Space News & Blog Articles

Exoplanets come in a variety of forms and one particular type, the Hot Jupiters have recently captured the attention of astronomers. They are usually found orbiting extremely close to their host star, completing an orbit in a few days or even hours. It has been thought that they migrated further out from the star, bullying other planets out of their way. Sometimes hurling them into the star or throwing them out of the system entirely. A new study however, suggests their evolution is not quite so violent since a Hot Jupiter has been found in a system with a Super-Earth and an icy giant. 

Back in the 60’s and 70’s it was all about the Moon. The Apollo program took human beings to the Moon for the first time and now over 50 years later things are really hotting up again. The latest mission to head toward our celestial neighbour is a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching Blue Ghost Mission 1 and the HAKUTO-R lander. The Blue Ghost is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) and it carries a total of 10 NASA payloads, the other is a private Japanese enterprise to explore the Moon. The launch went well and both landers will arrive shortly. 

NASA’s Curiosity Rover has been exploring Mars since 2012 and, more recently has found evidence of ice-free ancient ponds and lakes on the surface. The rover found small undulations like those seen in sandy lake-beds on Earth. They would have been created by wind-driven water moving back and forth across the surface. The inescapable conclusion is that the water would have been open to the elements instead of being covered by ice. The discovery suggests the ripples formed 3.7 billion years ago. 

Gas is the stuff of star formation, and most galaxies have enough gas in their budget to form some stars. However, the picture is a little different for dwarf galaxies. They lack the mass required to hold onto their gas when more massive neighbouring galaxies are siphoning it off.

The ISS’s orbit is slowly decaying. While it might seem a permanent fixture in the sky, the orbiting space laboratory is only about 400 km above the planet. There might not be a lot of atmosphere at that altitude. However, there is still some, and interacting with that is gradually slowing the orbital speed of the station, decreasing its orbit, and, eventually, pulling it back to Earth. That is, if we didn’t do anything to stop it. Over the 25-year lifespan of the station, hundreds of tons of hydrazine rocket fuel have been carried to it to enable rocket-propelled orbital maneuvers to keep its orbit from decaying. But what if there was a better way – one that was self-powered, inexpensive, and didn’t require constant refueling?

What came first, galaxies or planets? The answer has always been galaxies, but new research is changing that idea.

DwarfLab’s new Dwarf 3 smartscope packs a powerful punch in a small unit.

There’s plenty of action at the center of the galaxy, where a supermassive black hole (SMBH) known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) literally holds the galaxy together. Part of that action is the creation of gigantic flares from Sgr A*, which can give off energy equivalent to 10 times the Sun’s annual energy output. However, scientists have been missing a key feature of these flares for decades – what they look like in the mid-infrared range. But now, a team led by researchers at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy has published a paper that details what a flare looks like in those frequencies for the first time.

Water is the essence of life. Every living thing on Earth contains water within it. The Earth is rich with life because it is rich with water. This fundamental connection between water and life is partly due to water’s extraordinary properties, but part of it is due to the fact that water is one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe. Made from one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen, its structure is simple and strong. The hydrogen comes from the primordial fire of the Big Bang and is by far the most common element. Oxygen is created in the cores of large stars, along with carbon and nitrogen, as part of the CNO fusion cycle.

The problem with debating a flat-Earther is that they didn’t arrive at their conclusions from the weight evidence, so using the evidence isn’t going to work to change their minds.

The traditional theory of black hole formation seems to struggle to explain how black holes can merge into larger more massive black holes yet they have been seen with LIGO. It’s possible that they may have formed at the beginning of time and if so, then they may be a worthy candidate to explain dark matter but only if there are enough of them. A team of researchers recently searched for microlensing events from black holes in the Large Magellanic Cloud but didn’t find enough to account for more than a fraction of dark matter. 

Few places in the solar system are better suited to a balloon than Titan. The combination of low gravity and high atmospheric density makes Saturn’s largest moon ideal for a lighter than “air” vehicle, and the idea to put one there has been around for at least two decades. So why haven’t we yet? The simple answer is the size of the necessary balloon is too large for the existing launch platforms. But a team from Boeing, the prime contractor on the Space Launch System (SLS), believes their new launch platform will be capable of getting a large balloon into orbit, along with its necessary scientific payload – and start unlocking the mysteries of this intriguing moon.

Mars is well-known for its dust storms, which occur every Martian year during summer in the southern hemisphere. Every three Martian years (five and a half Earth years), these storms grow so large that they are visible from Earth and will engulf the entire planet for months. These storms pose a significant threat to robotic missions, generating electrostatic charges that can interfere with their electronics or cause dust to build up on their solar panels, preventing them from drawing enough power to remain operational.

The Arecibo Message, transmitted on November 16th, 1974, from the Arecibo Observatory, was humanity’s first true attempt at Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). The message was a simple pictorial signal in binary code composed by famed astronomer and SETI researcher Frank Drake (inventor of the Drake Equation) with the assistance of Sagan and other prominent astronomers. The message was and was aimed toward Messier 13 (NGC 6205 or “The Great Hercules Cluster”), a globular star cluster located about 25,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Hercules.

Despite 90 years of research, the nature and influence of Dark Matter continue to elude astronomers and cosmologists. First proposed in the 1960s to explain the rotational curves of galaxies, this invisible mass does not interact with normal matter (except through gravity) and accounts for 85% of the total mass in the Universe. It is also a vital component in the most widely accepted cosmological model of the Universe, the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model. However, according to new research, the hunt for DM could be over as soon as a nearby star goes supernova.

Astronomers have just found one of the youngest planets ever. At only 3 million years old, planet TIDYE-1b (also known as IRAS 04125+2902 b) is practically in its infancy. By comparison, Earth is 4.5 billion years old: that’s 1500 times older. The discovery of a planet this young can teach scientists a lot about the early stages of planet formation, and the peculiarities of this particular one have scientists re-evaluating their models of planetary birth.

Earth and Mars were very similar in their youth. Four billion years ago, both planets had vast, warm seas. But while Earth retained its oceans, the waters of Mars evaporated away or froze beneath its dusty surface. Exactly why these two worlds took such divergent paths is unclear, though it may lie in the origins of their water.

Dark matter made out of axions may have the power to make space-time ring like a bell, but only if it is able to steal energy from black holes, according to new research. 

Most of the time the Sun is pretty well-mannered, but occasionally it’s downright unruly. It sometimes throws extremely energetic tantrums. During these events, a solar flare or a shock wave from a coronal mass ejection (CME) accelerates protons to extremely high velocities. These are called Solar Particle Events or Solar Proton Events (SPEs).

Earth and Mars are the only two rocky planets in the solar system to have moons. Based on lunar rock samples and computer simulations, we are fairly certain that our Moon is the result of an early collision between Earth and a Mars-sized protoplanet called Theia. Since we don’t have rock samples from either Martian moon, the origins of Deimos and Phobos are less clear. There are two popular models, but new computer simulations point to a compromise solution.

The largest magnetic fields in the universe may have found themselves charged up when the first stars began to shine, according to new research.