In the years since Miguel Alcubierre came up with a warp drive solution in 1994, you would occasionally see news headlines saying that warp drives can work. And then a few months later you’ll see that they’ve been ruled out. And then after that you’ll see that warp drives kind of work, but only in limited cases. It seems to constantly go around and around without a clear answer.What gives?
What's on and in a star? What happens at an active galactic nucleus? Answering those question is the goal of a proposed giant interferometer on the Moon. It's called Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager (AeSI) and would deploy a series of 15-30 optical/ultraviolet-sensitive telescopes in a 1-km elliptical array across the lunar surface.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Comet G3 ATLAS wows southern hemisphere observers and Universe Today readers before it fades from view.
When searching for alien life, it’s not unusual to use Earth as a test bed for theories and even practice runs. Perhaps one of the most tantalising places in the Solar System to look for life is Saturn’s moon Enceladus. It has a liquid water interior and it is here that life may just be possible. A team of researchers want to test techniques for searching for life on Enceledaus by exploring the oceans of Earth. They have collected water and ice samples and hope to find chemicals like methane and hydrogen.
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are one of the greater mysteries facing astronomers today, rivaled only by Gravitational Waves (GWs) and Gamma-ray Bursts (GRBs). Originally discovered in 2007 by American astronomer Duncan Lorimer (for whom the “Lorimer Burst“ is named), these shot, intense blasts of radio energy produce more power in a millisecond than the Sun generates in a month. In most cases, FRBs are one-off events that brightly flash and are never heard from again. But in some cases, astronomers have detected FRBs that were repeating in nature, raising more questions about what causes them.
One of my gripes with ‘The Martian’ movie was the depiction of the winds on Mars. The lower air density means that the sort of high speed winds we might experience on Earth carry far less of an impact on Mars. During its 72 flights in the Martian air, NASA’s ingenuity helicopter took meticulous records of the conditions. A new paper has been released and reports upon the wind speeds on the red planet at various altitudes. Previous models suggested wind speeds would not exceed 15 m/s but Ingeniuty saw speeds as high as 25 m/s.
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