Space News & Blog Articles

NASA's Kepler exoplanet-hunting space telescope ended its mission in 2018, but its contribution to exoplanet science is ongoing. It generated a huge dataset, one that astronomers are still working through. Researchers found a new candidate exoplanet in Kepler's data named HD 137010 b that's orbiting a Sun-similar star nearly 150 light-years away. The new exoplanet is only slightly larger than Earth, and its orbit is about as long as Earth's.

Despite the US administration's threats to cancel the nearly complete Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, it's on track to launch this year or next. When it's launched and sent toward its orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 point, it'll carry two instruments and be ready to tackle three new astronomical surveys. One of them is the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey (GBTDS).

Jupiter’s atmosphere and clouds have mesmerized stargazers for centuries, as their multi-colored, swirling layers can easily be viewed from powerful telescopes on Earth. However, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has upped the ante regarding our understanding of Jupiter’s atmospheric features, having revealed them in breathtaking detail. This includes images of massive lightning storms, clouds swallowing clouds, polar vortices, and powerful jet streams. Yet, despite its beauty and wonder, scientists are still puzzled about the processes occurring deep inside Jupiter’s atmosphere that result in these incredible features.

From 2013 to 2019, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) carried out a deep, wide-area survey of the sky in a collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae, and measure the rate at which the cosmos is expanding. For more than a century, scientists have been trying to constrain this cosmological phenomenon - the Hubble-Lemaitre Constant - named in honor of astronomers Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaitre (who independently confirmed that the Universe is expanding in the early 20th century).

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile offers some of the clearest, darkest skies on Earth. High altitude, minimal cloud cover, and distance from major cities combine to create conditions astronomers dream about. It's why the European Southern Observatory chose Paranal for its Very Large Telescope array and the four 8.2 meter instruments that can work individually or combine their light to achieve staggering resolution.

When Edwin Hubble revealed in the 1920s that distant galaxies were retreating from us in all directions, he laid the foundation for our understanding of the expansion of the universe. But even then, the picture wasn't quite clean. Some nearby galaxies, like Andromeda, were moving toward us rather than away, exactly what you'd expect from gravity between neighboring galaxies.

For decades, Mercury has carried the reputation of being a dead, dry planet whose geological story ended long ago. Its cratered surface, baked by the Sun and seemingly frozen in time, appeared to tell a tale of ancient violence followed by billions of years of silence. That story just got considerably more interesting.

The Lambda Cold Dark Matter (Lambda CDM) model is the current cosmological model and explains much of what we see in the cosmos. One of Lambda CDM's core features is the prediction that structure grows hierarchically from the bottom up. It begins with dark matter density fluctuations, then dwarf galaxies form, then those dwarfs merge to form more massive galaxies, which merge into still larger galaxies. Eventually, there are galaxy clusters.

BepiColombo is slowly uncovering more and more fun facts about Mercury as it continues its preliminary mission. One of the more interesting things found so far is a magnetic “chorus” that appears similar to a phenomenon found in Earth’s much larger magnetic field. A new paper in Nature Communications from the researchers responsible for the probe’s Mio instrument that is studying Mercury’s magnetic field describes what could be thought of as a form of magnetic birdsong.

How can microorganism communities known as biofilms, and have been hypothesized to be responsible for early life on Earth, be used for space exploration? This is what a recent study published in *npj Biofilms and Microbiomes* hopes to address as an international collaboration of researchers investigated the pros and cons of using biofilms in spaceflight. This study has the potential for scientists to better understand the role of biofilms in spaceflight while mitigating health risks of astronauts.

Astronomers have puzzled over Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) since the Lorimer Burst (the first confirmed FRB) was detected in 2007. These rapid bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies last between milliseconds and a few seconds and release as much energy as the Sun produces in days. Whereas most FRBs are one-off events, astronomers have found some rare cases where FRBs were repeating in nature. For years, scientists have speculated as to what causes these events, with theories ranging from neutron stars and black holes to extraterrestrial communications.

When astronomers look out into the cosmos, they see supermassive black holes (SMBH) in two different states. In one state, they're dormant. They're actively accreting only a tiny amount of matter and emit only faint, weak radiation. In the other, they're more actively accreting matter and emitting extremely powerful radiation. These are normally called active galactic nuclei (AGN).

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope has been watching one of the most extreme neighbourhoods in our Galaxy, and it's just caught something extraordinary happening there. Astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. These aren't your average stellar flares, we're talking about energy releases so intense they make our Sun's most dramatic outbursts look like flickering candles.

When Halley's Comet blazed across English skies in April 1066, an elderly Benedictine monk named Eilmer watched from Malmesbury Abbey with growing recognition. "You've come, have you?" he reportedly said, crouching in terror at the glowing apparition. "You've come, you source of tears to many mothers." But Eilmer's words carried weight beyond mere dread, he realised he had seen this exact comet before, during its previous appearance in 989 when he was just a young man.

Dark matter doesn't emit light, it doesn't absorb light and it doesn't even block it, passing through ordinary matter like a ghost through walls (I’m very proud of that sentence.) Yet this invisible substance makes up roughly 85% of all matter in the universe, and its gravitational influence has shaped everything from galaxy clusters millions of light years across down to the rocky planet beneath our feet.

AI faces daily criticism from people worried about its ill-effects. But the type of AI that draws this ire are Large Language Models (LLMs). There are other types of AI with specialized functions that don't make it onto the front pages. Combing through vast troves of astronomical data is a perfect task for AI that is unlikely to be replicated by human minds.

In recent years, astrophysicists have discovered supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the early Universe that are much larger than they should be. Black hole growth is restrained by the Eddington Mass Limit, a cap on the growth rate of black holes. But objects can exceed this limit in certain circumstances, and that's called super-Eddington accretion. san Super-Eddington accretion explain these early SMBH?

In our galaxy, a supernova explodes about once or twice each century. But historical astronomical records show that the last Milky Way core-collapse supernova seen by humans was about 1,000 years ago. That means we've missed a few.

Lately we’ve been reporting about a series of studies on the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), NASA’s flagship telescope mission for the 2040s. These studies have looked at the type of data they need to collect, and what the types of worlds they would expect to find would look like. Another one has been released in pre-print form on arXiv from the newly formed HWO Technology Maturation Project Office, which details the technology maturation needed for this powerful observatory and the “trade space” it will need to explore to be able to complete its stated mission.

There’s a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4%), but non-negligible. And scientists are starting to prepare both for the bad (massive risks to satellites and huge meteors raining down on a large portion of the planet) and the good (a once in a lifetime chance to study the geology, seismology, and chemical makeup of our nearest neighbor). A new paper from Yifan He of Tsinghua University and co-authors, released in pre-print form on arXiv, looks at the bright side of all of the potential interesting science we can do if a collision does, indeed, happen.

How long did it take to establish the water content within Jupiter’s Galilean moons, Io and Europa? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of scientists from the United States and France investigated the intricate processes responsible for the formation and evolution of Io and Europa. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of two of the most unique moons in the solar system, as Io and Europa are known as the most volcanically active body in the solar system and an ocean world estimated to contain twice the volume of Earth’s oceans, respectively.