Space News & Blog Articles

There are plenty of places for life to hide. Even on our blue planet, where we know there is abundant life, it is sometimes difficult to predict all the different environments it might crop up in. Exploring worlds other than our own for life would make it exponentially more difficult to detect it because, realistically, we don’t really know what we’re looking for. But life will probably present itself with some sort of pattern. And there is one new technology that is exceptional at detecting patterns: machine learning. Researchers at the SETI Institute have started working on a machine-learning-based AI system that will do just that.

A newly discovered asteroid called 2023 DW has generated quite a buzz over the past week, due to an estimated 1-in-670 chance of impact on Valentine’s Day 2046. But despite a NASA advisory and the resulting scary headlines, there’s no need to put an asteroid doomsday on your day planner for that date.

Over 13 billion years ago, the first galaxies in the Universe formed. They were elliptical, with intermediate black holes (IMBHs) at their centers surrounded by a halo of stars, gas, and dust. Over time, these galaxies evolved by flattening out into disks with a large bulge in the middle. They were then drawn together by mutual gravitational attraction to form galaxy clusters, massive collections that comprise the large-scale cosmic structure. This force of attraction also led to mergers, where galaxies and their central black holes came together to create larger spiral galaxies with central supermassive black holes (SMBHs).

The picture of the Moon in the banner might not look all that spectacular, but it is absolutely astounding from a technical perspective. What makes it so unique is that it was taken via a telescope using a completely flat lens. This type of lens, called a metalens, has been around for a while, but a team of researchers from Pennsylvania State University (PSU) recently made the largest one ever. At eight cm in diameter, it was large enough to use in an actual telescope – and produce the above picture of the Moon, however, blurred it might be.

“It is possible even with existing technology, if done in the most efficient ways. New methods are needed, but none goes beyond the range of present-day knowledge. The challenge is to bring the goal of space colonization into economic feasibility now, and the key is to treat the region beyond Earth not as a void but as a culture medium, rich in matter and energy. Then, in a time short enough to be useful, the exponential growth of colonies can reach the point at which the colonies can be of great benefit to the entire human race.”

A world-famous 17th-century astronomer credited with discovering Saturn’s moon Titan may have needed glasses, according to a recent paper in the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science.

The official verdict on Artemis 1. Canadian kids discovered something NASA didn’t know. Was there a Dark Big Bang? The next bright comet for 2024.

The origins of Earth’s water is a complicated mystery that scientists have been untangling for decades. Life is impossible without water, so the origin of Earth’s life-giving water is a foundational question. As the power of our telescopes grows, researchers have made meaningful headway on the question.

Seen from space, regions of Mars around the south pole have a bizarre, pitted “Swiss cheese” appearance. These formations come from alternating massive deposits of CO2 ice and water ice, similar to different layers of a cake. For decades, planetary scientists wondered how this formation was possible, as it was long believed that this layering would not be stable for long periods of time.

One of the last times we did an article about a technology that could remove lunar dust from clothing, we opened it with a famous meme line from Star Wars. That also means we should probably avoid subjecting everyone to it again here. Still, the fact that we’ve had an opportunity to use it more than twice recently proves that removing lunar dust is a problem that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Artemis, NASA’s program to go back to the Moon this decade, is the cause of a lot of that attention as there are plenty of problems still to overcome. Some of those might be solved by a technique developed by a team at Washington State University (WSU) that uses every child’s gas that allows them to pound nails in with bananas – liquid nitrogen.

Artemis astronauts are returning to the Moon, and they’ll be following in Apollo’s footsteps when they go. But things are different this time. Not only is technology far more advanced, but so is the way we think about technology and how we design it.

For years, China has been dropping hints about its Long March 9 (CZ-9) rocket, a three-stage super-heavy variant of the Long March family. This launch vehicle will reportedly be capable of transporting up to 150,000 kg (165 tons) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and 54,000 kg (59.5 tons) to a trans-lunar injection. On March 2nd, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) announced (via the Chinese social media platform Weixin) that it had finished building the first propellant tank for the CZ-9.

When faced with a potentially mission-ending problem with NASA’s 15-year-old Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, engineers performed a time-honored procedure to fix it: they turned it off and then turned it back on again.

Every once in a while, the stars (or, in this case, satellites) align, and keen observers can receive an unexpected light show. That happened a few weeks ago at the Subaru telescope in Hawai’i. An eerie green laser seemingly appeared out of nowhere, as captured in a YouTube video uploaded to the telescope channel. Luckily, their source was no more ominous than a passing satellite, and with its video posted publicly, now everyone could enjoy the light show.

What are the hydrocarbon seas on Titan really like? While the upcoming Dragonfly helicopter mission to Saturn’s hazy and frigid moon should arrive by 2034 to explore Titan’s atmosphere, the need remains for a mission that could study the moon’s mysterious seas and lakes, filled with liquid hydrocarbons.  

When the first people set foot on the Moon for long-term projects, they’ll need a lot of things, including their own time zone. That makes sense since they’ll be on an entirely different world. And, they’ll depend on a whole new set of technologies that will need time coordination with each other. So, space agencies are now figuring out what time zone the Moon will have.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover usually looks down at the ground, studying nearby rocks and craters. But sometimes, it looks up and sees something wonderful.

The ongoing effort to under Martian geology and the planet’s history continues. A recent paper from a scientific team in China looks at the data collected by Zhurong, a rover that has been in place on the Red Planet since 2021. While it didn’t find any evidence of water in the basin it was looking in, it did find some interesting buried features and provided more data to our mounting understanding of one of our nearest neighbors.

New Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS may put on a show at the end of next year.

In the 1930s, astrophysicists theorized that at the end of their life cycle, particularly massive stars would collapse, leaving behind remnants of infinite mass and density. As a proposed resolution to Einstein’s field equations (for his Theory of General Relativity), these objects came to be known as “black holes” because nothing (even light) could escape them. By the 1960s, astronomers began to infer the existence of these objects based on the observable effects they have on neighboring objects and their surrounding environment.

Black holes and neutron stars are among the odder denizens of the cosmic zoo. They’re both dense collections of matter and, except for supermassive black holes, are the end states of massive stars. Fundamentally, they’re two different types of objects that are detectable via the activity in the accretion disks that form around them. Astronomers recently observed an object that acted like a black hole but turned out to be a neutron star. The clues lay in the accretion disk surrounding it.