Space News & Blog Articles

What can the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ), which is a galaxy’s region where complex life is hypothesized to be able to evolve, teach scientists about finding the correct stars that could have habitable planets? This is what a recent study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated a connection between the migration of stars, commonly called stellar migration, and what this could mean for finding habitable planets within our galaxy. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the astrophysical parameters for finding habitable worlds beyond Earth and even life as we know it.

In space, the one thing more important than ensuring access to food, water, and waste disposal (combined!) is the need for a steady supply of breathable air. Where the International Space Station (ISS) and other missions in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) can be resupplied regularly, missions operating in deep space will need to produce their own. There are several ways to go about this. One way is to use bioregenerative life support systems (BLSSs), which utilize photosynthetic organisms (like cyanobacteria) that take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen gas and edible algae.

According to astronomers, water worlds, though admittedly not those containing Kevin Costner, are one of the most common types of planets in our solar system. This is partly due to low density estimates and the abundance of water ice past the “snow line” orbit of a star. But a new paper led by Jie Li and their colleagues at the University of MIchigan, suggests there might be an alternative type of planet that fits the density data but is made up of a completely different type of material - soot.

Hidden within meteorites that fall to Earth are tiny spheres that have puzzled scientists for decades. These mysterious droplets, called chondrules, are time capsules from the birth of our Solar System and now, a team from Japan have used them to pinpoint exactly when Jupiter formed, solving a long standing planetary mystery.

A research team have used both archival Hubble Space Telescope data and new observations to precisely measure the binary star systems NGC3603-A1. One star weighs about 93 times the mass of our Sun, while its companion tips the scales at roughly 70 solar masses. Together, they represent one of the most massive binary systems ever discovered in our Galaxy.

Check out Part 3 of the series here.

A new study by Manuel Barrientos and colleagues from the University of Oklahoma reveals that between 0.6% and 2.5% of white dwarfs in our solar neighbourhood undergo dramatic cooling delays that could extend habitable zones for billions of additional years. The secret lies in an element known as neon-22, which after carbon and oxygen, is the most abundant element inside white dwarfs.

One of the advantages of having so many telescopes watching large parts of the sky is that, if astronomers find something interesting, there are probably images of it from before it was officially discovered sitting in the data archives of other satellites that noone thought to look at. That has certainly been the case for our newest interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, which, though discovered in early July, had been visible on other telescopes as early as May. We previously reported on Vera Rubin’s detection of 3I/ATLAS well before it was officially found, and now a new paper has found the interstellar object in TESS’s data going back to early May - and it looks like it may have been “active” around that time.

For nearly a century, cosmologists have relied on a simplified model of the universe that treats matter as uniform particles that don't interact with each other. While this approach helped scientists understand the Big Bang and the expansion of space, it ignores a fundamental reality, that our universe is anything but uniform. Stars cluster into galaxies, matter collapses into black holes, and vast empty voids stretch across space, all constantly interacting through gravity and other forces.

How exactly did the universe start and how did these processes determine its formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in Physical Review Research hopes to address as a team of researchers from Spain and Italy proposed a new model for the events that transpired immediately after the birth of the universe. This study has the potential to challenge longstanding theories regarding the exact processes that occurred at the beginning of the universe, along with how these processes have governed the formation and evolution of the universe.

Check out Part 2 of the series here.

The ambitious mission to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu and return them to Earth is paying off. Just as scientists had hoped, the asteroid is revealing details about the early days in our Solar System. More than just a simple space rock, research is revealing that Bennu contains not only material from the Solar System, but material from beyond our system.

Astronomers sometimes find conflicting data when trying to answer a question. This is a normal part of the scientific process, and it simply means that more data is needed to prove or disprove the theory they are trying to test. One prominent example of conflicting data in recent exoplanet research was that of planet GJ 1132 b, which either had or didn’t have an atmosphere, depending on which data set was being used. A new paper from researchers using more observational time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can now definitively say that, most likely, GJ 1132 b doesn’t have an atmosphere - and that finding has wider implications for exoplanet research more generally.

The early Universe continues to spring surprises on astronomers. In a recent study of dim, distant objects, astronomers at the University of Missouri found at least 300 of them that look way too bright. That means they're forming stars much earlier than expected, or something else is going on. Whatever it is could affect our understanding of events in the infant cosmos. The astronomers used two of JWST’s powerful infrared cameras: the Near-Infrared Camera and the Mid-Infrared Instrument. Both are specifically designed to detect light from the most distant places in space, which is key when studying the early Universe.

High-mass stars with eight or more solar masses are mysterious. Despite the fact that they're more easily observed than their lower-mass counterparts, astrophysicists have struggled to explain how they become so massive. The problem is that while they accrete material and become more massive, they're also shedding mass.

Deep beneath the ice at the South Pole sits one of the world's most extraordinary scientific instruments: the IceCube neutrino detector. Since 2009, this massive facility has been hunting for ghostly particles called neutrinos that constantly bombard Earth from the depths of space.

Imagine looking up at the night sky and watching a star almost completely disappear, then reappear months later. That's exactly what happened with a distant star called ASASSN-24fw, leaving astronomers scratching their heads for months.

NASA's Perseverance rover has turned its attention to towering sand formations called megaripples at a site named Kerrlaguna on Mars. These windblown features, standing up to a metre tall, are providing new insights into how wind shapes the red planet today and could even help prepare for future human missions to Mars.

Sometimes in science a negative result is just as important as a positive one. And sometimes data artifacts get the better of even the best space observatories. Both of those ideas seem to hold true for the James Webb Space Telescope’s recent observation of Epsilon Eridani, one of our nearest stars, and one that has decades worth of debate about whether there is a planet orbiting it or not. Unfortunately, while JWST’s NIRCam did find some interesting features, they were too close to a noise source in the telescope's instruments to be definitively labeled a “planet”. Their results were recently published on arXiv, and while it may sound disappointing, this type of work is exactly how science progresses.

SpaceX executed the most successful flight test of its super-powerful Starship launch system to date, featuring Starship’s first-ever payload deployment and a thrilling Indian Ocean splashdown. Today’s 10th test flight followed three earlier missions that fell short of full success.

To date, 5983 exoplanets have been confirmed in 4,470 star systems, with more than 15,000 candidates awaiting confirmation. Combined with next-generation telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), this massive census is ushering in a new era of astrobiology studies. By analyzing spectra obtained from exoplanet atmospheres, scientists are now able to characterize them and detect chemical signatures that could be indications of life and biological processes (aka. biosignatures). These surveys are also a way of learning more about the evolution of planets and their climates over time.