Space News & Blog Articles

Buried in the treasure trove of the Gaia catalog were two strange black hole systems. These were black holes orbiting sun-like stars, a situation that astronomers long thought impossible. Recently a team has proposed a mechanism for creating these kinds of oddballs.

SpaceX’s Starship launch system went through its sixth flight test today, and although the Super Heavy booster missed out on being caught back at its launch pad, the mission checked off a key test objective with President-elect Donald Trump in the audience.

Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we all have a vivid image of the Crab Nebula emblazoned in our mind’s eyes. It’s the remnant of a supernova explosion Chinese astronomers recorded in 1056. However, the Crab Nebula is more than just a nebula; it’s also a pulsar.

The existence of gigantic black holes in the very early universe challenges our assumptions of how black holes form and grow. New research suggests that these monsters may have found their origins in the earliest epochs of the Big Bang.

The 2024 China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition was held in Zhuhai last week – from November 12th to 17th, 2024. Since 1996, and with support from the Chinese aerospace industry, this biennial festival features actual products, trade talks, technological exchanges, and an air show. This year’s big highlight was China’s newly announced reusable space cargo shuttle, the Haolong (Chinese for “dragon”). According to chief designer Fang Yuanpeng, the spacecraft has entered the engineering phase and will be ready for space in the near future.

In recent years, astronomers have developed techniques to measure the metal content of stars with extreme accuracy. With that capability, astronomers have examined sibling stars to see how their metallicity differs. Some of these co-natal stars have pronounced differences in their metallicity.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a small galaxy, just a tenth of the Milky Way’s mass. It is about 160,000 light years away, which is remarkably close in cosmic terms. In the southern hemisphere it spans the width of 20 Moons in the night sky. While the galaxy seems timeless and unchanging to our short human lives, it is, in fact, a dynamic system undergoing a near collision with our galaxy. Now astronomers are beginning to observe that process.

Back in 2007, I talked with Rob Manning, engineer extraordinaire at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he told me something shocking. Even though he had successfully led the entry, descent, and landing (EDL) teams for three Mars rover missions, he said the prospect of landing a human mission on the Red Planet might be impossible.

One of the surprise findings with the James Webb Space Telescope is the discovery of massive galaxies in the early Universe. The expectations were that only young, small, baby galaxies would exist within the first billion years after the Big Bang. But some of the newly found galaxies appear to be as large and as mature as galaxies that we see today.  

We have been spoiled over recent years with first the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and then the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST.) Both have opened our eyes on the Universe and made amazing discoveries. One subject that has received attention from both is the derivation of the Hubble Constant – a constant relating the velocity of remote galaxies and their distances. A recent paper announces that JWST has just validated the results of previous studies by the Hubble Space Telescope to accurately measure its value. 

The Breakthrough Starshot program aims to cross the immense distances to the nearest star in just decades. Using a high-powered laser to propel a reflective sail technology to relativistic speeds is their mission. The selection of sail material is key to its success as it must be lightweight while being able to withstand acceleration and radiation from the laser. A recent study explores various materials and proposes that core-shell structures—spherical particles composed of two different materials—could be a promising solution.

The Earth has always been bombarded with rocks from space. It’s true to say though that there were more rocks flying around the Solar System during earlier periods of its history. A team of researchers have been studying a meteorite impact from 3.26 billion years ago. They have calculated this rock was 200 times bigger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The event would have triggered tsunamis mixing up the oceans and flushing debris from the land. The newly available organic material allowed organisms to thrive. 

RALEIGH, N.C. — Particle physicist Hitoshi Murayama admits that he used to worry about being known as the “most hated man” in his field of science. But the good news is that now he can joke about it.

We are all familiar with the atmosphere of the Earth and part of this, the ionosphere, is a layer of weakly ionized plasma. It extends from 50 to 1,500 km above the planet. It’s a diffuse layer but sufficient to interfere with satellite communications and navigation systems too. A team of researchers have come up with an intriguing idea to utilise millions of mobile phones to help map the ionosphere by relying on their GPS antennas.

Imagine a black hole with the mass of the asteroid Ceres. It would be no larger than a bacterium and practically undetectable. But if such black holes are common in the Universe, they would affect the motions of stars and galaxies, just as we observe. Perhaps they are the source of dark matter.

The seasonal variations of methane in the Martian atmosphere is an intriguing clue that there might be life hiding under the surface of the red planet. But we won’t know for sure until we go digging for it.

For decades, astronomers have used powerful instruments to capture images of the cosmos in various wavelengths. This includes optical images, where visible light is observed, and images that capture non-visible radiation, ranging from the radio and infrared to the X-ray and Gamma-ray wavelengths. However, these two-dimensional images do not allow scientists to infer what the objects look like in three dimensions. Transforming these images into a 3D space could lead to a better understanding of the physics that drives our Universe.

Ever since William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, astronomers have been eager to find new planets on the outer edge of the solar system. But after the discovery of Neptune in 1846, we’ve found no other large planets. Sure, we discovered Pluto and other dwarf planets beyond it, but nothing Earth-sized or larger. If there is some planet nine, or “Planet X” lurking out there, we have yet to find it.

A stellar odd couple 700 light-years away is creating a chaotically beautiful display of colourful, gaseous filaments. The Hubble captured the pair, named R Aquarii, and their symbiotic interactions. Every 44 years the system’s violent eruptions blast out filaments of gas at over 1.6 million kilometers per hour.

In the earliest moments of the Universe, the first photons were trapped in a sea of ionized gas. They scattered randomly with the hot nuclei and electrons of the cosmic fireball, like tiny boats in a stormy sea. Then, about 370,000 years after the big bang, the Universe cooled enough for the photons to be free. After one last scattering, they could finally ply interstellar space. Some of them traveled across 14 billion years of space and time to reach Earth, where we see them as part of the cosmic microwave background. The remnant first light of creation.

Space tourism here is here to stay, and will likely remain a permanent fixture of near-Earth activities for the foreseeable future. But is it worth it?