they mean it's about to blow up? Probably not.

Bit by bit, scientists are piecing together Mars' climate history. Thanks to orbiters armed with powerful cameras and rovers carrying suites of scientific instruments, the red planet's history is becoming clearer year-by-year. In the past decade or so, evidence of Mars' ancient habitability is becoming more and more convincing.

New Space is a term now commonly used around the rocketry and satellite industries to indicate a new, speed focused model of development that takes its cue from the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and (hopefully don’t) break things.” Given that several of the founders of rocketry and satellite companies have a Silicon Valley background, that probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but the mindset has resulted in an exponential growth in the number of satellites in orbit, and also an exponential decrease in the cost of getting them to orbit. A new paper, recently published in pre-print form in arXiv from researchers at Schmidt Space and a variety of research institutes, lays out plans for the Lazuli Space Observatory, which hopes to apply that same mindset to flagship-level space observatory missions.