Space News & Blog Articles

Sometimes humans get ahead of ourselves. We embark on grand engineering experiments without really understanding what the long-term implications of such projects are. Climate change itself it a perfect example of that - no one in the early industrial revolution realized that, more than 100 years later, the emissions from their combustion engines would increase the overall global temperature and risk millions of people's lives and livelihoods, let alone the impact it would have on the species we share the world with. According to a new release from the Salata Institute at Harvard, we seem to be going down the same blind path with a different engineering challenge in this century - satellite megaconstellations.

This is Part 3 in a series on the age of the universe. Read Parts 1 and 2.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST ) was designed to look back in time and study galaxies that existed shortly after the Big Bang. In so doing, scientists hoped to gain a better understanding of how the Universe has evolved from the earliest cosmological epoch to the present. When Webb first trained its advanced optics and instruments on the early Universe, it discovered a new class of astrophysical objects: bright red sources that were dubbed "Little Red Dots" (LRDs). Initially, astronomers hypothesized that they could be massive star-forming regions, but this was inconsistent with established cosmological models.

Dwarf Lab’s newest entry into the smartscope market is also the smallest yet.

Humanity has worked itself into a position where we can detect a single high-energy particle from space and wonder where in Nature it came from. Billions of people likely don't care at all about such matters, but for those that are naturally curious and are fortunate enough to have the time to indulge their curiosity, an extremely energetic neutrino detected in 2023 was a remarkable event, and may even turn out to be an historic one.

Astronomers have been collecting data for generations, and the sad fact is that not all of it has yet been fully analyzed. There are still discoveries hiding in the dark recesses of data archives strewn throughout the astronomical world. Some of them are harder to access than others, such as actual physical plates containing star positions from more than a hundred years ago. But as more and more of this data is archived, astronomers also keep coming up with ever more impressive tools to analyze it. A recent paper from Cyril Tasse of the Paris Observatory and his co-authors, published recently in Nature Astronomy describes an algorithm that analyzes hundreds of thousands of previously unknown data points in radio telescope archives - and they found some interesting features in it.

This is Part 2 in a series on the age of the universe. Read Part 1.

In this photo, the Artemis II mission's Orion spacecraft is shown positioned on Launch Pad 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The image shows the second stage, comprising the Orion Crew Module, the European Service Module, the Launch Abort System, and the spacecraft adapter, all enclosed by the second-stage panels. Just visible beneath is the upper section of the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA's next-generation super-heavy launch vehicle that will send crewed spacecraft and payloads beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in the near future.

The JWST has spotted a system of five merging, interacting galaxies only about 800 million years post Big-Bang. This is sooner than astronomers thought, and is another example of the powerful space telescope forcing us to reconsider our understanding of the early Universe.

New tools unlock new discoveries in science. So when a new type of non-destructive technology becomes widely available, it's inevitable that planetary scientists will get their hands on it to test it on some meteorites. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Estrid Naver of the Technical University of Denmark and her co-authors, describes the use of two of those (relatively) new tools to one of the most famous meteorites in the world - NWA 7034 - also known as Black Beauty.

In the early 1960s, Dutch astronomer Adriaan Blaauw observed stars moving at unusually high speeds moving through the Milky Way. These stars, as it turned out, were unbound objects that had been kicked out of the Milky Way and periodically looped back and forth through the disk. Blaauw proposed that these stars originated in binary systems and were ejected when the companion star collapsed and exploded off its outer layers in a supernova. By 2005, even faster runaway stars were observed, leading to the designation "hypervelocity stars."

Aging stars can completely destroy their planets.

This is Part 1 in a series on the age of the universe.

Magnetism on the Moon has always been a bit confusing. Remote sensing probes have noted there is some magnetic signature, but far from the strong cocoon that surrounds Earth itself. Previous attempts to detect it in returned regolith samples blended together all of the rocks in those samples, leading to confusion about the source - whether they were caused by a strong inner dynamo in ages past, or by powerful asteroid impacts that magnetized the rocks they hit. A new study from Yibo Yang of Zhejiang University and Lin Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published recently in the journal Fundamental Research, shows that the right answer seems to be - a little of both.

A galaxy's powerful magnetic fields have a fundamental effect on light, and it's all because of dust. Tiny dust grains in interstellar space are elongated rather than spherical. In the presence of a magnetic field, these grains align themselves with the field. That means they preferentially absorb and reflect light.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’s making space-based artificial intelligence the “immediate focus” of a newly expanded company that not only builds rockets and satellites, but also controls xAI’s generative-AI software and the X social-media platform.

This Hubble Picture of the Month shows NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy about 185 million light-years away. It's known for its striking appearance, where dramatic dust lanes can't quite block out the light from its central region. The dusty lanes are likely from a past merger. In fact, astronomers think all lenticular galaxies are the result of past mergers, or at least gravitational interactions with other galaxies.

The light, rare element boron, better known as the primary component of borax, a longtime household cleaner, was almost mined to exhaustion in parts of the old American West. But boron could arguably be an unsung hero in cosmic astrobiology, although it's still not listed as one of the key elements needed for the onset of life.

Observations show that Jupiter's icy moon Europa has a thick icy shell covering a warm ocean. The ocean is chemically-rich, and may have all the essential ingredients for life. That's why Europa is such a juicy target in the search for life, and why NASA's Europa Clipper and the ESA's JUICE are on their way to examine the moon in greater detail.

We see stars as the main constituent of galaxies. They're the visible part, and they're what announce a galaxy's presence. But a galaxy's gas supply is its lifeblood, and tracing the gas as it flows in and through a galaxy reveals its inner workings.

The search for life-supporting worlds in the Solar System includes the Jovian moon Europa. Yes, it's an iceberg of a world, but underneath its frozen exterior lies a deep, salty ocean and a nickel-iron core. It's heated by tidal flexing, and that puts pressure on the interior ocean, sending water and salts to the surface. As things turn out, there's also evidence of ammonia-bearing compounds on the surface. All these things combine to provide a fascinating look at Europa's geology and potential as a haven for life.