Space News & Blog Articles

Here's one less thing to worry about — or to look forward to: NASA has ruled out any chance that an asteroid called 2024 YR4 will hit the moon in 2032. Last year, the uncertainty surrounding the space rock's orbital path held out a slight chance of impact, but fresh observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope confirm that it'll be a miss.

The Universe is full of surprises, including a fascinating type of "space laser" known as Mega-Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (megamasers). More specifically, hydroxyl megamasers (OHMs) are extremely bright radio-wavelength emissions produced when gas-rich galaxies collide. This compresses the gas and stimulates large reservoirs of hydroxyl molecules (-OH) to amplify radio emissions. Using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, astronomers discovered a hydroxyl megamaser located in a violent galactic merger more than 8 billion light-years away.

The ESA's Mars Express probe has been surveying Mars from orbit for more than twenty years. The way it has mapped the surface using its High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) has drastically changed the way we see the Red Planet. In a recent article, the ESA shared a series of HRSC images highlighting the heavily cratered region known as Arabia Terra. The study of Martian craters offers insight into Mars' geology, meteorology, and its long and turbulent history. The images were generated from the camera's digital terrain model and the nadir and colour channels.

Ever since physicist Freeman Dyson first proposed the concept in 1960, the “Dyson sphere” has been the holy grail of techno-signature hunters. A highly advanced civilization could build a “sphere” (or, in our more modern understanding, a “swarm” of smaller components) around their host star to harvest its entire energy output. We know, in theory at least, that such a swarm could exist - but what would it actually look like if we were able to observe one? A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv, and soon to be published in Universe from Amirnezam Amiri of the University of Arkansas digs into that question - and in the process discloses the types of stars that are the most likely to find them around.

The stable Solar System we see around us today took time to develop. Not only did it take time for planetary orbits to stabilize, but planetary atmospheres also needed time to evolve. In fact, planetary orbits and evolving atmospheres work together to determine what a solar system eventually looks like, and photoevaporation drives the process.

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, has a proven track record for reducing waste and efficiently producing made-to-order tools and components. For years, NASA has been testing the technology aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to investigate how it may increase astronauts' self-sufficiency. This is especially true of missions far from Earth, where opportunities for resupply are few and far between. With their latest experiment, the JPL Additive Compliant Canister (JACC), NASA demonstrated another application: 3D printing space antennas.

One feature of the Solar System that doesn't require a complex explanation is the cratered surfaces of some of the planets and moons. These surfaces have been pummeled by impacts, and on some bodies, these impacts are defining features. The craters tell the tale of our Solar System's history.

It's strange that a dying star is at the heart of this glowing cloud of gas, ionizing it and lighting it up almost like a living structure, but that's Nature for you. An aging Wolf-Rayet star, which has exhausted its hydrogen core, illuminates the Cat's Eye Nebula from within. The star, catalogued as HD 164963, has suffered episodic mass loss as it ages. Each complex layer in the gaseous nebula represents one episode of mass loss driven by the star's extremely powerful winds.

Anyone familiar with the search for alien life will have heard of the “Goldilocks Zone” around a star. This is defined as the orbital band where the temperature is just right for liquid water to pool on a rocky planet’s surface - a good approximation for what we thought of as the early conditions for life on Earth. But what happens if that life doesn’t stay on an Earth analog? If they, like we, start to move towards their neighboring planets, the idea of a habitable zone becomes much more complicated. A new paper from Dr. Caleb Scharf of the NASA Ames Research Center, and one of the agency’s premier astrobiologists, tries to account for this possibility by introducing the framework of an Interplanetary Habitable Zone (IHZ).

On April 8th, 2024, people across the world witnessed a solar eclipse, a relatively rare event in which the Moon occults (blocks out) light from the Sun. To capture this event, volunteers at 143 observatories across the U.S. trained their equipment on it as part of NASA's Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project. The images they took were groundbreaking and provided some of the most detailed images to date of the Sun's corona. After nearly two years of production and editing, the Eclipse Megamovie team has released the dataset from this project.

When most people think of a supernova, they're thinking of a Type II core-collapse supernova. These are massive stars that have reached the end of their time on the main sequence. They've used up their supply of hydrogen and continue fusing heavier elements until the star can't support its own mass. The core collapses and they explode, outshining their entire host galaxy for months.

For about a century, scientists have known that the Universe is in a state of constant expansion. In honor of the scientists who definitively showed this, this expansion has come to be known as the Hubble Constant (or Hubble-Lemaitre Constant). Today, scientists use two main techniques to measure the rate of expansion: the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and the Cosmic Distance Ladder. The former relies on redshift measurements of the CMB, the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang, while the latter relies on parallax and redshift measurements using variable stars and supernovae (aka "standard candles").

Red dwarfs make up the vast majority of stars in the galaxy. Such ubiquity means they host the majority of rocky exoplanets we’ve found so far - which in turn makes them interesting for astrobiological surveys. However, there’s a catch - astrobiologists aren’t sure the light from these stars can actually support oxygen-producing life. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Giovanni Covone and Amedeo Balbi, suggests that they might not - when it comes to stellar light, quality is just as important as quantity. And according to their calculations, Earth-like biospheres are incredibly difficult to sustain around red dwarfs.

Giant mpacts on Earth's surface can be cataclysmic events with far-reaching consequences. They can excavate massive craters like the Vredefort Crater. There's also growing evidence that impacts powerful enough can create a massive underground hydrothermal system of cracks and chemistry that could be conducive to life.

Radio astronomy offers scientists a means of observing the "unseen" Universe, where a wide range of natural phenomena take place that optical telescopes cannot observe. This is the purpose behind the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), a massive radio telescope with stations all across Europe. It is the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world, operating at low frequencies (10–240 MHz). After ten years of surveying the sky, the LOFAR Collaboration has produced the most detailed radio map of the Universe ever made.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and has proudly boasted about this since time immemorial, with its scientific confirmation occurring by Galileo Galilei in 1610. It was later found that Jupiter has a bulging equator caused by its rapid rotation, turbulent atmosphere, and complex interior mechanisms despite its massive size, and scientists have even measured its “waistline” down to a tenth of a kilometer. Now, imagine being the largest planet in the solar system and you’re told you’re not as big as you thought. Where probably most humans would be thrilled to find this out, how do you respond if you’re Jupiter?

Earlier today, NASA announced that it would be increasing the cadence of its missions to meet its objectives under the Artemis Program. It is also making changes to its mission architecture to include a standard vehicle configuration and undertake one surface landing every year after 2027. In real terms, this means that a lunar landing will not take place as part of Artemis III in 2027, but during Artemis IV, currently scheduled for 2028. Instead, Artemis III will involve a rendezvous in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to test the systems and operations for the first lunar landing in over sixty years.

Here's a thought experiment that keeps planetary scientists awake at night. Strip every living thing from our planet, every bacterium, every blade of grass, every creature that has ever drawn breath and ask a simple but profound question: would Earth still be a world capable of supporting life?

Imagine trying to reconstruct the history of a city by studying only its oldest surviving buildings. You can't watch it being built, you can't interview the architects, all you have are the structures themselves, their materials, their arrangement, the subtle clues locked into their very fabric. That is essentially what astronomers do when they study the formation of our Galaxy, and a new study has just given them their biggest collection of clues yet.

Imagine trying to study the foundations of an ancient city while it's still being built. The noise is deafening, the dust is everywhere, and the whole place is barely visible through the haze. That is almost exactly the challenge astronomers face when trying to understand how vast cities of hundreds of galaxies first came into being. A new discovery has just given them their best look yet.

It's been about 8 months since the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) saw first light. Now the telescope is scanning the night sky to detect transient changes and sending alerts to astronomers and observatories around the world so they can perform follow-up observations. This alert system is one of the last milestones before the VRO starts its primary endeavour: the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).