Space News & Blog Articles

Astronomy would be a lot easier if there were no clouds of gas and dust in space. There'd be no need for telescopes with the abilty to see through these thick veils. Alas, space is not only full of things we want to see, but full of things that get in the way.

Exoplanet scientists are eagerly awaiting the discovery of an atmosphere around a terrestrial exoplanet. Not a thin, tenuous, barely perceptible collection of molecules, but a thick, robust, potentially life-supporting atmosphere. Due to the way we detect exoplanets, most of the terrestrial planets we find are orbiting red dwarfs (M dwarfs).

In 1949, famed mathematician and physicist John von Neumann delivered a series of addresses at the University of Illinois, where he introduced the concept of "universal constructor." The theory was further detailed in the 1966 book, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, a collection of von Neumann's writings compiled and completed by a colleague after his death. In the years that followed, scientists engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) considered how advanced civilizations could rely on self-replicating probes to explore the galaxy.

A few days ago, I wrote about non-singular black hole models, specifically one known as the Hayward model. Since its introduction in 2006, several variations of the Hayward model have been introduced, including a rotating model similar to the Kerr metric used to study the supermassive black holes we've observed directly. This raises an interesting question: what if we use a rotating Hayward model instead of the usual Kerr model? A recent study answers that question.

Star formation has a lot of complex physics that feed into it. Classical models used something equivalent to a “collapse” of a cloud of gas by gravity, with a star being birthed in the middle. More modern understandings show a feature called a “streamer”, which funnels gas and dust to proto-stars from the surrounding disc of material. But our understanding of those streamers is still in its early stages, like the stars they are forming. So a new paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Pablo Cortes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his co-authors is a welcome addition to the literature - and it shows a unique feature of the process for the first time.

The cosmic voids of the universe are empty of matter. But we all know there’s more to the universe than just matter. Nothing in this universe is completely empty, and that’s because there’s always your constant companions. Me? No, not me, I only visit once a month.

Is there anything more dramatic than an exploding star? More than just extraordinarily bright, energetic events that can light up the sky for months, these explosions play important roles in the cosmos. Supernova create heavy elements and spread them out into their surroundings, where they can be taken up in the next round of planet and star formation.

Brown dwarfs are a growing area of focus for astronomers, thanks to improved instruments that have the necessary resolution to visualize them. The term describes substellar objects that are about 13 to 80 Jupiter masses, making them too small to become stars, but massive enough to experience some nuclear fusion in their cores and produce heat. Initially theorized in the 1960s, it was not until the mid-1990s that this class of stellar object was confirmed through direct observation. And thanks to next-generation telescopes and improved data-sharing techniques, there are growing opportunities to study these objects.

When it comes to finding baby, still-forming planets around young stars, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory is astronomers' most adept tool. ALMA has delivered many images of the protoplanetary disks around young stars, with gaps and rings carved in them by young planets. In new research, a team of researchers used ALMA to image 16 disks around young class 0/1 protostars and found that planets may start forming sooner than previously thought.

Sometimes space exploration doesn’t go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might not have succeeded, allowing them to try again. A group from MIT’s Space Enabled Research Group, part of its Media Lab, recently released a paper in Space Science Reviews that describes the design and testing results of a pair of passive sensors sent to the Moon on the ill-fated Rashid-1 rover.

At the heart of the Milky Way, just 27,000 light-years from Earth, there is a supermassive black hole with a mass of more than 4 million Suns. Nearly all galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, and many of them are much more massive. The black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87 has a mass of 6.5 billion Suns. The largest black holes are more than 40 billion solar masses. We know these monsters lurk in the cosmos, but how did they form?

What if I told you that while you can’t see dark matter, maybe you can hear it? I know, I know, it sounds crazy…and it is crazy. But it’s crazy enough that it just might work. It’s a real life experiment, called the…let me see here…the Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers, or CRESST – that’s a double s in case you didn’t catch that. Look it’s not the greatest of acronyms but we’re going to just go with it.

Nature's like a photographer's canvas backdrop, lit up by the different types of electromagnetic radiation. Gamma radiation is the most powerful, strong enough to rip your double helix in two. Radio waves are at the low end. They're generally safe, and are almost omnipresent; we live in a sea of radio waves.

The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) hasn't yet begun it's much-anticipated Legacy Survey of Space and Time. But it saw its first light in June 2025, when it captured its Virgo First Look images as part of commisioning its main camera. Those images are a sample of how the observatory will perform the LSST and feature the Virgo Cluster of galaxies.

So where do we go after years of empty searches for dark matter? We haven’t learned nothing. After decades of searches, we’re narrowing down the range of what dark matter can and cannot be.

Whenever someone talks about black holes, they almost always talk about the event horizon and the singularity. After all, that's what defines a black hole, right? Well, it depends on what you mean by black hole. There are some that would argue a black hole doesn't need a singularity, and that could mean they don't even have an event horizon.

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto has forced astronomers to rewrite their textbooks — but that’s not all: New Horizons also forced Les Johnson to rewrite a novel.

How does water form on exoplanets and what could this mean for the search for life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated the processes responsible for exoplanets producing liquid water. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life beyond Earth, and specifically which exoplanets could be viable future targets for astrobiology.

For over a century, rocket propulsion has followed a simple principle; burn fuel, expel it backward, and Newton’s third law pushes you forward. Since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first formulated the rocket equation in 1903, spacecraft have carried their propellant with them, limiting mission capabilities by the mass ratios. The more fuel you carry, the heavier your rocket becomes, requiring even more fuel to lift that fuel, in a vicious cycle that makes interstellar travel seem impossibly distant. But what if spacecraft didn’t need to carry propellant at all?

For decades, astronomers have studied Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and swirling cloud bands through increasingly powerful telescopes, building a detailed understanding of our giant neighbor’s dynamic atmosphere. Now, for the first time, scientists have created a three-dimensional map of a planet orbiting a distant star, a breakthrough that promises to transform how we study worlds beyond our Solar System.

Space clouds, or nebulae as they are more properly known are vast nurseries where stars are born from swirling collections of gas and dust scattered throughout a galaxy. These aren't fluffy white clouds like the ones we see in the sky, they're enormous regions stretching light years across, filled with hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of heavier elements left over from previous generations of stars. Some glow brilliantly with vibrant colours as nearby stars illuminate them, while others appear as dark silhouettes blocking the light of stars behind them. Inside these clouds, gravity slowly pulls matter together over millions of years, creating dense pockets that eventually collapse to form new stars and planetary systems.