Space News & Blog Articles

Between February and April of this year, NASA will conduct its first crewed mission beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in over fifty years. At 09:41 p.m. EDT (06:41 p.m. PDT), the Artemis II crew will launch aboard their Orion spacecraft atop the Space Launch System (SLS) from Launch Pad-39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With the launch date rapidly approaching, NASA is entering the final stages of preparation, including the rollout of the SLS and Orion to the launch pad for the first time. This will be followed by the final integration and testing of the rocket and spacecraft, then launch rehearsals.

One of the most consequential events—maybe the most consequential one throughout all of Earth's long, 4.5 billion year history—was the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE). When photosynthetic cyanobacteria arose on Earth, they released oxygen as a metabolic byproduct. During the GOE, which began around 2.3 billion years ago, free oxygen began to slowly accumulate in the atmosphere.

One of the most stubborn issues in cosmology today concerns the Universe's rate of expansion. Scientists know it's expanding, but defining the rate of that expansion is challenging. The rate of expansion is called the Hubble Constant, after American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered that the Universe is expanding in the 1920s.

Back in the earlier days of the internet, there was a viral video from a creator called Bill Wurtz called “the history of the entire world, i guess” which spawned a number of memorable memes, some of which are still in use to this day. One of those was a clip from the video where Wurtz states “The Sun is a deadly laser.” Apparently, that was more true than even he knew, as a new paper from Georgios Tsirvouils of the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden and his co-authors have shown experimental evidence that the Sun’s laser-like radiation is likely responsible for the death of a vast majority of closely-orbiting asteroids.

When the Sun erupts in its most violent flares, it doesn’t just hurl plasma and particles into space. These explosions also generate intense bursts of gamma radiation, the most energetic form of light in the universe. Solar physicists have detected these gamma ray signals for decades, yet the precise mechanism producing them remained frustratingly elusive. Now researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have pinpointed the source.

Right now, as you read this sentence, roughly a trillion neutrinos are passing straight through your body. They slip through flesh and bone and even brain without leaving a trace, streaming through the entire planet as if it weren’t there at all. These ghost particles have earned their name through spectacular elusiveness, interacting so rarely with ordinary matter that detecting even one requires enormous underground detectors and considerable patience.