Space News & Blog Articles

Searching for Earth 2.0 has been an obsession of almost all exoplanet hunters since the discipline’s dawn a few decades ago. Since then, they’ve had plenty of technological breakthroughs help them in their quest, but so far, none of them have been capable of providing the clear-cut image needed to prove the existence of an exo-Earth. However, some of those technologies are undoubtedly getting closer, and one of the most interesting is utilizing a system called a multi-grated vector vortex coronagraph (mgVVC). Researchers funded by ESA think it may hold the optical properties to enable space-based telescopes like the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) to finally capture the holy grail of exoplanet hunting – and it may be ready for prime time as early as next year.

Near-Earth space is an orbiting junkyard of space debris. Everything from old rocket parts and pieces of dead satellites to cameras and tools floats in orbit. None of it serves a useful function any longer, but it does threaten other spacecraft. In fact, some missions have been damaged by this orbital debris and the problem will get worse as we launch more missions to space.

I have always found Mariana’s Trench fascinating, it’s like an alien world right on our doorstep. Any visitor to the oceans or seas of our planet will hopefully get to see fish flitting around and whilst they can survive in this alien underwater world they still need oxygen to survive. Breathing in oxygen is a familiar experience to us, we inflate our lungs and suck air into them to keep us topped up with life giving oxygen. Fish are different, they get their oxygen as water flows over their gills. Water is full of oxygen which at the surface comes from the atmosphere or plants. But deep down, thousands of meters beneath the surface, it is not so easy. Now a team of scientists think that potato-sized chunks of metal called nodules act like natural batteries, interacting with the water and putting oxygen into the deep water of the ocean. 

The origins of the Moon have been the cause of many a scientific debate over the years but more recently we seem to have settled on a consensus. That a Mars-sized object crashed into Earth billions of years ago, with the debris coalescing into the Moon. The newly formed Moon drifted slowly away from Earth over the following eons but a new study suggests some surprising nuances to the accepted model. 

Some galaxies experience rapid star formation hundreds or even thousands of times greater than the Milky Way. Astronomers think that mergers are behind these special galaxies, which were more abundant in the earlier Universe. But new results suggest no mergers are needed.

It’s time to take a thorough, more serious look at using geoengineering to protect the planet’s icesheets, according to a group of scientists who have released a new report examining the issue. Glacial geoengineering is an emerging field of study that holds some hope for Earth’s diminishing glaciers and ice sheets.

While black holes are known as the most destructive objects in the universe, their evolution is largely shrouded in mystery. This is because while astronomers are familiar with supermassive black holes that exist at the center of galaxies like our own and black holes whose masses are less than 100 times the size of our Sun, the notion of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) have largely eluded discovery. However, this might change with the recent discovery of a black hole candidate that could exist within the globular cluster, Omega Centauri, and holds the potential to be the “missing link” in scientists better understanding black hole evolution.

Ae inflatable habitats the future of human space exploration? This is what the space-tech company, Sierra Space, hopes to achieve as they recently conducted a successful Ultimate Burst Pressure test on June 18 with its Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE®) technology at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The goal of these tests is to inflate the test article until it explodes while ascertaining if the maximum pressure falls within NASA’s strict safety guidelines regarding a recommended operating pressure of 60.8 psi (maximum operating pressure of 15.2 psi times four as a safety factor). Upon explosion, Sierra Space engineers immediately found the recent test achieved 74 psi, thus exceeding NASA’s safety standards by 22 percent.

Academic research on solar system objects has increased dramatically over the last twenty years. However, information on most of the estimated 1.2 million objects discovered in our solar system has been spread throughout various databases and research papers. Putting all that data into a single data store and making it easy to access would allow researchers to focus on their research rather than on where to collect data. That is the idea behind the Solar System Open Database Network (SsODNet), a project by data scientists at the Observatoire de Paris.