Space News & Blog Articles

For astronomers, the only thing better than new data is more new data. And we seem to be in a golden age of data gathering. We’ve gushed over the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble continues to make observations, but several new space telescopes are lesser known, such as Gaia, TESS, and Swift. And now a new space telescope enters the game, known as Euclid. Euclid is an infrared telescope launched last month by the European Space Agency (ESA). It took 11 years to design and build the telescope, and it has just taken test images with its two primary detectors.

So much in science is based on constraints. If scientists don’t understand something, they try to constrain it as much as possible so that more precise experiments can finally detect whatever the theorized phenomenon is. Dark matter is notoriously difficult in this regard, as it has evaded detection for over a century at this point, despite even more precise instruments trying to capture a glimpse of it. One of those instruments is the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS), run by the SLAC National Laboratory and located in northern Minnesota. To help further the cause, researchers looked at the data from the experiment while considering a few new possibilities, and while they didn’t find any evidence of dark matter, they helped tighten the constraints even more.

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) has been going through a rough patch lately. We recently reported on reports coming out about Congress restricting its budget and potential cost overruns. However, like any good government program, progress continues toward the goal of bringing samples until there is a clear order to stop or the money drives up. That wasn’t the case back in March and April when NASA successfully tested two engines that will be used in the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV).

A pair of studies published in JGR: Planets and Science Advances discuss new findings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) regarding Jupiter’s first and third Galilean Moons, Io and Ganymede, and more specifically, how the massive Jupiter is influencing activity on these two small worlds. For Io, whose mass is about 21 percent larger than Earth’s Moon, the researchers made the first discovery of sulfur monoxide (SO) gas on the volcanically active moon. For Ganymede, which is the largest moon in the solar system and boasts twice the mass of the Earth’s Moon, the researchers made the first discovery of hydrogen peroxide, which exists in Ganymede’s polar regions.

It probably comes as no surprise to people suffering through drastic weather this year that our planet is heating up. Climate change is the culprit and researchers continue to look for ways to mitigate its effects. A scientist at the University of Hawai’i suggests a novel approach: create a giant solar shade in space to block enough sunlight to counter climate change.

Aliens are big in the news recently, fueled by congressional hearings about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), formally known as UFOs. But while the idea of aliens visiting Earth may be exciting, the better bet is still the idea that aliens might exist on distant worlds. We already know potentially habitable planets are common and intelligent life has arisen on at least one world, so why not many? But after 60 years of searching for evidence of extraterrestrials “out there,” we’ve found nothing. So what does that tell us?

Venus and Earth have several things in common. Both are terrestrial planets composed of silicate minerals and metals that are differentiated between a rocky mantle and crust and a metal core. Like Earth, Venus orbits within our Sun’s circumsolar habitable zone (HZ), though Venus skirts the inner edge of it. And according to a growing body of evidence, Venus has active volcanoes on its surface that contribute to atmospheric phenomena (like lightning). However, that’s where the similarities end, and some rather stark differences set in.

Humanity has been on an asteroid-finding spree as of late. Those close to Earth, known as Near Earth Objects (NEOs), have been particularly interesting for two reasons. One is they offer potentially lucrative economic opportunities with asteroid mining. The other is they are potentially devastating if they hit the Earth, so we’d like to find them with some advance warning. Those that fall into the latter category are known as potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs. Now, thanks to some ingenious programmers from the University of Washington, we have a new algorithm to detect them.

It’s every space mission’s nightmare: losing contact with the spacecraft. In the best case, you recover it right away. Worst case, you never hear from your hardware again. On July 21, controllers lost contact with Voyager 2, out in the depths of space. Now they’re waiting for a reset to catch Voyager 2’s next message when it “phones home”.

A collaboration of engineers from NASA and academia recently tested hybrid printed electronic circuits near the edge of space, also known as the Kármán line. The space-readiness test was demonstrated on the Suborbital Technology Experiment Carrier-9, or (SubTEC-9), sounding rocket mission, which was launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on April 25 and reached an altitude of approximately 174 kilometers (108 miles), which lasted only a few minutes before the rocket descended to the ground via parachute.

In 2026, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch its next-generation exoplanet-hunting mission, the PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO). This mission will scan over 245,000 main-sequence F, G, and K-type (yellow-white, yellow, and orange) stars using the Transit Method to look for possible Earth-like planets orbiting Solar analogs. In keeping with the “low-hanging fruit” approach (aka. follow the water), these planets are considered strong candidates for habitability since they are most likely to have all the conditions that gave rise to life here on Earth.

Supermassive black holes haunt the cores of many galaxies. Yet for all we know about black holes (not nearly enough!), the big ones remain a mystery, particularly when they began forming. Interestingly, astronomers see them in the early epochs of cosmic history. That raises the question: how did they get so big when the Universe was still just a baby?

When will we find evidence for life beyond Earth? And where will that evidence be found? University of Arizona astronomer Chris Impey, the author of a book called “Worlds Without End,” is betting that the first evidence will come to light within the next decade or so.

From the dust, we rise. Vortices within the disks of young stars bring forth planets that coalesce into worlds. At least that’s our understanding of planetary evolution, and new images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope’s Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) further support this.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) examines what are known as dark stars, which are estimated to be much larger than our Sun, are hypothesized to have existed in the early universe, and are allegedly powered by the demolition of dark matter particles. This study was conducted using spectroscopic analysis from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and more specifically, the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), and holds the potential to help astronomers better understand dark stars and the purpose of dark matter, the latter of which continues to be an enigma for the scientific community, as well as how it could have contributed to the early universe.

On a basic level, a star is pretty simple. Gravity squeezes the star trying to collapse it, which causes the inner core to get extremely hot and dense. This triggers nuclear fusion, and the heat and pressure from that pushes back against gravity. The two forces balance each other while a star is in its main sequence state. Easy peasy. But the details of how that works are extremely complex. Modeling the interior of a star accurately requires sophisticated computer models, and even then it can be difficult to match a model to what we see on the surface of a star. Now a new computer simulation is helping to change that.

We have discovered more than 5,400 planets in the universe. These worlds range from hot jovians that closely orbit their star to warm ocean worlds to cold gas giants. While we know they are there, we don’t know much about them. Characteristics such as mass and size are fairly straightforward to measure, but other properties such as temperature and atmospheric composition are more difficult. So the next generation of telescopes will try to capture that information, including one proposed telescope from the Chinese National Space Administration.

What do you get when a hot young world orbits a wildly unstable young red dwarf? For AU Microsopii b, the answer is: flares from the star tearing away the atmosphere. That catastrophic loss happens in fits and starts, “hiccuping” out its atmosphere at one point and then losing practically none the next.

In capitalist societies, resources are primarily directed at solving problems, and one of the biggest hurdles facing space development is its ability to directly solve the problems of the majority of humanity back on Earth. So far, we’ve taken some cautious commercial steps, primarily through satellite monitoring and communication technologies. Some think that space tourism is the “killer app” that will kickstart the commercialization of space. But to really have a sustainable business model, humans need to make something in space that they are unable to make on Earth. This article is the first in a series where we will look at what those possible first manufactured goods are. And in this case, the good isn’t something that might immediately be thought of as high-tech.

In 1985, the physicist Heinz Pagels wrote that star birth was a “veiled and secret event.” That’s because the stellar crêches hide the action. But, ever since the advent of infrared astronomy, astronomers have been able to lift that veil. In particular, the Hubble Space Telescope has studied these systems and now, the Webb Telescope (JWST) gives regular detailed views of stellar nurseries.

NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars in the coming decade. This presents many challenges, not the least of which is the distance involved and the resulting health risks. To this end, they are investigating and investing in many technologies, ranging from life support and radiation protection to nuclear power and propulsion elements. A particularly promising technology is Nuclear-Thermal Propulsion (NTP), which has the potential to reduce transit times to Mars significantly. Instead of the usual one-way transit period of six to nine months, a working NTP system could reduce the travel time to between 100 and 45 days!