Space News & Blog Articles

Comet R3 Pan-STARRS is about to put on its climatic perihelion act.

Mars is well known as a static, frozen desert. We tend to think of the only thing changing on the surface of the Red Planet is due to the occasional dust storm. But if you look closely - and are willing to wait decades - you’ll see the planet is very much alive - at least in the environmental sense. The European Space Agency just released some spectacular new images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on its Mars Express Orbiter, one of which shows a surprisingly “fast” geological change happening in Utopia Planitia. A dark, ominous-looking blanket of volcanic ash is actively creeping across the bright red sands - and it's moving (relatively) fast.

(This is Part 2 of a series on Cherenkov radiation — the "light boom." Read Part 1 first.)

Based on the most widely accepted models of how the Universe began - Big Bang cosmology and the LCDM model - scientists theorize that massive clouds of neutral hydrogen permeated the Universe. From this material, the first stars and galaxies formed rapidly over the next several hundred eons, an event that astronomers and cosmologists refer to as "Cosmic Dawn." For some time, it was further theorized that these early galaxies were surrounded by gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called "Lyman-alpha nebulae."

Engineers love a good practical challenge, especially when it comes to spaceflight. But there’s one particular challenge facing the crewed missions of the near future that scares mission planners above almost all others - fire. For decades, we’ve relied on a NASA test known as NASA-STD-6001B to screen material flammability for flight. But space is much more complicated than an Earth-bound test provides for. A new paper from researchers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center and Johnson Space Center and Case Western Reserve University details a planned mission to test the flammability of materials on the Moon’s surface - where they expect flame to act much differently than it does here on Earth.

To say NASA has been undergoing some massive administrative changes lately is a huge understatement. One of the more concerning ones, according to a new paper at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Ari Koeppel and Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, is the trend towards the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and break things” - which they argue doesn’t work very well when it comes to producing valuable science.

Some of the most scientifically important astronomical objects are the ones that push the boundaries of definitions. These objects can exist in the grey areas between competing definitions. They motivate astronomers to develop a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of Nature. One of these important dividing lines places planets on one side and stars on the other.

A pair of dwarf galaxies in the giant Virgo Cluster show what can happen when these stellar cities interact. Scientists at the University of Michigan focused the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) onto the galaxies NGC 4486B and UCD736 and found each of them sporting "overmassive" black holes at or near their hearts. Those supermassive black holes comprise a large fraction of each galaxy's mass.

On Friday, April 10, 2026 at 5:07 p.m. PDT (02:07 p.m. EDT), the first astronauts to travel to the Moon in more than fifty years made it back to Earth when their Orion capsule (Integrity) splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego. In addition to being a historic accomplishment and a major step towards returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era, the Artemis II flight set a new record for distance traveled by a crewed spacecraft.

Mars rovers have spearheaded the exploration of the planet over the last 20 years. MSL Curiosity and Perseverance are awe-inspiring machines, and Spirit and Opportunity were similarly impressive. Collectively, they've greatly improved our understanding of Mars and its ancient climate and shed light on its potential ancient habitability.

Keep an eye out this coming week for the venerable Lyrid meteor shower.

Living long-term on the Moon means surviving the devastating toll that deep space takes on a human body. Astronauts in low gravity environments suffer muscle and bone loss, vision-altering fluid shifts, and heavy radiation exposure - all of which are incredibly hazardous to our biology. So, to help future lunar explorers survive, a new crew just arrived at the International Space Station (ISS). That might not sound surprising, except this crew is composed of worms.

I want you to imagine a scene. It's the red carpet. It's the night of the Oscars, or the Emmys, or the participation trophy ceremony for your kid's soccer team. That's not the essential part of the metaphor. What matters is who is there: Brad Bradington's adoring fans, curious onlookers, and of course the paparazzi, ready to take their shot.

Venus is often called Earth's twin, but spend any time with it and the comparison falls apart quickly. Its surface is hot enough to melt lead, its atmosphere is a crushing blanket of carbon dioxide, and its clouds are made of concentrated sulphuric acid. Somewhere beneath those acid clouds, between the surface and the main cloud deck at around 47 kilometres up, a thin mysterious haze has drifted for billions of years, stubbornly resisting every attempt at explanation. Until now.

(This is Part 3 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1 and Part 2.)

An ultra-hot Jupiter exoplanet orbiting a young A-type star gave scientists using the Gemini South telescope a look at how both a star and its hot planet can have similar chemical compositions. The team, led by Arizona State University graduate student Jorge Antonio Sanchez, took spectra of the planet, called WASP-189b, using the Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph instrument on loan from McDonald Observatory in Texas. The observations measured the abundance of magnesium compared to silicon in the hot planet's atmosphere and allowed the team to compare it to the makeup of its parent star.

Even a modest telescope reveals the breathtaking Saturnian ring system that has captivated astronomers for four centuries, a world so alien in its beauty that first time observers often struggle to believe what they are seeing is real. But Saturn's rings are just the beginning. Beneath that iconic silhouette lies a planet of extraordinary extremes, a gas giant eleven times wider than Earth, spinning so fast that a single day lasts barely ten hours, and wrapped in a magnetic field so powerful it dominates a region of space millions of kilometres in every direction.

We have been searching for signals from other civilisations for over sixty years. Radio telescopes on Earth have swept the sky, listened patiently, and found nothing but silence. It is a search that demands extraordinary sensitivity and that is the problem, Earth and our very existence itself is getting in the way.

Space is full of objects that push the boundaries of imagination, but few do it quite as effectively as a black hole. At its simplest, a black hole is a region of space where gravity has become so overwhelmingly powerful that nothing, no matter, no light, nothing can escape its grip. They form when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse catastrophically inward, crushing an enormous amount of mass into an extraordinarily small space. The result is an object so dense that it warps the very fabric of space and time around it.

When India's Chandrayaan-1 orbiter released the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) into the Shackleton crater on the Moon, they confirmed something scientists had speculated about for decades. The Moon, an airless and vacuum-desiccated body, has abundant sources of water ice around its poles! Located in the many craters that litter the region, these permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) prevent this water from being exposed to sunlight, which would cause it to sublimate and be lost into space.

Every electronic device you have ever owned shares a critical weakness. Push it past roughly 200 degrees Celsius and it begins to fail. Your phone, your car's computer, the satellites orbiting above your head right now, all of them have the same thermal ceiling baked into their design. For decades, that ceiling has been one of the most stubborn walls in engineering. Now, a team at the University of Southern California may just have broken through it.