Space News & Blog Articles

The period known as "Cosmic Noon," which took place roughly 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang, was characterized by the rapid formation of new stars and planetary systems. Naturally, objects dated to this period are coveted by scientists hoping to learn more about the processes that led to the formation of planets and the emergence of life itself. This includes asteroids and comets, which are known to be composed of material leftover from the formation of entire star systems and their planets. And with the detection of three interstellar objects (ISOs) in the Solar System since 2017, there could be multiple opportunities to do so.

Ten years ago, we heard the universe whisper for the first time. On September 14, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) detected ripples in space-time. The signal came from the gravitational waves that had traveled 1.3 billion years to reach Earth, carrying the story of two colliding black holes. This historic moment, predicted by Einstein a century earlier, opened an entirely new way of experiencing the universe.

Different parts of Mars have different advantages and disadvantages when it comes to their available resources, just like Earth. The polar caps are likely the most valuable in terms of their water content, which will be critical to any early stage crewed mission to the Red Planet. But to really unlock the fully potential of Mars, geologists think we’ll need to look to the volcanoes, where there is likely to be easily accessible valuable materials like nickel, titanium, and chromium, that were placed there when the volcanoes were active. Reaching those deposits on the side of some of the largest mountains in the solar system safely is a challenge, and one that is tackled in a new paper by Divij Gupta and Arkajit Aich, where they look at the necessary requirements to set up an effective mining operation on the slopes of Olympus and Elysium Mons.

Europe's upcoming Mars rover mission has received an unexpected boost in its search for signs of ancient life. The Rosalind Franklin rover, scheduled to launch in 2028, will land in Oxia Planum, a vast clay rich plain that formed in water billions of years ago. Two new studies have revealed that natural Martian processes could deliver organic rich materials directly to the rover. These new findings, presented at the joint Europlanet Science Congress and American Astronomical Society meeting in Helsinki, show how rockfalls and ancient floods could bring previously inaccessible organic materials within the rover's reach.

In summer 2022, just weeks after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operating, astronomers noticed something unexpected rather strange, tiny red objects scattered across the sky that had never been seen before. These "little red dots" appeared extremely compact and red, emitting light primarily in the mid-infrared, at these wavelengths the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't detect them but JWST was perfectly designed for the purpose.

According to every experiment, the constants of nature appear to be constant.

While plate tectonics may not be absolutely necessary for life, they may be necessary for a technological civilization to arise. Habitability may be possible on a static world, but habitability probably won't persist long enough for a technological civilization like ours to appear. Plate tectonics regulates our planet's climate, and without it, atmospheric CO2 would rise to catastrophic levels.

Stellar black holes form from the collapse of massive stars at the end of their lives, typically weighing 3 to 50 times the mass of the Sun. When a star runs out of fuel, it explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a region so dense that nothing can escape, not even light. Primordial black holes, by contrast, are theoretical objects that could have formed less than a second after the Big Bang from extremely dense regions of the early universe. Unlike stellar black holes, they could be much lighter and are ancient relics from when the universe contained mostly hydrogen and helium.

What are the most important constants of nature? Of course physicists debate about which of the constants are the important ones, because physicists debate EVERYTHING. Some lists have 19 numbers, some have more. Some try to build categories of numbers, like really really fundamental constants, less fundamental but still important constants, and…others. Some say that the only REAL constants are the ones that don’t have any units, the ones that are just bare numbers, like the fine structure constant. Others…well, others disagree.

Protoplanets are celestial objects in the act of forming into full planets within the gas and dust disks surrounding hot, young stars. These objects, often several times the mass of Jupiter, are still embedded in their birth environments, actively feeding on surrounding material through their own circumplanetary disks. Unlike mature planets, protoplanets offer a rare glimpse into the violent, chaotic processes of planetary formation, revealing how the worlds we see today form.

Lasers aren’t just useful for entertaining cats or pointing out features of powerpoint slides. They can also drill holes on icy extraterrestrial bodies from comets to Mars polar caps. At least according to a new paper in Acta Astronautica by researchers at the Technical University of Dresden, who describe a new laser drill for use on icy surfaces throughout our solar system.

*Astronomers chart the growth of the Spirograph Nebula over more than a century. *

Protecting astronauts and equipment during missions outside of Earth's protective sphere is critical to successful space exploration. The Moon is a malign environment where powerful solar radiation bombards the surface unimpeded.

Neutrinos are one of the most enigmatic particles in the standard model. The main reason is that they’re so hard to detect. Despite the fact that 400 trillion of them created in the Sun are passing through a person’s body every second, they rarely interact with normal matter, making understanding anything about them difficult. To help solve their mysteries, a new neutrino detector in China recently started collecting data, and hopes to provide insight on between forty and sixty neutrinos a day for the next ten years.

The story begins in 2024 when NASA's Perseverance rover became the first to photograph a visible light aurora from Martian surface. Now, Dr. Elise Wright Knutsen and her team from the University of Oslo has revealed a second successful image and, more importantly, the method her team developed to forecast when these Martian northern lights will appear.

White dwarfs are the dense, hot cores left behind when Sun like stars die. Imagine squeezing the entire mass of our Sun into something the size of Earth, that’s a white dwarf and our Sun will become one in the distant future. These stellar corpses are incredibly dense, with just a teaspoon weighing as much as a large car.

The search for habitable planets in other star systems has progressed considerably in the past few decades. As of the writing of this article, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 5,989 planets in over 4,500 planetary systems, with over 15,000 candidates yet to be confirmed. At the same time, next-generation observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have made amazing breakthroughs in exoplanet characterization. Unfortunately, scientists are still not at the point where they can characterize smaller planets located closer to their suns, where Earth-like planets are likely to reside.

Binary star systems are not rare. Neither are systems where one star is a remnant like a white dwarf or neutron star, and its companion is on the main sequence. In those systems, the dense remnant can draw material away from the main sequence star. This can create violent Type 1a supernovae in the case of a white dwarf, and the emission of extremely powerful x-rays in the case of a neutron star.

In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made a discovery. It found towering geysers of water erupting from fractures called "tiger stripes" near Enceladus's south pole. This water comes from a vast ocean hidden beneath the moon's icy crust, kept liquid by the powerful gravitational forces from Saturn that constantly squeeze and stretch the interior of Enceladus.

The Sun's magnetic cycle works much like planetary seasons, but on a vastly different timescale. During solar “summer,” otherwise known as solar maximum, our star becomes dramatically more active, sprouting dark sunspots across its surface and hurling massive flares into space. These solar storms send charged particles racing across the Solar System, creating the spectacular aurora displays. We’re currently experiencing this peak activity phase, with Solar Cycle 25 having possibly reached its maximum in 2024.

Has it finally happened? Has NASA finally found biosignatures from ancient Martian life? It's too early to reach that conclusion, but the Perseverance Rover did find chemical compounds that microbes could've used as an energy-rich food. They also found minerals that could've been created by biological reactions.