Space News & Blog Articles

Asteroid 2024 YR4 caused quite a stir last year when it was discovered and originally calculated to have a 3% chance of hitting Earth. Since then models have been refined and while it no longer has a chance of hitting Earth, it does have a 4% chance of hitting the Moon in December 2032. As that time gets closer, we’ll have a better idea of the probability, but engineers and scientists are also planning for what we would need to do in order to ensure it doesn’t hit our only natural satellite at all. A new paper from NASA and a bunch of other researchers details potential missions and timelines that could make sure the Moon isn’t pummeled with a decent-sized asteroid in less than a decade.

The Hubble Space Telescope is still working hard despite its age. Its UV observing capabilities make it particularly well suited to studying white dwarfs. The telescope has observed a particular white dwarf on two separate occasions over the years, as it has with dozens of white dwarfs. But this particular white dwarf, named WD 1647+375 and about 260 light years away, has shown astronomers something unusual.

The age of exoplanets began in 1992, when astronomers detected a pair of planets orbiting a pulsar. Then, in 1995, astronomers discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a main sequence star. As NASA's Kepler and TESS missions got going, the number of confirmed exoplanets continued to rise.

In February 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first detection of gravitational waves (GW). These ripples in space time, originally predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, are caused by the merger of massive objects (like neutron stars and black holes). Since then, gravitational wave observatories like LIGO, VIRGO, and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) have detected around 300 gravitational wave (GW) events.

A remote solar eclipse ends the final season of 2025.

Before we get to Mars, we’re going to have to practice. And develop radical leaps in technology, but also practice. A Mars mission will be utterly unlike anything attempted by humanity. We’re talking about a group of settlers, maybe as few as an initial team of four, traveling over a hundred million miles away from home to a literally alien environment, one that is so hostile to life that nothing lives there, and turn it into a home.

In November 2019, Japan's Hayabusa 2 mission departed the asteroid Ryugu after 1.5 years of observations. It had successfully collected a sample from the near-Earth object and in December 2020, the spacecraft returned the valuable sample to Earth. If its mission had ended there, it would've been deemed one of the most successful and challenging missions ever conducted.

K2-18b is a sub-Neptune about 124 light-years away from Earth first detected in 2015. Follow-up research found water vapour in its atmosphere, indicating that it could be a water planet, or what is called a 'hycean planet'. Hycean planets have thick hydrogen atmospheres and deep, global or near-global oceans. Or so scientists thought.

Exoplanet surveys are useful for more than just astrobiology or increasing the tally of known planets in other solar systems. They can also help us understand the evolution of planetary systems themselves. That’s what a new paper from researchers led by astronomers at the University of Geneva and published in Astronomy & Astrophysics attempts to do - by looking at a large population of “exo-Neptunes” they are attempting to understand the intricacies of how planetary systems are formed.

In a recent discovery, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) detected a massive stellar eruption measuring eight light-years across. This outflow, known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), is located about 15,000 light-years away in the outer reaches of the Milky Way. Based on an analysis by an international team of astronomers, this outflow appears to be coming from a newly forming star (a proto-star). It is moving at relativistic speeds (hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour), and its size and strength indicate it is a rare phenomenon.

Saturn makes its triumphant return to the dusk sky.

You know, if you take away the lack of air and water, the weaker Sun, the lower gravity, and the toxic soil, Mars isn’t all that bad of a place to live. And there are certainly worse places to live, like, I don’t know, Ohio (I’m allowed to say that because I grew up there). But there’s been a big push in the past two decades to not just go to Mars and visit, like we did with the Moon fifty years ago, but to stay there. Put down roots. Establish ourselves. Build a colony or a settlement.

78 million years ago, a 1.6 km asteroid slammed into what is now Finland, creating a crater 23 km (14 mi) wide and 750 km deep. The catastrophic impact created a fractured hydrothermal system in the shattered bedrock under the crater. There's evidence from other impact structures that in the aftermath of a collision, life colonized the shattered rock and heated water that flowed through it. But determining when the colonization happened is challenging.

When considering the unnamed major features of all the moons, asteroids, and comets in our solar system there are still a lot of places out there that need proper names. That means the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the non-governmental body responsible for naming astronomical objects, has its work cut out for them. Recently they tackled a relatively easy challenge by approving a series of names on the asteroid Donaldjohnson, the first and only target of NASA’s Lucy mission in the main asteroid belt. With those names come a whole new way to talk about one of the asteroids that humanity has studied most closely thus far.

When the ESA launched the Gaia spacecraft in 2013, it didn't generate the same fanfare as the launch of other missions like the JWST, or first light from telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory. That's largely because Gaia doesn't capture gorgeous images of celestial objects like other telescopes. Instead, Gaia was an astrometry mission.

Whenever astronomers detect something new moving through our region of space, like an interstellar object or an unusual asteroid, somebody somewhere claims it could be an alien interstellar space probe. It's like one of those laws about human behaviour—Godwin's Law for example—that should probably have its own name.

We don't realize it, but Earth is subjected to a constant cosmic rain of material. The vast majority of it is tiny micrometeors that burn up in the atmosphere, up to 100 tons per day by some estimates. But sometimes, much larger objects strike Earth. The most notable is probably the Chicxulub impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs and left a massive crater, now buried.

There are plenty of theories about what dark matter is and how it might be gravitationally affecting the universe. However, proving those theories out is hard since it hardly ever interacts with anything, especially on “small” scales like galaxies. So when a research team claims to have found evidence for dark matter in our own galaxy, it's worth taking a look at how. A new paper from Dr. Surkanya Chakrabati and her lab at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) does just that. They found evidence for a dark matter “sub-halo” in the galactic neighborhood, by looking at signals from binary pulsars.

A new comet approaching from sunward could make a fine dusk appearance in October.

Three data releases from the recently retired Gaia spacecraft show that far-flung parts of the Milky Way are connected by families of stars born in clusters. Some continue to travel the galaxy together, while others appear wildly dispersed, sometimes as chains of related stars. One cluster is even trying to escape the Milky Way. The Gaia data show that open clusters (in particular) and the star formation regions from which they spring are interconnected across the Galaxy, populating the Milky Way in ways astronomers are just now beginning to understand.

The grinning Moon slides by Regulus and Venus later this week, in a complex event.