Space News & Blog Articles

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is slated to be the next Great Observatory for the world. Its main focus has been searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-like exoplanets. However, to do that, it will require a significant amount of effort with only a coronagraph, the currently planned primary instrument, no matter how powerful that coronagraph is. As new paper from Fabien Malbet of the University of Grenoble Alpes and his co-authors suggest an improvement - add a second instrument to HWO’s payload that will be able to astrometrically track planets down to a precision of .5 micro-arcseconds (µas). That would allow HWO to detect Earth-size planets around hundreds of nearby stars - dramatically increasing the number of potential candidates for atmospheric analysis.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Black holes it seems, are recyclers and a team of scientists have just caught them in the act. Two gravitational wave detections from late 2024 have revealed black holes with bizarre spins and lopsided masses, the telltale signs of cannibalism on a universal scale.

Asteroids spin. Most of them do so rather slowly, and up until now most theories of asteroid rotation have failed to explain exactly why. A new paper from Wen-Han Zhou at the University of Tokyo and his co-authors might finally be able to fully explain that mystery as well as a few others related to asteroid rotation. Their work was presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in late September and could impact our understanding of how best to defend against a potentially hazardous asteroid.

Low Earth orbit might seem like empty space, but for the thousands of satellites circling our planet between 95 and 1,900 km up, it's actually a surprisingly hostile environment. Every moment, these spacecraft are bombarded by highly reactive oxygen atoms that corrode their surfaces, while collisions with atmospheric molecules create drag that gradually pulls them back toward Earth. Most satellites last only about five years before these relentless forces take their toll, and the spacecraft tumbles back through the atmosphere. Now, a team at the University of Texas in Dallas is developing a protective coating that could fundamentally change how long satellites survive in orbit.

Driving on the Moon for the first time has got to be an exhilarating experience. But driving the same path on the Moon for the 500th time probably won’t be nearly as exciting to whatever poor astronaut got stuck with that duty for the day. With that in mind, a team of researchers led by PhD student Alec Krawciw and Professor Tim Barfoot of the University of Toronto are working on a way to automate the mundane task of driving goods back and forth from a lunar landing site to a nascent lunar exploration base.

Citing delays, acting NASA chief Sean Duffy announced that the Artemis Program - NASA's plan to return astronauts to the Moon - needs to be shaken up again. The announcement came on Monday (Oct. 22nd) when Duffy, also the Secretary of Transportation, made two television appearances to discuss ongoing problems with the program. This included the development of the Starship Human Landing System (HLS), the lunar lander that will transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface, which NASA contracted to SpaceX in 2021.

Astronomers with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) made history in 2019 by producing the first image of a black hole. The object in question was the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of M87, a supergiant elliptical galaxy about 53.5 million light-years distant in the constellation Virgo. This was followed in 2022 with the first-ever image of Sagittarius A*, the SMBH at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. Now, in another first, astronomers have observed a pair of black holes orbiting each other in quasar OJ287, an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) located 4 billion light-years away in the constellation Cancer.

In the distant past, the Solar System was rife with impacts and collisions. Millions of rocky objects zoomed chaotically through the system, smashing into each other in collisional cascades. Over time, many of them eventually became part of the rocky planets. What's left of the space rocks are mostly gathered in the main asteroid belt.

On the surface of it, Earth and Saturn's moon Titan are wildly different from one another. Earth is temperate and warmed by the Sun, liquid water flows across its surface, and life pervades its opulent biosphere. Titan is beyond the reach of the Sun's warmth, is frigid and lifeless, and orbits a gas giant that is also lifeless.

All sorts of crazy things have been suggested regarding 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object that we’ve discovered. Some are simply conspiracy theories about it being an alien spacecraft, while others have been well-thought out suggestions, like using Martian-based probes to observe the comet as it streaked past the red planet. A new paper pre-published on arXiv and accepted for publication by the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society by Samuel Grand and Geraint Jones, of the Finnish Meteorological Institute and ESA respectively, falls into the latter category, and suggests utilizing two spacecraft already en route to their separate destinations to potentially detect ions from the object’s spectacular tail that has formed as it approaches the Sun.

Earth has a long, 4.5 billion history full of momentous twists and turns. Multiple prominent events played leading roles in Earth's story. One of them is the catastrophic impact with another planetesimal early in Earth's history that not only created the Moon, but altered Earth's chemistry forever.

Dust devils are a regular occurrence on Mars. Similar to Earth, these short-lived whirlwinds emerge when surface heating occurs, causing changes in air pressure and a vertical column of wind to form. As the column pulls in surrounding air, it becomes a vortex that kicks up dust, which it carries with it across the surface. While Mars has a very thin atmosphere, less than 1% that of Earth's, the lower gravity means that its dust devils grow larger than anything we see here. And according to new research by an international research team, these dust devils will reach velocities that are higher than what we expected.

The wavelengths of radio light are so large that you can't capture a high-resolution image with a single dish. To capture an image as sharp as, say, the Hubble telescope, you'd need a radio dish tens of kilometers across. So radio astronomers took a different approach. They used an array of dozens of antennas, each capturing their own signal. Since the antennas not only capture precise data but also the precise timing of that data, astronomers can use a process known as interferometry. Light from a distant radio object reaches each antenna at a slightly different time, and by correlating the arrival times, astronomers can treat the array as a virtual antenna disk the size of the entire array. From many, one, as the saying goes.

The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is evolving. We’ve moved on from the limited thinking of monitoring radio waves to checking for interstellar pushing lasers or even budding Dyson swarms around stars. To match our increased understanding of the ways we might find intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is working through an update to its protocols for what researchers should do after a confirmed detection of intelligence outside of Earth. Their new suggestions are available in a pre-print paper on arXiv, but were also voted on at the 2025 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, with potential full adoption early next year.