Space News & Blog Articles

This is Part 3 of a series on large extra dimensions. Read Parts 1 and 2.

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.

This is Part 2 of a series on large extra dimensions. Read Part 1.

The Aurora Borealis and Australis have dazzled and inspired all those who have beheld them since time immemorial. Much like the Moon, stars, constellations, and planets, they are considered a permanent part of our shared cultural heritage. These awe-inspiring displays of light are the result of charged particles from our Sun interacting with Earth's magnetic field. However, there remain unanswered questions about the mechanisms that power aurorae that scientists have been hoping to resolve for decades. For example, there's the question of what powers the electrical fields that accelerate these particles.

This is Part 1 of a series on large extra dimensions.

With the astronauts of the SpaceX Crew-12 mission safely home, NASA is moving ahead with preparations for the launch of the Crew-12 mission. The crew will launch for the International Space Station (ISS) no sooner than Wednesday, Feb. 11th. It will consist of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir (commander) and Jack Hathaway (pilot), ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot (mission specialist), and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev (mission specialist). Once they reach the ISS, select crew members will participate in human health studies designed to assess how astronauts' bodies adapt to long periods spent in space.

According to Einstein's Theory of General Relativity and the Standard Model of Cosmology, galaxies like the Milky Way are bound together by gravity and the mysterious mass known as Dark Matter. However, magnetic fields are also vital for maintaining galactic balance through a process known as Faraday rotation. This phenomenon, discovered by Michael Faraday in 1845, describes the magneto-optical effect in which polarized light rotates as it passes through a medium subjected to magnetic fields parallel to its path.

The combustible sedimentary rock, better known as coal, was not only crucial to the onset of advanced technology here on earth, but it should also be key to the development of advanced E.T.s residing on any given exoearth. Or so say the authors of a new paper just published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

This is Part 4 in a series on the age of the universe. Read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

In 2019, the international collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) made history by producing the first-ever image of a black hole. The object in question was the supermassive black hole (SMBH) residing at the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, located about 55 million light-years away. The SMBH, designated M87*, is also noted for the powerful streams of charged particles emanating from its poles that travel close to the speed of light. This "relativistic jet," as they are known, is powered by the SMBH's powerful gravity and rapid rotation.

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.