Space News & Blog Articles

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS may be one to watch for at dawn late next month.

In 1977, astronomers received a powerful, peculiar radio signal from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Its frequency was the same as neutral hydrogen, and astronomers had speculated that any ETIs attempting to communicate would naturally use this frequency. Now the signal, named the Wow! Signal has become lore in the SETI world.

Citizen science is such a great concept. Using the combined computing power of a gazillion (exaggeration) desktop and laptops to churn through data is an excellent and efficient way of analysing volumes of data. This has been shown yet again as a star has been identified to be hurtling out to intergalactic space! Most stars in the Milky Way are not travelling fast enough to be able to escape its immense gravity but the suspected brown dwarf is travelling at 1.5 million km/h, fast enough to escape. 

Empty space is nothing but. According to the weird rules of quantum mechanics, it’s actually filled with an endless amount of energy, known appropriately enough as vacuum energy.

Cost is a major driving factor in the development of space exploration missions. Any new technology or trick that could lower the cost of a mission makes it much more appealing for mission planners. Therefore, much of NASA’s research goes into those technologies that enable cheaper missions. For example, a few years ago, NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) supported a project by Michael VanWoerkom of ExoTerra Resource to develop a lander mission that could support a sample return from Europa. Let’s examine what made that mission different from other Europa mission architectures.

How common are Earth-like exoplanets—also called exo-Earths—and which exoplanetary systems should we target to find them? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated potential targets for the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), which was recommended during the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 (Astro2020) and is slated to launch in the 2040s. Most notably, HWO will use the direct imaging method to identify exo-Earths, and this study holds the potential to create a more scientifically cost-effective approach for identifying and studying exoplanets.

According to NASA’s Perseverance rover, ancient rocks in Jezero Crater formed in the presence of water. These sedimentary rocks are more than 3.5 billion years old and may predate the appearance of life on Earth. When and if these samples are returned to Earth, scientists hope to determine if they hold evidence of ancient Martian life.

Black holes are notoriously destructive to stars near them. Astronomers often see flashes representing the death throes of stars collapsing past the event horizon, a black hole they got too close to. However, in rare instances, a star isn’t wholly swallowed by its gigantic neighbor and is pulled into an orbit, causing a much slower death, which would probably be more painful if stars could feel anything. A new study using X-ray results from Chandra and some other instruments details a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy far, far away that is slowly devouring a star it has captured in an orbit, and it could teach them more about a variety of interest physical processes. 

Galaxies are some of the largest clearly defined structures in space. There are trillions of them, and many are clustered around each other. But how does that clustering affect them? That’s been a question for a while, and older papers have yielded contradictory results. Now, a new paper analyzing millions of galaxies from researchers at the University of Washington, Yale, and several other institutions shows a clear pattern that had been debated before – galaxies surrounded by other galaxies tend to be larger.

Areas of space have wildly different temperatures depending on whether they are directly in sunlight or not. For example, temperatures on the Moon can range from 121 °C during the lunar “day” (which lasts for two weeks), then drop down to -133 °C at night, encompassing a 250 °C swing. Stabilizing the temperature inside a habitat in those environments would require heating and cooling on a scale never before conducted on Earth. But what if there was a way to ease the burden of those temperature swings? Phase change materials (PCMs) might be the answer, according to a new paper from researchers at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. 

Sometimes, when scientists measure things differently, they get different results. Whenever that happens with something as crucial to humanity’s long-term future as the universe’s expansion rate, it can draw much attention. Scientists have thought for decades that there has been such a difference, known as the Hubble Tension, in measurements of the speed at which the universe is expanding. However, a new paper by researchers at the University of Chicago and the Carnegie Institution for Science using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggests that there wasn’t any difference at all.

Solar storms captured the imagination of much of the American public earlier this year when auroras were visible well south of their typical northern areas. As the Sun ramps into another solar cycle, those storms will become more and more common, and the dangers they present to Earth’s infrastructure will continue to increase. Currently, most of our early warning systems only give us a few minutes warning about a potentially destructive impending geomagnetic storm event. So a team of researchers from Sapienza University in Rome and the Italian Space Agency proposed a plan to sail a series of detectors to a point out in space where they could give us an early warning. And they want those detectors to stay on station without rockets.

There’s a link between Earth’s ocean salinity and its climate. Salinity can have a dramatic effect on the climate of any Earth-like planet orbiting a Sun-like star. But what about exoplanets around M-dwarfs?

Well-placed observers have a rare opportunity to see an interplanetary spacecraft early next week.

The idea of terraforming Mars, making its atmosphere and environment more Earth-like for human settlement, goes back decades. During that time, many proposed methods have been considered and put aside as “too expensive” or requiring technology well in advance of what we have today. Nevertheless, the idea has persisted and is often considered a part of long-term plans for establishing a human presence on Mars. Given the many plans to establish human outposts on the Moon and then use that infrastructure to send missions to Mars, opportunities for terraforming may be closer than we think.

Many times, it’s better to flesh out technologies fully on Earth’s surface before they’re used in space. That is doubly true if that technology is part of the critical infrastructure keeping astronauts alive on the Moon. Since that infrastructure will undoubtedly use in-situ resources – known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) – developing test beds here on Earth for those ISRU processes is critical to derisking the technologies before they’re used on a mission. That’s the plan with a test bed designed by researchers at the German Aerospace Center in Bremen – they designed it to improve how well we gather water and oxygen from lunar regolith. Unfortunately, as their work described in a recent paper demonstrates, it will be a challenge to do so.

GPS is ubiquitous on Earth. It guides everything from precision surveying to aircraft navigation. To realize our vision of lunar exploration with a sustained human presence, we’ll need the same precision on the Moon.

Primordial black holes formed during the earliest stages of the evolution of the universe. Their immense gravity may be playing havoc in stellar systems. They can transfer energy into wide binary systems disrupting their orbits. Like celestial bullies their disruption might lead to extreme outcomes though like the ejection of a star, only to be replaced by the black hole itself! A new paper studies the interactions of systems like these and looks at ways we might be able to detect them. 

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), launched in 2009, spent the next fourteen and half years studying the Universe in infrared wavelengths. During that time, it discovered thousands of minor planets, star clusters, and the first Brown Dwarf and Earth-Trojan asteroid. By 2013, the mission was reactivated by NASA as the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), which was tasked with searching for Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). For ten years, the NEOWISE mission faithfully cataloged comets and asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth someday.

Mars was once wet, but now its surface is desiccated. Its meagre atmosphere contains only a tiny trace amount of water vapour. But new research says the planet contains ample liquid water. Unfortunately, it’s kilometres under the surface, well out of reach.

Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, is one of the most biologically interesting places in the solar system. Despite being hard to reach, it appears to have active volcanoes, a thin atmosphere, and even some organic molecules called tholins on its surface. However, Voyager only visited it once, in passing, 35 years ago. Technology has advanced a lot in the intervening decades, and a new push for a lander on Triton specifically has been garnering attention. One such mission was described by Steve Oleson and Geoffrey Landis of NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Their concept mission, known as Triton Hopper, was funded by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) back in 2018 and utilized a cryogenic pump to extract propellant from Triton’s surface to power a “hopper” that could travel up to 5 km a month, and do some fascinating science along the way.