Space News & Blog Articles

With the federal government cutting funds for research, scientific organizations are facing a budget crunch. This includes astrophysics and cosmology, where researchers test theories fundamental to our understanding of the Universe. A good example is the search for Dark Matter (DM), which usually consists of smashing protons in particle accelerators to find evidence of this elusive particle. According to a recent study that appeared in the Physical Review Letters, black holes could represent a cheaper, natural alternative.

The discovery of a Saturn-sized gas giant orbiting a small red dwarf is urging astronomers to reconsider their theories of planet formation. Typically, astronomers find larger planets around larger stars, but this discovery breaks that connection. The finding puts pressure on the core-accretion theory, the leading explanation for planet formation.

It's official. NASA's Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Request (FY 2026) has been released, and the news is decidedly mixed. In a previous article, we examined the FY 2026 Budget Request (released on May 2nd) and its recommendations for the coming year. With the release of the FY 2026 Budget, what was previewed and the anxiety it caused for many have been confirmed. While the Budget bolsters funding for NASA's exploration programs for the Moon and Mars, it also contains deep cuts to many other programs and the cancellation of key elements in NASA's Moon to Mars architecture.

Every single organism on Earth, no matter the biome, the kingdom, the domain, whether it's an extremophile in a hot spring or some lithotroph buried in the crust, depends on water.

Astronomers have found another super-Earth. It's about 10 times more massive than Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star 2475 light-years away. These massive Earth-like planets hold key information about how planets form and evolve.

The Hubble Tension is perhaps, one of the most frustratingly unresolved mysteries in cosmology. Here's the problem: when astronomers measure how fast the universe is expanding today using nearby stars, they get one answer. When it's calculated from the afterglow of the Big Bang—the cosmic microwave background—there is a completely different number. The gap between these measurements has persisted for over a decade, surviving countless attempts to explain it away as experimental error. Either the instruments are systematically wrong, or something fundamental about the universe's evolution is missing from our models.

Before diving into their collision, it's worth understanding just how extreme these objects are. A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape once it crosses the "event horizon." Black holes form when the most massive stars collapse at the end of their lives, creating a point of infinite density surrounded by this inescapable boundary.

As the years go by the chances of Europa hosting life seem to keep going down. But it's not out of contention yet.

When the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto and Charon in 2015, it revealed two amazingly complex worlds and an active atmosphere on Pluto. Those snapshots redefined our understanding of the system. Now, new observations using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) taken in 2022 and 2023, show that Pluto's atmosphere is completely different from any other one in the Solar System. For one thing, it contains haze particles that rise and fall as they are heated and cooled.

The idea that the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) will collide emerged after decades of observations by a host of astronomers. The Hubble played a decisive role in the determination during the early 2000s. It was a triumph of precision astronomy and space telescopes. Now, the Hubble has played an equally important role in cancelling the collision.

On the surface (you're welcome for the joke), Venus is not even close to being hospitable to life. But that's not the end of the story.

The challenge in the search for habitable worlds is clear. We need to be able to identify habitable worlds and distinguish between biotic and abiotic processes. Ideally, scientists would do this on entire populations of exoplanets rather than on a case-by-case basis. Exoplanets' natural thermostats might provide a way of doing this.

Mars has received considerable attention in the past few decades, thanks to the many robotic missions exploring it to learn more about its past. NASA and China plan to send astronauts/taikonauts there in the coming decades, and commercial space companies like SpaceX hope to send passengers there sooner. This presents several significant challenges, one of the greatest being the lengthy transit times involved. Using conventional propulsion and low-energy trajectories, it takes 6 to 9 months for crewed spacecraft to reach Mars.

Mars is by far the most Earth-like planet in the solar system…but that’s not saying much.

A new study suggests that unseen geologic activity may lurk just below the thin crust of Venus.

Whenever scientists present new research showing potential biosignatures on an exoplanet, follow-up articles spread like ripples on a pond. Mainstream media usually runs with it, which shows how the issue captures people's attention. The issue of life on other worlds is a compelling one. This is what happened recently with the exoplanet K2-18b.

Twenty years ago, the US Congress instructed NASA to find 90% of near-Earth asteroids threatening Earth. They've made progress finding these asteroids that orbit the Sun and come to within 1.3 astronomical units of Earth. However, they may have to expand their search since astronomers are now finding asteroids co-orbiting Venus that could pose a threat.

The field of exoplanet studies has grown by leaps and bounds in the past twenty years. To date, over 5,900 planets have been confirmed in more than 4,400 planetary systems. Astronomers have even confirmed the presence of a multi-planet system around Proxima Centauri, the closest star outside the Solar System. And yet, astronomers have not confirmed the presence of any exoplanets around Alpha Centauri, the binary system located about 4.344 light-years from Earth (which forms a trinary with Proxima Centauri).

Astronomers with the Event Horizon Telescope have developed a new way to observe the radio sky at multiple frequencies, and it means we will soon be able to capture color images of supermassive black holes.