Space News & Blog Articles

This is Part 1 of a series on topological defects.

Picture a vast invisible doughnut wrapped around a planet, filled with electrons and protons hurtling around at extraordinary speeds. That's a radiation belt, and if your planet has a magnetic field strong enough to trap particles from the solar wind, chances are it has one.

To understand how stars form, astronomers need to watch the process play out in galaxies. That simple fact is behind PHANGS, the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS survey. It's a large-scale, multiwavelength, multitelescope survey of dozens of nearby spiral galaxies. Its targets are galaxies close enough that star-forming features like giant molecular clouds (GMCs), HII regions, and stellar clusters can be resolved.

This is Part 4 of a series on interstellar comets. Read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

In May 2024, people worldwide witnessed beautiful aurorae that appeared far beyond Earth's polar regions. Even the Aurora Borealis, which is usually confined to the Arctic Circle, was visible as far south as Mexico. This rare event was the result of a massive solar storm, the most powerful recorded in over 20 years. As always, this storm bombarded Earth with charged solar particles that interacted with the planet's magnetosphere. The storm also reached Mars, which was witnessed by two orbiters operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) - the Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO).

Astronomers have found an exoplanet that could serve as a benchmark in future studies. It's a rocky planet orbiting an M-type star, and though these planets are plentiful, this one could serve as a benchmark for understanding other M-dwarf exoplanets and their atmospheres. According to the authors of a new study, this new exoplanet could serve as "a reference system for highly irradiated rocky planets."

Neutron stars are the remnants of supernova explosions. They're known for their extreme density, and it's often said and written that a teaspoon of neutron star weighs as much as the combined weight of all of Earth's approximately 8 billion human beings. The only thing denser than a neutron star is a black hole.

This is Part 3 of a series on interstellar comets. Read Parts 1 and 2.

In its earliest moments, the Universe was hot and dense. A plasma sea of quarks and gluons out of which hydrogen, helium, and humans eventually formed. This early cosmic state is sometimes called the primordial soup, and thanks to new research, we now know just how fitting the term is.

Europa is not supposed to look the way it does. Jupiter's icy moon is scarred by a chaotic patchwork of fractured terrain, criss crossed ridges, and disrupted surface regions that suggest something dynamic is happening beneath its frozen shell. Scientists have long suspected that a vast liquid ocean, kept warm by the gravitational kneading of Jupiter's enormous gravity, lies hidden beneath that ice. Now, a new study using the James Webb Space Telescope is adding a crucial piece to the puzzle, and the implications reach right to the heart of astrobiology.

In addition to being a staple of science fiction, the concept of megastructures has long been the subject of serious scientific studies. As famed physicist Freeman Dyson originally proposed in 1960, "Malthusian pressures will ultimately drive an intelligent species" to occupy an "artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star." In short, he theorized that advanced civilizations would disassemble their planet (or planets) to create a structure (which has since come to be called a "Dyson Sphere" that would harness all the energy from their star and provide immense living space.

Our first satellites were little more than repeater stations that propagated our radio and tv signals around the world. But now we live in an age where a fleet of orbiting space telescopes and satellites seeks out and examines light from across the cosmos. When a powerful burst of energy flashes elsewhere in the Universe, satellites detect it, record it, and then scientists analyze it in excruciating detail.

This is Part 2 of a series on interstellar comets. Read Part 1.

Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their center, but some galaxies have two. These supermassive binaries form when two galaxies collide and merge. We can detect some of these binaries, such as by observing the periodic changes of a quasar or by observing the binary directly, such as in the case of NGC 7727. But most supermassive binaries remain hidden. They are too far away to be observed directly or too inactive to be observed by jets. And while gravitational wave observatories can detect the mergers of stellar-mass black holes, we can't yet detect the mergers of supermassive black holes. But a new study shows how we might detect some of them.

Traditional chemical rockets, though they are the most commonly used propulsion method for space exploration today, are beholden to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Every ounce of thrust they use must also start out as fuel, which means the rocket itself will have to weigh more, and weight is one of the limiting factors in how fast a propulsion system can go. So, scientists have been searching for, and actively testing, alternatives for decades. One of the most promising is the solar sail - a huge reflective sheet that uses sunlight, or in some cases a “pushing laser” to maneuver about the solar system without any onboard propellant necessary. A recent paper published in the Journal of Nanophotonics by Dimitar Dimitrov and Elijah Taylor Harris of Tuskegee University describes a new type of light sail that solves some of the major problems of existing designs.

The Chinese didn't invent the rocket but they came remarkably close. More than a thousand years ago, during the Song Dynasty, Chinese engineers were packing black powder into bamboo tubes and launching fire arrows that hissed across battlefields on jets of smoke and flame. Those crude devices were the distant ancestors of every launch vehicle that has ever punched through Earth's atmosphere and there's a pleasing symmetry in the fact that, today, China operates one of the most capable and ambitious space programmes on the planet. From its first satellite in 1970 to a fully operational crewed space station orbiting overhead right now, the journey has been extraordinary. And in 2026, it's about to get even more interesting.

Lunar dust can be a pain - but it’s also literally the ground we will have to traverse if we are ever to have a permanent human settlement on the Moon. In that specific use case, it’s clingy, jagged, staticky properties can actually be an advantage, according to a new paper, recently published in Research from researchers at Beihang University, who analyzed the mechanical properties of samples returned by Chang’e 6 mission to the far side of the Moon.

On Earth, aurorae are fleeting displays. They occur when charged particles from the Sun strike Earth's magnetosphere. Most of these particles are deflected away, but some particles become trapped and are directed toward the poles by magnetic field lines. They find their way into the upper atmosphere where they collide with atoms and molecules. This creates the energetic display in the sky, and the stronger the flow of charged particles from the Sun, the further the aurorae extend into middle latitudes.

Even when the idea of terraforming Mars was originally put forward, the idea was daunting. Changing the environment of an entire planet is not something to do easily. Over the following decades, plenty of scientists and engineers have looked at the problem, and most have come to the same conclusion - we’re not going to be able to make Mars anything like Earth anytime soon. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is a good explainer as to why.

It's a well-known fact that if humanity wishes to explore deep space and to live and work on other planets, we need to bring Earth's environment with us. This includes life support systems that leverage biological processes - aka. Bioregenerative Life Support Systems (BLSS) - but also the many species of microbes that are essential to living systems. Humans already bring microbes with them when they travel to space, in particular, to the International Space Station (ISS). These microbes become part of the natural environment, sticking to surfaces, growing in nooks and crannies, and getting into everything.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) just released its photo of the week. This image, acquired by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, shows the RCW 36 nebula, located about 2,300 light-years away in the Vela Constellation. But to observers, it looks like a cosmic hawk spreading its wings: the dark clouds at the center resembling the hawk's head and body, and the filaments extending to the right and left serving as the wings. And in a nice twist, the image itself was acquired by the High Acuity Wide-field K-band Imager-1 (HAWK-1) instrument on the VLT.