Space News & Blog Articles

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Comets Leave Dusty Trails That Surround the Solar System

Comets are messy things. They scatter bits of dust as they travel through the solar system. If Earth happens to encounter one of those cometary dust trails, we get to see a meteor shower.

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Want to Learn More About Dark Matter? Send an Atomic Clock Close to the Sun

Dark matter continues to vex astronomers around the world. We see its effects in the clustering of galaxies and the gravitational lensing of light within galaxies, and it seems to comprise about 80% of the matter in the universe, but we still haven’t detected it on Earth. So what about at least detecting it in our solar system? That might be possible according to a new study in Nature Astronomy.

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Japanese Billionaire Reveals His Round-the-Moon Crew

Four years after announcing that he’d lead an around-the-moon mission aboard SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has named the eight people he wants to fly with him.

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Astronomers Have Found Two Temperate Super-Earths Orbiting a Nearby Red Dwarf

A team of astronomers has found two Super-Earths orbiting a red dwarf about 114 light-years away. The star, named LP 890-9, is the second coolest star found that hosts planets. Both the planets are likely temperate, and one of them “… is the second-most favourable habitable-zone terrestrial planet known so far,” according to the paper presenting the results.

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There's a Giant Magma Plume on Mars, Bulging the Surface out Across a Vast Region

Billions of years ago, Mars was a much different place than it is today. Its atmosphere was thicker and warmer, liquid water flowed on its surface, and the planet was geologically active. Due to its lower gravity, this activity led to the largest volcanoes in the Solar System (Olympus Mons and the Thetis Mons region) and the longest, deepest canyon in the world (Valles Marineris). Unfortunately, Mars’ interior began to cool rapidly, its inner core solidified, and geological activity largely stopped. For some time, geologists have believed that Mars was essentially “dead” in the geological sense.

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Trading Spaces: How Swapping Stars Create Hot Jupiters

Star clusters tend to host more hot Jupiters than average, but why? A team of astronomers have proposed a new solution, and it involves a lot of swapping of stellar neighbors.

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Meteorites Bathed in Gamma Rays Produce More Amino Acids and Could Have Helped Life get Going on Earth

Our modern telescopes are more powerful than their predecessors, and our research is more focused than ever. We keep discovering new things about the Solar System and finding answers to long-standing questions. But one of the big questions we still don’t have an answer for is: ‘How did life on Earth begin?’

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SpaceX Launches ‘Starshield’. A Quiet Announcement With A Huge Potential

SpaceX revealed their new service called Starshield. It is a “secured satellite network for government entities” and is aimed at “supporting national security.” The project looks similar to Starlink, but instead of providing service to end users and businesses, Starshield is aimed at government entities. Here’s what we know so far.

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Colliding Neutron Stars can Generate Long Gamma-ray Bursts

Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are the most energetic recurring events in the Universe. Only the Big Bang was more energetic, and it was a singularity. Astronomers see GRBs in distant Universes, and a lot of research has gone into understanding them and what causes them.

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“Early Dark Energy” Could Explain the Crisis in Cosmology

In 1916, Einstein finished his Theory of General Relativity, which describes how gravitational forces alter the curvature of spacetime. Among other things, this theory predicted that the Universe is expanding, which was confirmed by the observations of Edwin Hubble in 1929. Since then, astronomers have looked farther into space (and hence, back in time) to measure how fast the Universe is expanding – aka. the Hubble Constant. These measurements have become increasingly accurate thanks to the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope.

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How Artificial Intelligence Can Find the Source of Gamma-Ray Bursts

Gamma-ray bursts come in two main flavors, short and long. While astronomers believe that they understand what causes these two kinds of bursts, there is still significant overlap between them. A team of researchers have proposed a new way to classify gamma-ray bursts using the aid of machine learning algorithms. This new classification scheme will help astronomers better understand these enigmatic explosions.

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The Geminids Will be Peaking on December 14th. They’re Usually the Most Active Meteor Shower Every Year

Meteor showers are a great way to share a love of astronomy with those who might not be as familiar with it. Almost everyone loves watching streaks of light flash across the sky, but usually, it’s so intermittent that it can be frustrating to watch. That’s not the case for the next few weeks, though, as the annual Geminid meteor shower is underway until December 24th.

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A Star was Blocking a Galaxy, but Now it’s Moved Enough That Astronomers can Finally Examine What it Was Hiding

One of the biggest puzzles in astronomy, and one of the hardest ones to solve, concerns the formation and evolution of galaxies. What did the first ones look like? How have they grown so massive?

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Will We Ever Go Back to Explore the Ice Giants? Yes, If We Keep the Missions Simple and Affordable

It’s been over 35 years since a spacecraft visited Uranus and Neptune. That was Voyager 2, and it only did flybys. Will we ever go back? There are discoveries waiting to be made on these fascinating ice giants and their moons.

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A new Hubble Image Reveals a Shredded Star in a Nearby Galaxy

The Hubble Space Telescope, to which we owe our current estimates for the age of the universe and the first detection of organic matter on an exoplanet, is very much doing science and still alive. It’s latest masterpiece remixes an old hit – apparently a growing trend in science as well as music.

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Evidence of a Megatsunami on Mars

Things were pretty wet back on Mars about three and a half billion years ago. You wouldn’t know that by looking at the planet today. But, would you believe a megatsunami happened there? It turns out that not one, but two of these rogue waves happened there some 3.4 billion years ago.

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Not Just Stars. Gaia Mapped a Diverse and Shifting Universe of Variable Objects

We’ve reported on Gaia’s incredible data-collection abilities in the past. Recently, it released DR3, its latest data set, with over 1.8 billion objects in it. That’s a lot of data to sift through, and one of the most effective ways to do so is through machine learning. A group of researchers did just that by using a supervised learning algorithm to classify a particular type of object found in the data set. The result is one of the world’s most comprehensive catalogs of the type of astronomical object known as variables.

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Mars at Opposition 2022: The Full Moon Occults Mars Wednesday Night

A rare event transpires Wednesday night, as the Full Moon occults Mars near opposition.

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Construction Begins on the Square Kilometer Array

At twin ground-breaking ceremonies today in South Africa and Australia, project leaders formally marked the start of construction on what will be the largest radio telescope ever built. Dubbed the Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO) – referring to the total area the antennas and dishes will cover when complete – the telescope is not a single detector but rather a collection of them, connected across two continents using a technique known as interferometry (the same technique used by the Event Horizon Telescope, which took the first ever photograph of a black hole in 2019).

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SOFIA Fails to Find Phosphine in the Atmosphere of Venus, But the Debate Continues

The on-again, off-again detection of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus appears to be off-again – for now. The latest study, based on data from the SOFIA telescope, reveals that the flying observatory didn’t see any signs of phosphine. According to the results, if there is any phosphine present in Venus’s atmosphere at all, it’s a maximum of about 0.8 parts per billion, much smaller than the initial estimate.

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Hubble Spots Two Open Clusters. One is Also an Emission Nebula

Open star clusters are groups of stars in loosely-bound gravitational associations. The stars are further apart than the stars in their cousins, the globular clusters. The weak gravity from the loose clusters means open clusters take on irregular shapes. They usually contain only a few thousand stars.

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