Somewhere around the year 774 CE, the Sun erupted with extraordinary violence. High energy particles slammed into Earth’s atmosphere, triggering nuclear reactions that produced radioactive carbon-14. Trees across the planet absorbed this carbon and locked it into their wood, preserving a record of that ancient solar storm that scientists can still read today.
The atmospheres of exoplanets have been a focal point of the field lately, with the James Webb Space Telescope taking a look at as many as it can manage. But time on the world’s most powerful space telescope is valuable, and getting a complete picture of any such atmosphere is difficult without that significant time commitment. So a multidisciplinary team of researchers have come up with an alternative mission that is very specialized at capturing as much information as they can about exoplanet atmospheres, but also with a fraction of the budget of flagship missions like JWST. The mission, known as the EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope (EXCITE), has one feature the JWST doesn’t though - a gondola.
Astronomers want to collect as much data as possible using as many systems as possible. Sometimes that requires coordination between instruments. The teams that run the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the upcoming Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (Ariel) missions will have plenty of opportunity for that once both telescopes are online in the early 2030s. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from the Ariel-JWST Synergy Working Group details just how exactly the two systems can work together to better analyze exoplanets.
Four years ago, astronomers spotted a distant supermassive black hole swallowing an entire star. The star had wandered to close to the SMBH, and the black hole's powerful gravity prevented its escape. It was a tidal disruption event (TDE), and now, four years later, the energy output from the TDE is still rising.
It's finally happened: Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX, the company he founded in 2002 with the goal of creating the first self-sustaining city on Mars, will no longer be focusing on Mars. As he announced on Feb. 8th via X, the social media platform he acquired in 2023, the company will now focus on creating a self-sustaining city on the Moon. Musk cited several reasons for this pivot, including a shorter development timeline ("less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years"), faster transit times, and more regular launch windows.
Data from NASA’s long defunct Magellan radar-imaging mission to Venus has made the first indirect detection of a large lava tube (pyroduct) on the Western flank of our sister planet’s massive Nyx Mons shield volcano.
New sungrazing comet C/2026 A1 MAPS could put on a fine show in April… but it will have to survive a blazing close passage near the Sun first.
Sending a mission to the Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) is the most effective way of actually directly imaging a potentially habitable planet, as well as its atmosphere, and even possibly some of its cities. But, the SGL is somewhere around 650-900 AU away, making it almost 4 times farther than even Voyager 1 has traveled - and that’s the farthest anything human has made it so far. It will take Voyager 1 another 130+ years to reach the SGL, so obviously traditional propulsion methods won’t work to get any reasonably sized craft there in any reasonable timeframe. A new paper by an SGL mission’s most vocal proponent, Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, walks through the different types of propulsion methods that might eventually get us there - and it looks like we would have a lot of work to do if we plan to do it anytime soon.
Free-Floating Planets, or as they are more commonly known, Rogue Planets, wander interstellar space completely alone. Saying there might be a lot of them is a bit of an understatement. Recent estimates put the number of Rogue Planets at something equivalent to the number of stars in our galaxy. Some of them, undoubtedly, are accompanied by moons - and some of those might even be the size of Earth. A new paper, accepted for publication into the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and also available in pre-print on arXiv, by David Dahlbüdding of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and his co-authors, describes how some of those rogue exo-moons might even have liquid water on their surfaces.
Most evidence shows that supermassive black holes (SMBH) sit in the center of massive galaxies like ours. Their masses can be extraordinary; many billions of times more massive than the Sun. All that concentrated mass has a powerful effect on their surroundings.
NASA's Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) was built for the ambitious purpose of performing an all-sky survey. The data it collects from more than 450 million galaxies and 100 million stars in the Milky Way over its two-year mission will help scientists explore the origins of the Universe and its evolution over time. But that doesn't mean scientists can't occasionally take a break from investigating the deepest cosmological mysteries to take a peek at an interstellar object (ISO), right?
Mars’ water disappeared somewhere, but scientists have been disagreeing for years about where exactly it went. Data from rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity, along with orbiting satellites such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ExoMars have shown that Mars used to be a wet world with an active hydrodynamic cycle. Obviously it isn’t anymore, but where did all the water go? A new paper that collects data from at least six different instruments on three different spacecraft provides some additional insight into that question - by showing that dust storms push water into the Red Planet’s atmosphere, where it is actively destroyed, all year round.
The Moon has a long history of being smacked by large rocks. Its pock-marked, cratered surface is evidence of that. Scientists expect that, as part of those impacts, some debris would be scattered into space - and that we should be able to track it down. But so far, there have been startlingly few discoveries of these Lunar-origin Asteroids (LOAs) despite their theoretical abundance. A new paper from Yixuan Wu and their colleagues at Tsinghua University explains why - and how the Vera Rubin Observatory might help with finding them.
Fans of the Star Wars franchise will surely remember the iconic scene where Luke Skywalker steps out of his uncle and aunt's home on Tatooine to contemplate his future. Looking to the far horizon, wondering if he will ever get off that desolate desert planet, he gazes upon two setting suns. Naturally, some purists (like myself) would be quick to point out that Lucas "borrowed" this idea from the late and great Frank Herbert (creator of the Dune franchise). Nevertheless, the scene masterfully illustrates why Tatooine is a hostile, unforgiving planet where the indigenous inhabitants are nomads or salvagers, and the primary industry is "moisture farming."
A major theme in communist governments is the idea of central planning. Every five years, the central authorities in communist countries lay out their goals for the country over the course of the next five years, which can range from limiting infant mortality to increasing agricultural yield. China, the largest current polity ruled by communists, recently released its fifteenth five-year plan, which lays out its priorities for 2026-2030. This one, accompanied by a press release of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s state-owned giant aerospace corporation, has plenty of ambitious goals for its space sector.
Origami and space exploration might not seem like they have much in common, but the traditional paper-folding technique solves one massive problem for space exploration missions - volume. Satellites and probes that launch in rocket housings are constrained by very restrictive requirements about their physical size, and options for assembling larger structures in orbit are limited to say the least. Anything that can fold up like an origami structure and then expand out to reach a fully functional size is welcome in the space community, and a new paper published in Communications Engineering by Xin Ning of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and his lab describes a novel use case for the idea - electromagnetic waveguides.
In this period of heightened geopolitical flux, enthusiasm for advances in planetary exploration can be dampened. But that's not stopping NASA from forging ahead in its efforts.
For years the scientific consensus was that a supermassive black hole (SMBH) resides in the center of the Milky Way. There's plenty of evidence that the SMBH, named Sagittarius A-star, sits in the Galactic Center (GC). But there were still lingering doubts.
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