Space News & Blog Articles

So where do we go after years of empty searches for dark matter? We haven’t learned nothing. After decades of searches, we’re narrowing down the range of what dark matter can and cannot be.

Whenever someone talks about black holes, they almost always talk about the event horizon and the singularity. After all, that's what defines a black hole, right? Well, it depends on what you mean by black hole. There are some that would argue a black hole doesn't need a singularity, and that could mean they don't even have an event horizon.

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto has forced astronomers to rewrite their textbooks — but that’s not all: New Horizons also forced Les Johnson to rewrite a novel.

How does water form on exoplanets and what could this mean for the search for life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated the processes responsible for exoplanets producing liquid water. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life beyond Earth, and specifically which exoplanets could be viable future targets for astrobiology.

For over a century, rocket propulsion has followed a simple principle; burn fuel, expel it backward, and Newton’s third law pushes you forward. Since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first formulated the rocket equation in 1903, spacecraft have carried their propellant with them, limiting mission capabilities by the mass ratios. The more fuel you carry, the heavier your rocket becomes, requiring even more fuel to lift that fuel, in a vicious cycle that makes interstellar travel seem impossibly distant. But what if spacecraft didn’t need to carry propellant at all?

For decades, astronomers have studied Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and swirling cloud bands through increasingly powerful telescopes, building a detailed understanding of our giant neighbor’s dynamic atmosphere. Now, for the first time, scientists have created a three-dimensional map of a planet orbiting a distant star, a breakthrough that promises to transform how we study worlds beyond our Solar System.

Space clouds, or nebulae as they are more properly known are vast nurseries where stars are born from swirling collections of gas and dust scattered throughout a galaxy. These aren't fluffy white clouds like the ones we see in the sky, they're enormous regions stretching light years across, filled with hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of heavier elements left over from previous generations of stars. Some glow brilliantly with vibrant colours as nearby stars illuminate them, while others appear as dark silhouettes blocking the light of stars behind them. Inside these clouds, gravity slowly pulls matter together over millions of years, creating dense pockets that eventually collapse to form new stars and planetary systems.

Comet 3I/ATLAS, only the third known visitor from beyond our Solar System, has been brightening far more rapidly than expected as it approaches perihelion, its closest point to the Sun. From Earth, the comet has been positioned almost directly behind the Sun for the past month, making ground based observations nearly impossible during this crucial period. Instead, the team of astronomers have been watching from space based observatories.

When you open your fridge, you expect it to be cooler than your kitchen. Similarly, when astronomers look back billions of years into the universe's history, they expect to find it was hotter than today. A team of Japanese researchers has just confirmed this prediction with remarkable precision, offering one of the strongest tests yet of our understanding of how the universe evolved.

To answer that question of what’s inside a void, we have to first decide what a void…is. I know it’s easy enough to describe in big, broad, vague terms. Voids are the empty places. Voids are the things that aren’t. If you zoom out to truly enormous scales, well beyond the sizes of mere galaxies, where you take such a huge portrait of the universe that individual galaxies appear as nothing more than tiny points of light, then a) welcome to cosmology, and b) holy crap the voids really stand out. In fact, we got our first taste of voids all the way back in the late 1970’s, right when we started to build our first deep surveys of the universe. Once we started making maps, we noticed places where the maps were empty. And two different groups found the voids around the same time, although only one group called them voids. The other group called them “big holes” for one I’m glad they didn’t win that particular jargon war.

Meteorites are both the messengers and time capsules of the Solar System. As pieces of larger asteroids that broke apart, or debris thrown up by impacts on other bodies, these "space rocks" retain the composition of where they originated from. As a result, scientists can study other planets, moons, and objects by examining the abundance of chemical elements in meteorites. Unfortunately, such studies are limited when it comes to meteorites retrieved on Earth, due to erosion, atmospheric filtration, and geological processes (like volcanism and mantle convection).

When the Sun reaches the end of its main sequence, approximately 5 billion years from now, it will enter what is known as its Red Giant Branch (RGB) phase, during which it will expand and potentially consume Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth. Not long after, it will undergo gravitational collapse and blow off its outer layers, leaving behind a dense remnant known as a white dwarf. While this is how planet Earth will eventually meet its end, it will not mark the end of the Solar System, as the white dwarf remnant of our Sun surrounded by clouds of trace elements.

Now that we have tools to find vast numbers of voids in the universe, we can finally ask…well, if we crack em open, what do we find inside?

There is a limit to how big we can build particle colliders on Earth, whether that is because of limited space or limited economics. Since size is equivalent to energy output for particle colliders, that also means there’s a limit to how energetic we can make them. And again, since high energies are required to test theories that go Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics, that means we will be limited in our ability to validate those theories until we build a collider big enough. But a team of scientists led by Yang Bai at the University of Wisconsin thinks they might have a better idea - use already existing neutrino detectors as a large scale particle collider that can reach energies way beyond what the LHC is capable of.

How could the principle of “radical mundanity” proposed by the Fermi paradox help explain why humans haven’t found evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs)? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a lone researcher investigated the prospect for finding ETCs based on this principle. This study has the potential to help scientists and the public better understand why we haven’t identified intelligent life beyond Earth and how we might narrow the search for it.

Could scientists find life in the clouds of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recently submitted manuscript hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how the biosignatures of microbes could be identified in exoplanet atmospheres and clouds. This study has the potential to help scientists develop new methods for finding life on exoplanets, either as we know it or even as we don’t know it.

In the 1970’s Vera Rubin didn’t set out to upend modern cosmology. She was just always curious about the heavens. It started with building a homemade telescope out of cardboard and glass, and it progressed with her becoming the only astronomy undergraduate student at Vasser College, graduating in 1948. She was qualified enough to get into Princeton, except for the fact that she was a woman, and so they wouldn’t let her in. Despite years of discouragement and harassment, she made a name for herself in cosmology, joining the first generation of scientists to piece together the large-scale structure of the universe.

Everyone’s favorite interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS isn’t hiding near perihelion this week, as amateur astronomers reveal.

For decades, astronomers have faced a frustrating puzzle when studying star formation in our Galaxy. They know that most stars are born inside clouds of cold molecular hydrogen gas, but this hydrogen is all but invisible to telescopes because it doesn't emit light that can easily be detected. To find these stellar nurseries, researchers have relied on carbon monoxide as a tracer molecule, find the marker and thats where molecular clouds exist. However, there's been a problem with this approach, substantial amounts of star forming gas simply don't light up in carbon monoxide observations, remaining hidden from view.

If you could zoom out from Earth far enough, our Milky Way would shrink to just one galaxy among roughly fifty neighbours clustered together by gravity. These galactic neighbourhoods vary dramatically in size, and the largest ones, containing hundreds or thousands of galaxies bound together, represent some of the most massive objects in the entire universe. Their immense scale makes them uniquely valuable laboratories for testing our understanding of fundamental physics.

Can water-rich exoplanets survive orbiting white dwarf stars, the latter of which are remnants of Sun-like stars? This is what a recent study accepted to *The Astrophysical Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the likelihood of small, rocky worlds with close orbits to white dwarfs could harbor life. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life as we know it, or don’t know it, and where to find it.