Space News & Blog Articles

Modularity is taking off in more ways than one in space exploration. The design of the upcoming “Lunar Gateway” space station is supposed to be modular, with different modules being supplied by different organizations. In an effort to extend that thinking down to rovers on the ground, a new paper from researchers at Germany’s space agency (DLR), developed an architecture where a single, modular rover could be responsible for both exploration and carrying payloads around the Moon or Mars.

Radio astronomy opens a window onto the invisible universe. While our eyes can detect visible light, countless objects in space emit radiation at much longer wavelengths, in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Where visible light gets blocked by interstellar dust, radio waves pass through unrestricted revealing objects that remain completely invisible to traditional telescopes. Radio telescopes detect these waves, revealing phenomena that optical telescopes simply cannot see. Radio waves also penetrate Earth's atmosphere far more easily than many other wavelengths, making ground-based radio observatories incredibly effective tools for exploring the universe.

The Great Oxidation Event, which occurred between 2.1 and 2.4 billion years ago, fundamentally transformed Earth's atmosphere and made complex life possible. Before this period, oxygen producing cyanobacteria had evolved hundreds of millions of years earlier, yet atmospheric oxygen levels remained low for an extended period. Scientists have long wondered over this delay, exploring various explanations from volcanic gases to microbial activity. A recent study from Okayama University in Japan offers a fresh view on this ancient mystery by examining two unlikely culprits, nickel and urea.

Ground-based telescopes have a fundamental problem that no amount of engineering can fix. They're trying to observe the universe through Earth's atmosphere, a constantly moving blanket of air that distorts and blurs incoming light. It's a little like trying to take a photograph of the bottom of a stream where the water is gently flowing! Space telescopes like Hubble easily sidestep this issue by operating above the atmosphere, but they can only photograph tiny slivers of sky. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a clever mathematical solution that could give ground based telescopes near space quality vision whilst retaining their ability to survey vast swathes of space!

SpaceX closed out a dramatic chapter in the development of its super-heavy-lift Starship launch system with a successful flight test that mostly followed the script for the previous flight test.

When galaxies collide, it's not a gentle affair but it does take millions of years. Over this time the two massive star systems slowly merge together, their gravitational pull drawing them closer. At the heart of each galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, an object containing millions or even billions of times the mass of our Sun. After the galaxies merge, these two black holes should eventually find each other, settling into orbit around their shared centre of gravity. The result is one of the universe's most extreme phenomena, a supermassive black hole binary. But to date, none have been found.

Centuries before the Roswell UFO Incident, Native Americans had their own stories to tell about alien visitations — for example, about the “Sky People” who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and have a special bond with the Cherokee Nation.

Avoiding, or at least limiting the damage from, geomagnetic storms is one of the most compelling arguments for why we should pay attention to space. Strong solar storms can have an impact on everything from air traffic to farming, and we ignore them at our own peril and cost. Despite that threat, the tools that we have applied to tracking and analyzing them have been relatively primitive. Both simulations and the physical hardware devoted to it require an upgrade if we are to accurately assess the threat a solar storm poses. As a first step, a new paper from a group led by researchers at the University of Michigan created a much more detailed simulation that shows how important it is that we also have the appropriate sensing hardware in place to detect these storms as they happen.

The gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon has led to one hemisphere of the Moon being locked facing away from Earth. Don’t be misled though, the Moon does rotate, it just takes as long to rotate once on its axis as it takes to complete an orbit of Earth. This is known as synchronous rotation and on the far side there is a massive crater called the South Pole-Aitken basin. Spanning over 1,930 km from north to south and 1,600 km east to west. This ancient impact crater formed roughly 4.3 billion years ago when a giant asteroid delivered a glancing blow to the young Moon. A new study from the University of Arizona reveals that this colossal crater holds secrets about the Moon's formation and early evolution.

Hunting for something completely invisible sounds impossible, yet astronomers do this regularly to probe the nature of dark matter. Dark matter is a mysterious material that makes up about 85% of all the matter in the universe, yet it remains invisible to our telescopes and detectors. Unlike ordinary matter, dark matter doesn't emit, absorb, or reflect light, which is why we can't see it directly. We know it exists because of its gravitational effects on visible matter, galaxies rotate too fast and galaxy clusters hold together too tightly to be explained by the matter we can see alone. Despite decades of research, we still don’t know exactly what it is.

Terraforming is the theoretical process of transforming a planet or moon to make it habitable for humans and other Earth like life. The concept involves altering an alien world's atmosphere, temperature, and surface conditions to resemble Earth's environment, such as adding oxygen to the air, creating liquid water on the surface, and establishing a stable climate. Mars is the most commonly discussed candidate for terraforming, with proposals ranging from releasing greenhouse gases to warm the planet, to introducing microorganisms that could gradually produce oxygen over thousands of years.

The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has been something of a mystery ever since it graced our Solar System. From all outward appearances, the object appears to be a comet that originated in another star system and was ejected by gravitational perturbations. This was evident from the way it has been actively releasing water vapor as it draws closer to the Sun, forming a coma and a tail. Nevertheless, it has exhibited some anomalous behavior, fueling speculation that it may be an interstellar visitor of another kind.

Betelgeuse, the brilliant red star marking Orion's shoulder, has long been suspected of harbouring a secret. I have to confess, Betelgeuse holds a special place in my heart as the first star I ever looked at through a telescope as a child, so learning that astronomers theorised this massive supergiant wasn't alone made it even more intriguing. Proving it, however, required catching a fleeting alignment and deploying some of our most powerful space telescopes in a race against time. Now, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have finally confirmed what many suspected, Betelgeuse does indeed have a companion star, though not quite the type anyone expected.

Phosphine has caused quite a stir in the astronomical world lately. That was largely due to its (still hotly debated) detection in the atmosphere of Venus. While the only known way for phosphine to be created on terrestrial worlds, like Venus, is through some sort of biological origin, it is relatively common among larger gas giants and even “brown dwarfs” - failed stars larger than Jupiter but not quite large enough to start their own hydrogen fusion process. Previously, we hadn’t yet seen phosphine in the atmosphere of brown dwarf in other solar systems, but a new paper from a diverse group of researchers, available in pre-print form on arXiv, used data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find it for the first time. They also realized the mechanism that made it so hard to spot in the first place - the object’s metallicity.

When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, they brought with them samples of lunar soil (regolith) and rock. The analysis of these samples forever changed our perceptions of how the Earth-Moon system formed and evolved. Similarly, the samples returned by China's Chang'e program are also leading to breakthroughs in our understanding of Earth's only satellite, especially its so-called "dark side." As a tidally-locked body, the Moon's near side is constantly facing towards Earth while its far (or "dark") side faces outward to space.

An asteroid recently made the second closest pass to Earth ever observed on October 1st. And astronomers only found it after it had already completed its closest approach. That offers another lesson in how difficult it is to find small objects coming close to our planet in the vast dark ocean of space.

What if our understanding of Uranus and Neptune’s compositions have been wrong, specifically regarding their classifications as “ice giants”? This is what a recent study accepted for publication in *Astronomy & Astrophysics* hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Zurich investigated the interior structures of Uranus and Neptune. This study has the potential to help scientists not only better understand the formation and evolution of Uranus and Neptune but could also provide key insights into Jupiter and Saturn, and gaseous exoplanets, too.

Today, it's a scientific consensus that Mars was once a very different place, with a warmer, denser atmosphere and liquid water on its surface. This is evidenced by flow channels, delta fans, lakebeds, and many other features that form in the presence of flowing water here on Earth. Based on the way many of these channels feed into the Northern Lowlands on Mars, scientists speculate that this region was once home to an ocean that covered the northern hemisphere. According to new research from the University of Arkansas, there is a strong case for the existence of this ancient ocean.

The Big Bang essentially created two elements: hydrogen and helium. It also produced tiny traces of lithium and a few other light isotopes, but in the beginning there was hydrogen and helium. All the other, heavier elements formed later, either in the cores of stars, through stellar collisions, or other astrophysical processes. Even now hydrogen and helium make up so much of the material world that astronomers refer to all other elements as metals. Dust in the wind, you might say.

Duplicating expensive resources is expensive and wasteful, and most people would agree it's unnecessary. However, the planned increase in major satellite constellations is currently causing a massive duplication of resources as individual companies and even countries try to set up their own infrastructure in space. What’s more, there is a relatively limited amount of space in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), where many of these satellites are supposed to go - any more than that and a single collision could cause Kessler Syndrome, where many of the ones already in orbit would be destroyed and we wouldn’t be able to launch any more for a long time. A new paper from researchers at the National University of Defense Technology in China suggests an alternative to these multiple megaconstellations - a single, modular system similar to how cloud computing works on the current internet.

A6 Lemmon joins the dusk comet parade, in a brief apparition finale.