Space News & Blog Articles

They are known as Active Galactic Nuclei (aka. quasars), the core regions of galaxies that are so bright that they temporarily outshine all the stars in the galactic disk combined. This is the result of the Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) at their centers, which accelerate infalling gas and dust in their accretion disks to near the speed of light. This produces intense radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from visible light and infrared to microwaves and X-rays. For decades, astronomers have known that SMBHs reside at the centers of many massive galaxies, and the same was thought to be true of dwarf galaxies.

When the Hubble Space Telescope began operations 35 years ago, it was motivated by some ambitious science goals. From its position in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), the Hubble was poised to address fundamental questions in astronomy. It was tasked with determining the size and the age of the Universe, studying the formation and evolution of galaxies, and investigating quasars and black holes, among other things.

Around the sun, there are countless small bodies whose orbits occasionally bring them in close proximity to Earth, known as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). There are currently 37,000 known Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and 120 known short-period near-Earth comets (NECs), though astronomers estimate that these objects number in the millions. Of particular concern are asteroids and comets that pose a potential impact risk to Earth, known as Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs). While scientists are confident that none of the known PHOs will pose a risk to Earth within the next century, planetary defense measures will be needed sooner or later.

China made history in June 2024 when the Chang'e-6 mission made the first lunar sample-return in history, sending 1,935.3 grams (roughly 4.25 pounds) of lunar regolith and rock to Earth. Analysis of these samples has revealed a great deal of information about the Moon's composition and geological history, as well as notable differences between the two hemispheres. This data is crucial as China, NASA, the ESA, and other space agencies, along with commercial partners, plan to build lunar bases on the far side of the Moon in the near future.

Additive Manufacturing, more commonly known as 3D printing, will be an absolutely critical technology for any long-term settlement on another world. Its ability to take a generic input, such as plastic strips or metal powder, and turn it into any shape of tool an astronaut will need is an absolute game changer. But the chemistry behind these technologies is complicated, and their applications are extremely varied, ranging from creating bricks for settlements to plastics for everything from cups to toothbrush holders. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Zane Mebruer and Wan Shou of the University of Arkansas, explores one specific aspect of a particularly important type of 3D printing, and realized that they could save millions of dollars on Mars missions by simply using the planet’s atmosphere to help print metal parts.

Young stars need time to grow into their final masses before they begin fusing lighter elements into heavier elements as main-sequence stars. They can spend hundreds of thousands of years as protostars, when they're still accreting mass from the molecular clouds they form in. But even though they haven't begun fusion, they still inject energy into their surroundings.

Chemistry on other worlds varies widely from that on Earth. Much of Earth’s chemistry is driven by well-understood processes, which typically involve water and heat in some form. Mars lacks both of those features, which makes how some of its chemicals formed a point of ongoing debate in the scientific community. A new paper led by Alian Wang and Neil Sturchio of Washington University of St. Louis and the University of Delaware, respectively, and published recently in Earth and Planetary Science Letters offers a new framework for understanding chemical reaction processes on Mars. Despite the differences, Earthlings will still be familiar with the driving force behind Martian chemistry - electricity.

Between February and April of this year, NASA will conduct its first crewed mission beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in over fifty years. At 09:41 p.m. EDT (06:41 p.m. PDT), the Artemis II crew will launch aboard their Orion spacecraft atop the Space Launch System (SLS) from Launch Pad-39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With the launch date rapidly approaching, NASA is entering the final stages of preparation, including the rollout of the SLS and Orion to the launch pad for the first time. This will be followed by the final integration and testing of the rocket and spacecraft, then launch rehearsals.

One of the most consequential events—maybe the most consequential one throughout all of Earth's long, 4.5 billion year history—was the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE). When photosynthetic cyanobacteria arose on Earth, they released oxygen as a metabolic byproduct. During the GOE, which began around 2.3 billion years ago, free oxygen began to slowly accumulate in the atmosphere.

Right now, as you read this sentence, roughly a trillion neutrinos are passing straight through your body. They slip through flesh and bone and even brain without leaving a trace, streaming through the entire planet as if it weren’t there at all. These ghost particles have earned their name through spectacular elusiveness, interacting so rarely with ordinary matter that detecting even one requires enormous underground detectors and considerable patience.

When the Sun erupts in its most violent flares, it doesn’t just hurl plasma and particles into space. These explosions also generate intense bursts of gamma radiation, the most energetic form of light in the universe. Solar physicists have detected these gamma ray signals for decades, yet the precise mechanism producing them remained frustratingly elusive. Now researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have pinpointed the source.

Back in the earlier days of the internet, there was a viral video from a creator called Bill Wurtz called “the history of the entire world, i guess” which spawned a number of memorable memes, some of which are still in use to this day. One of those was a clip from the video where Wurtz states “The Sun is a deadly laser.” Apparently, that was more true than even he knew, as a new paper from Georgios Tsirvouils of the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden and his co-authors have shown experimental evidence that the Sun’s laser-like radiation is likely responsible for the death of a vast majority of closely-orbiting asteroids.

One of the most stubborn issues in cosmology today concerns the Universe's rate of expansion. Scientists know it's expanding, but defining the rate of that expansion is challenging. The rate of expansion is called the Hubble Constant, after American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered that the Universe is expanding in the 1920s.

Crew-11’s early return could be visible across the U.S. Wednesday night.

What exists beneath the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon, Callisto? This is what a recent study accepted by *The Planetary Science Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the subsurface composition of Callisto, which is Jupiter’s outermost Galilean satellite. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the interior composition of Callisto, which is hypothesized to possess a subsurface liquid water ocean, and develop new techniques for exploring planetary subsurface environments.

When stars at least thirty times the mass of our Sun reach the end of their lives, astronomers had assumed they simply winked out, collapsing silently into black holes under the force of gravity from which not even light can escape. No bright supernova explosion, no spectacular death throes, just a quiet gravitational implosion.

The thunderous roar that echoed across Huntsville, Alabama, on January 10 wasn't a rocket launch but something equally momentous: the end of an era. Two massive test stands that helped send humans to the Moon collapsed in carefully choreographed implosions, their steel frameworks crumbling in seconds after decades standing as monuments to American spaceflight achievement.

The universe occasionally produces flashes of light so bright and so blue that they outshine entire galaxies, then vanish within days. For years, astronomers studying these rare event, called luminous fast blue optical transients, or LFBOTs, debated their origin. Were they unusual supernovae, or something fundamentally different?

At the beginning of the exoplanet age, the goals were fairly simple. The first was to find as many of them as possible to flesh out our understanding of the exoplanet population. The second was to determine if any were in the habitable zones around their stars. The definition of a habitable zone was necessarily simple in the beginning. Any planet in the right distance range from its star to allow liquid surface water was considered to be in the habitable zone.

There is a fundamental tension in space exploration that has created ongoing debates for decades. By creating the infrastructure we need to explore other worlds, we damage them in some way, making them either less scientifically interesting or less “pristine,” which some would argue, in itself, is a bad thing. A new paper available in JGR Planets, from Francisca Paiva, a physicist at Instituto Superior Técnico, and Silvio Sinibaldi, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) planetary protection officer, argues that, in the Moon’s case at least, the problem is even worse than we originally thought.

NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula in the Perseus Molecular Cloud. The cloud is relatively nearby in astronomical terms, only about 1000 light-years away. The nebula is a very active star-forming region, and since it's so close, it's very well-studied. Most of the cloud is basically invisible, but NGC 1333 is one of two visible structures.