Space News & Blog Articles

The ongoing saga of the New Horizons mission—will it get truncated and its science team disbanded?—may have some resolution. Dr. Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters announced last Friday that mission operations will continue until at least the end of the decade.

Fifty-five million light-years away, in the galaxy known as M87, lies a supermassive black hole. It is a powerfully active black hole with a mass of 6.5 billion Suns, and in 2019 it was the first black hole to be imaged directly. The radio image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) shows a halo of ambient light warped by the black hole’s gravity and directed our way. On one side of the halo, the light is brighter, which according to general relativity is due to the rotation or spin of the black hole. It was the first direct confirmation that the black hole rotates. A new study published in Nature has given us more rotational evidence.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are some of the most violent events in the universe. Some have a power output equivalent to all of the other stars in the observable universe, at least in the spectrum of gamma rays. But we know very little about them. A new paper from researchers on an interdisciplinary team from seven countries puts forth a new theory about how at least one type of GRB happens – when a binary of two specific types of stars collapses and forms a black hole.

The Moon will be a popular destination for space programs worldwide in the coming years. By 2025, NASA’s Artemis III mission will land the first astronauts (“the first woman and first person of color”) onto the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo Era, over fifty years ago. They will be joined by multiple space agencies, as per the Artemis Accords, that will send European, Canadian, Japanese, and astronauts of other nationalities to the lunar surface. These will be followed in short order by taikonauts (China), cosmonauts (Russia), and vyomanauts (India), who will conduct similarly lucrative research and exploration.

A recent study examines how the Earth was hit by blasts from supernovae (plural form of supernova (SN)) that occurred 3 million years ago (Mya) and 7 Mya with the goal of ascertaining the distances of where these blasts originated. Using the live (not decaying) radioactive isotope 60-Fe, a team of researchers at the University of Illinois was able to determine the approximate astronomical distances to the blasts, which they refer to as Pliocene Supernova (SN Plio, 3 Mya) and the Miocene Supernova (SN Mio, 7 Mya).

Barnard’s Star is a small red dwarf just six light-years from Earth. Despite its proximity, it was only noticed in 1916 when E. E. Barnard found it had a particularly high proper motion. It had appeared in photographic plates taken by Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s, but as a small dim star, no one took notice of it. Since its discovery, Barnard’s Star has been one of the most studied red dwarfs.

Tracking spacecraft as they traverse deep space isn’t easy. So far, it’s been done manually, with operators of NASA’s Deep Space Network, one of the most capable communication arrays for contacting probes on interplanetary journeys, checking data from each spacecraft to determine where it is in the solar system. As more and more spacecraft start to make those harrowing trips between planets, that system will not be scalable. So engineers and orbital mechanics experts are rushing to solve this problem – and now a team from Politecnico di Milano has developed an effective technique that would be familiar to anyone who has seen an autonomous car.  

How massive is the Milky Way? It’s an easy question to ask, but a difficult one to answer. Imagine a single cell in your body trying to determine your total mass, and you get an idea of how difficult it can be. Despite the challenges, a new study has calculated an accurate mass of our galaxy, and it’s smaller than we thought.

Since time immemorial, humans have gazed up at the stars and wondered if we’re alone in the universe. We have asked if there are other intelligent beings out there in the vastness of the cosmos, also known as extraterrestrial intelligence (ET). Yet, despite our best efforts, we have yet to confirm the existence of ET outside of the Earth. While the search continues, it’s fair to speculate if they might look “human” or humanoid in appearance, or if they could look like something else entirely. Here, we present a general examination and discussion with astrobiologists pertaining to what ET might look like and what environmental parameters (e.g., gravity, atmospheric makeup, stellar activity) might cause them to evolve differently than humans.

It’s a basic fact we’ve all learned in school. Drop any object, be it a baseball, feather, or cat, and it will fall toward the Earth at exactly the same rate. The cat will fortunately land on its feet thanks to a bit of feline grace, but the point is that everything falls at the same rate under gravity. It doesn’t matter what an object is made of, or how heavy it is. While we’ve all been taught this fact, calling it a fact was, until recently, a bit of a lie.

Exoplanet studies have come a long way in a short time! To date, 5,523 exoplanets have been confirmed in 4,117 systems, with another 9,867 candidates awaiting confirmation. With all these planets available for study, exoplanet researchers have been shifting their focus from detection to characterization – i.e., looking for potential signs of life and biological activity (biosignatures). Some major breakthroughs are expected in the coming years, thanks in part to next-generation observatories like NASA’s James Webb and Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the ESA’s PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission.

As the search for dark matter particles continues to yield nothing, astronomers continue to look at ways these elusive particles might be found. One general method is to look for evidence of dark matter particle decay. Although dark matter doesn’t interact strongly with regular matter, some dark matter models predict that dark matter particles can interact with each other, causing them to decay into regular particles. There have been several searches for this effect, but there’s no clear evidence yet. But a new study suggests looking at white dwarfs could be a good approach.

There may come a day when we grow weary of JWST images. But it’s not today. Today, we can lose ourselves in the space telescope’s engrossing image of NGC 6822, also called Barnard’s Galaxy.

The upcoming solar eclipses and the current high sunspot activity means it’s a great time to observe the Sun. Eclipses also mean that large groups of people will be together to view these events. However, rule #1 for astronomy is to never look at the Sun with unprotected eyes, especially with a telescope or binoculars.

If we could wind the clock back billions of years, we’d see our Solar System the way it used to be. Planetesimals and other rocky bodies were constantly colliding with each other, and new objects would coalesce out of the debris. Asteroids rained down on the planets and their moons. The gas giants were migrating and contributing to the chaos by destroying gravitational relationships and creating new ones. Even moons and moonlets would’ve been part of the cascade of collisions and impacts.

Astronomers are working hard to understand biosignatures and how they indicate life’s presence on an exoplanet. But each planet we encounter is a unique puzzle. When it comes to planetary atmospheres, carbon is a big piece of the puzzle because it has a powerful effect on climate and biogeochemistry. If scientists can figure out how and where a planet’s carbon comes from and how it behaves in the atmosphere, they’ve made progress in solving the puzzle.

In 1960, while preparing for the first meeting on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), legendary astronomer and SETI pioneer Dr. Frank Drake unveiled his probabilistic equation for estimating the number of possible civilizations in our galaxy – aka. The Drake Equation. A key parameter in this equation was ne, the number of planets in our galaxy capable of supporting life – aka. “habitable.” At the time, astronomers were not yet certain other stars had systems of planets. But thanks to missions like Kepler, 5523 exoplanets have been confirmed, and another 9,867 await confirmation!

On Sunday, September 23rd, the Sample Retrieval Capsule (SRC) from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission landed in the Utah desert. Shortly thereafter, recovery teams arrived in helicopters, inspected and secured the samples, and flew them to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). On Monday, the sample canister was transferred to the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate (ARES) in Houston, Texas. Yesterday, on Tuesday, September 26th, NASA announced that the process of unsealing and removing the samples from the canister had begun with the removal of the initial lid.

Earth was once entirely molten. Planetary scientists call this phase in a planet’s evolution a magma ocean, and Earth may have had more than one magma ocean phase. Earth cooled and, over 4.5 billion years, became the vibrant, life-supporting world it is today.

It looks like India’s Chandrayaan-3 succumbed to the cold, and its mission is over. The frigid lunar night lasted about two weeks, and a new day has dawned. With that day came hopes of a sunlit revival for the lander and the rover, but the India Space Research Organization (ISRO) says the chances of the spacecraft awakening in the Sun are diminishing by the hour.

The Search for Life is focused on the search for biosignatures. Planetary life leaves a chemical fingerprint on a planet’s atmosphere, and scientists are trying to work out which chemicals in what combinations and amounts are a surefire indicator of life. Martian methane is one they’re puzzling over right now.