Space News & Blog Articles

In the more than sixty years where scientists have engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), several potential examples of technological activity (“technosignatures”) have been considered. While most SETI surveys to date have focused on potential radio signals from distant sources, scientists have expanded the search to include other possible examples. This includes other forms of communication (directed energy, neutrinos, gravitational waves, etc.) and examples of megastructures (Dyson Spheres, Clarke Bands, Niven Rings, etc.)

Sailing has been a mainstay of human history for millennia, so it’s no surprise that scientists would apply it to traveling in space. Solar sailing, the most common version, uses pressure from the Sun to push spacecraft with giant sails outward in the solar system. However, there is a more technologically advanced version that several groups think might offer us the best shot at getting to Alpha Centauri – light sailing. Instead of relying on light from the Sun, this technique uses a laser to push an extraordinarily light spacecraft up to speeds never before achieved by anything humans have built. One such project is supported by the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative, initially founded by Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking. A new paper by researchers at Caltech, funded by the Initiative, explores how to test what force a laser would have on a light sail as it travels to another star.

The Hakuto-R 2 mission launched on January 15, 2025. It’s the successor to Hakuto-R, which launched in December 2022 but failed when it lost communications during its descent. Both missions carried rovers, and this image was captured by the rover Resilience as it travels toward the Moon.

A galactic merger is a chaotic event. When two massive structures like galaxies merge, their powerful gravitational forces wrench stars out of their usual orbits in a process called violent relaxation. In essence, the merging galaxies are evolving rapidly, and small perturbations can be amplified as the system moves toward a more stationary state.

Every exoplanet discovery is an opportunity to refine models of planet formation, solar system architecture, habitable zones, and habitability itself. Each new planet injects more data into the scientific endeavour to understand what’s going on and how things got this way. However, some planets have such unusual characteristics that they invite a deeper focus and intense follow-up observations.

According to the Giant Impact Hypothesis, the Moon formed from a massive impact between a primordial Earth and a Mars-sized object (Theia) roughly 4.5 billion years ago. This is largely based on the study of sample rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions and seismic studies, which revealed that the Earth and Moon are similar in composition and structure. Further studies of the surface have revealed features that suggest the planet was once volcanically active, including lunar maria (dark, flat areas filled with solidified lava).

The odds of a sizable asteroid striking Earth are small, but they’re never zero. Large asteroids have struck Earth in the past, causing regional devastation. A really large asteroid strike likely contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. So we shouldn’t be too surprised that astronomers have discovered an asteroid with a better than 1% chance of striking our world. Those odds are large enough we should keep an eye on them, but not large enough that we should start packing bags and fleeing to the hills.

Mars haunts us as a vision of a planet gone wrong. It was once warm and wet, with rivers flowing across its surface and (potentially) simple life residing in its water bodies. Now it’s dry and freezing.

Sometimes, the best innovative ideas come from synthesizing two previous ones. We’ve reported before on the idea of having a balloon explore the atmosphere of Venus, and we closely watched the progress of the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) as part of the Perseverance rover on Mars. When you combine the two, you can solve many of the challenges facing balloon exploration of Venus’ upper atmosphere – the most habitable place in the solar system other than Earth. That is the plan for Dr. Michael Hecht, the principal investigator of the MOXIE system and professor at MIT, and his team for the Exploring Venus with Electrolysis (EVE) project, which recently received as NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I grant as part of the 2025 NIAC awards.

The study of asteroid samples is a highly lucrative area of research and one of the best ways to determine how the Solar System came to be. Given that asteroids are leftover material from the formation of the Solar System, they are likely to contain vital clues about how several key processes took place. This includes how water, organic molecules, and the building blocks of life were distributed throughout the Solar System billions of years ago. For this reason, space agencies have attached a high importance to the retrieval of asteroid samples that are returned to Earth for analysis.

Though it’s a cold, dead planet, Mars still has its own natural beauty about it. This image shows us something we’ll never see on Earth.

What would you do for fun on another planet? Go ballooning in Venus’ atmosphere? Explore the caves of Hyperion? Hike all the way around Mercury? Ride a toboggan down the slopes of Pluto’s ice mountains? Or watch clouds roll by on Mars?

When astronomers detected the first long-predicted gravitational waves in 2015, it opened a whole new window into the Universe. Before that, astronomy depended on observations of light in all its wavelengths.

To the casual observer, the Sun seems to be the one constant and never changing. The reality is that the Sun is a seething mass of plasma, electrically charged gas which is constantly being effected by the Sun’s magnetic field. The unpredictability of the activity on the Sun is one of the challenges that faces modern solar physicists. The impact of coronal mass ejections are one particular aspect that comes with levels of uncertainty of their impact. But machine learning algorithms could perhaps have given us more warning! A new paper suggests algorithms trained on decades of solar activity saw all the signs of increased activity from the region called AR13664 and perhaps can help with future outbursts.

New images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft make Io’s nature clear. It’s the most volcanically active world in the Solar System, with more than 400 active volcanoes. Juno has performed multiple flybys of Io, and images from its latest one show an enormous hotspot near the moon’s south pole.

Comet G3 ATLAS wows southern hemisphere observers and Universe Today readers before it fades from view.

The event horizon is a fascinating part of a black hole’s anatomy. In 2017, telescopes around the world gathered data on the event horizon surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of M87. This was the first time we had ever seen an image of such a phenomenon. Since then, 120,000 more images of the region have been captured and, as astronomers sift through the data, their model of M87’s event horizon has evolved. 

A classic scene from several high sci-fi movies and shows is when the characters approach their new spaceship in space for the first time. It is typically attached to a massive structure – think of the Kuat Drive Yards in Star Wars or the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards around Mars in Star Trek. These gigantic structures play a role akin to what dry docks do for modern navies – they allow for the construction of ships in a relatively controlled environment with access to tools and equipment specialized for their construction. That is the idea behind a new NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to ThinkOrbital, a company specializing in In-space assembly, manufacturing, and construction (ISAM&C). Their idea is to build a “Construction Assembly Destination” in orbit to build spacecraft in space.

Exoplanets have captured the imagination of public and scientists alike and, as the search continues for more, researchers have turned their attention to the evolution of metallicity in the Milky Way. With this answer comes more of an idea about where planets are likely to form in our Galaxy. They have found that stars with high-mass planets have higher metallicity than those with lower amounts of metals. They also found that stars with planets tend to be younger than stars without planets. This suggests planetary formation follows the evolution of a galaxy with a ring of planet formation moving outward over time. 

Astronomers have found two planets around two separate stars that are succumbing to their stars’ intense heat. Both are disintegrating before our telescopic eyes, leaving trails of debris similar to a comet’s. Both are ultra-short-period planets (USPs) that orbit their stars rapidly.

Exoplanet exploration has taken off in recent years, with over 5500 being discovered so far. Some have even been in the habitable zones of their stars. Imaging one such potentially habitable exoplanet is the dream of many exoplanet hunters, however, technology has limited their ability to do that. In particular, one specific piece of technology needs to be improved before we can directly image an exoplanet in the habitable zone of another star – a starshade. Christine Gregg, a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, hopes to contribute to the effort of developing one and has received a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant as part of the 2025 cohort to work on a star shade that is based on a special type of metamaterial.