Space News & Blog Articles

Billions of years ago, Mars was a much different place than it is today. During the same period when life was first emerging on Earth, Mars had a thicker atmosphere, warmer surface temperatures, and flowing water on its surface. Evidence of this warmer, wetter past is preserved on the planet’s surface today in the form of river channels, lakebeds, alluvial fans, and sedimentary deposits. When this period began, and how long it lasted, remains the subject of much debate for scientists.

Although meteorites are known to fall all over the world, the environment and unique processes in Antarctica make them somewhat easier to find on the pristine, snowy landscape. Still, collecting meteorites in Antarctica is physically grueling and hazardous work.

Dark matter has long been a mystery to astronomers, in no small part because it is so hard to measure directly.  Its influence is plain when looking at its gravitational effects on objects such as far away galaxies, but measuring that influence directly has proved much trickier.  But now, a team of scientists thinks they have a way to measure the influence of dark matter directly – all it would require is a specialized probe that sits really far away from Earth for a while.

Our galaxy hosts loads of binary stars. So much so that the majority of all stars in the galaxy are members of a binary system. Astronomers can only find most binary systems through intense scrutiny, either by having a telescope big enough to reveal two or more stars where we once thought there was only one, or by using spectroscopy to notice the wiggling motion of one star caused by the orbit of a hidden companion.

Microlensing strikes again.  Astronomers have been using the technique to detect everything from rogue planets to the most distant star ever seen.  Now, astronomers have officially found another elusive object that has long been theorized and that we first reported on back in 2009 but has never directly detected – a rogue black hole.

Elliptical galaxies are the retirement centers of the universe. They are filled with old, red stars and have very little active star formation. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t make more stars, since they have relatively thin stores of interstellar gas and dust. The stars inside ellipticals are just sitting there, slowly burning through their reserves of hydrogen, dying off one by one.

For anyone old enough to remember the 1980s, the Space Shuttle was an iconic symbol of spaceflight. For thirty years (1981-2011), this program flew 135 missions, which consisted of orbital science experiments, deploying satellites, launching interplanetary probes, participating in the Shuttle-Mir program, deploying the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and constructing the International Space Station (ISS). There were also tragedies along the way, such as the Challenger (1986) and Columbia disasters (2003).

With better computers comes more battery imagery.  Or at least that’s true most of the time.  Supercomputers are extraordinarily good at image processing, so it’s normally worth it when a new algorithm comes along that they can turn their attention to.  That’s exactly what happened with an algorithm recently developed by Ph.D. student Frits Sweijen and his colleagues at Leiden University.  They used several supercomputers’ image processing power to simulate and enhance the resolution of radio images captured by the International LOFAR telescope. 

As evidenced by a recent Netflix movie, dangerous asteroids can come from anywhere.  So there was an obvious weakness in our asteroid defense system when only one of the hemispheres was covered by telescopes that constantly scan the sky.  That was the case until recently, with the expansion of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) system into the southern hemisphere.

When young stars coalesce out of a cloud of molecular hydrogen, a disk of leftover material called a protoplanetary disk surrounds them. This disk is where planets form, and astronomers are getting better at peering into those veiled environments and watching embryonic worlds take shape. But young stars aren’t the only stars with disks of raw material rotating around them.

The master of disaster has struck again, and this time our Moon is the ominous villain.  

The existence of water on Mars is a contentious subject. We know there used to be water on the surface of the planet, though it’s long gone now. We know there’s frozen water underground in the world, and we know there’s water vapour in the air. But life needs liquid water.

For decades, climate researchers and Earth scientists have used cores from ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic to better understand Earth’s climate history. Given how sensitive our atmosphere and climate are to the Sun, these ice cores are also a record of Solar activity. In a recent analysis of ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, a research team led by Lund University in Sweden found evidence of an extreme solar storm that occurred about 9,200 years ago – when solar activity was believed to be one of the Sun’s more “quiet” phases.

Space agencies worldwide have some very ambitious plans that will take place in this decade and the next. For starters, NASA and its agency and commercial partners plan to return to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era. Beyond that, they also intend to build the infrastructure that will allow for a “sustained program of lunar exploration,” such as bases on the surface and the Lunar Gateway. Once all of that is in place, NASA will be contemplating sending crewed missions to Mars.

NASA says it plans to plunge the vestiges of the International Space Station into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo in early 2031, after passing the baton to commercial space stations.

In February 2016, scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed the first-ever detection of a gravitational wave event. Originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, GWs result from mergers between massive objects – like black holes, neutron stars, and supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Since 2016, dozens of events have been confirmed, opening a new window to the Universe and leading to a revolution in astronomy and cosmology.

North Korea released some pictures they say come from their recent missile test. The missile they tested—the intermediate-range Hwasong-12—can reach the U.S. territory of Guam. According to most North Korea observers, the country hopes the tests will bring the U.S. back to the negotiating table.

If the Ingenuity helicopter would fly at night on Mars, its very possible the whirring rotors would create enough static electricity in the extremely dry Martian atmosphere to cause the air around the craft to glow.

NEA Scout will hitch a ride to an asteroid on the Artemis 1 Moon mission.

Stars form inside vast collections of molecular hydrogen called molecular clouds, sometimes called stellar nurseries or star forming regions. Instabilities in the clouds cause gas to collapse in on itself, and when enough material gathers and the density reaches a critical stage, a star begins its life of fusion.

Power beaming is one of those technologies that can completely change the world.  Almost unlimited power wherever it is needed, whenever it’s needed, is literally a technology straight out of science fiction.  Researchers have been working on the technology for decades at this point, but there has been little commercial headway so far, so what is holding this revolutionary technology up?  A “killer app” would certainly help move it along – and that is what a team from Space Power, a private company, and the University of Surrey think they have found in the form of powering other microsatellites.