Space News & Blog Articles

Radio astronomy opens a window onto the invisible universe. While our eyes can detect visible light, countless objects in space emit radiation at much longer wavelengths, in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Where visible light gets blocked by interstellar dust, radio waves pass through unrestricted revealing objects that remain completely invisible to traditional telescopes. Radio telescopes detect these waves, revealing phenomena that optical telescopes simply cannot see. Radio waves also penetrate Earth's atmosphere far more easily than many other wavelengths, making ground-based radio observatories incredibly effective tools for exploring the universe.

An interstellar comet is as its name suggests, a comet that originated outside our Solar System and travels through interstellar space before entering our neighbourhood. Unlike comets that orbit the Sun and formed within our Solar System, these rare visitors come from other star systems, traveling for millions or even billions of years across interstellar space. When they pass through our Solar System, their trajectories are hyperbolic rather than elliptical, meaning they're just passing through rather than remaining bound by the Sun's gravity. The most famous example is 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019, which became the first confirmed interstellar comet observed.

SpaceX closed out a dramatic chapter in the development of its super-heavy-lift Starship launch system with a successful flight test that mostly followed the script for the previous flight test.

Ground-based telescopes have a fundamental problem that no amount of engineering can fix. They're trying to observe the universe through Earth's atmosphere, a constantly moving blanket of air that distorts and blurs incoming light. It's a little like trying to take a photograph of the bottom of a stream where the water is gently flowing! Space telescopes like Hubble easily sidestep this issue by operating above the atmosphere, but they can only photograph tiny slivers of sky. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a clever mathematical solution that could give ground based telescopes near space quality vision whilst retaining their ability to survey vast swathes of space!

The Great Oxidation Event, which occurred between 2.1 and 2.4 billion years ago, fundamentally transformed Earth's atmosphere and made complex life possible. Before this period, oxygen producing cyanobacteria had evolved hundreds of millions of years earlier, yet atmospheric oxygen levels remained low for an extended period. Scientists have long wondered over this delay, exploring various explanations from volcanic gases to microbial activity. A recent study from Okayama University in Japan offers a fresh view on this ancient mystery by examining two unlikely culprits, nickel and urea.

Avoiding, or at least limiting the damage from, geomagnetic storms is one of the most compelling arguments for why we should pay attention to space. Strong solar storms can have an impact on everything from air traffic to farming, and we ignore them at our own peril and cost. Despite that threat, the tools that we have applied to tracking and analyzing them have been relatively primitive. Both simulations and the physical hardware devoted to it require an upgrade if we are to accurately assess the threat a solar storm poses. As a first step, a new paper from a group led by researchers at the University of Michigan created a much more detailed simulation that shows how important it is that we also have the appropriate sensing hardware in place to detect these storms as they happen.