Space News & Blog Articles

When considering the unnamed major features of all the moons, asteroids, and comets in our solar system there are still a lot of places out there that need proper names. That means the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the non-governmental body responsible for naming astronomical objects, has its work cut out for them. Recently they tackled a relatively easy challenge by approving a series of names on the asteroid Donaldjohnson, the first and only target of NASA’s Lucy mission in the main asteroid belt. With those names come a whole new way to talk about one of the asteroids that humanity has studied most closely thus far.

When the ESA launched the Gaia spacecraft in 2013, it didn't generate the same fanfare as the launch of other missions like the JWST, or first light from telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory. That's largely because Gaia doesn't capture gorgeous images of celestial objects like other telescopes. Instead, Gaia was an astrometry mission.

Whenever astronomers detect something new moving through our region of space, like an interstellar object or an unusual asteroid, somebody somewhere claims it could be an alien interstellar space probe. It's like one of those laws about human behaviour—Godwin's Law for example—that should probably have its own name.

We don't realize it, but Earth is subjected to a constant cosmic rain of material. The vast majority of it is tiny micrometeors that burn up in the atmosphere, up to 100 tons per day by some estimates. But sometimes, much larger objects strike Earth. The most notable is probably the Chicxulub impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs and left a massive crater, now buried.

There are plenty of theories about what dark matter is and how it might be gravitationally affecting the universe. However, proving those theories out is hard since it hardly ever interacts with anything, especially on “small” scales like galaxies. So when a research team claims to have found evidence for dark matter in our own galaxy, it's worth taking a look at how. A new paper from Dr. Surkanya Chakrabati and her lab at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) does just that. They found evidence for a dark matter “sub-halo” in the galactic neighborhood, by looking at signals from binary pulsars.

A new comet approaching from sunward could make a fine dusk appearance in October.

Three data releases from the recently retired Gaia spacecraft show that far-flung parts of the Milky Way are connected by families of stars born in clusters. Some continue to travel the galaxy together, while others appear wildly dispersed, sometimes as chains of related stars. One cluster is even trying to escape the Milky Way. The Gaia data show that open clusters (in particular) and the star formation regions from which they spring are interconnected across the Galaxy, populating the Milky Way in ways astronomers are just now beginning to understand.

The grinning Moon slides by Regulus and Venus later this week, in a complex event.

One possibility to explain the constants of nature is that there’s more than one universe. That we live in a multiverse, with each different universe “sampling” different values of the constants. There are a few extremely hypothetical ideas in physics that can lead to the multiverse. One is through the concept of eternal inflation, where the very early universe never ended its period of rapid expansion, and that different portions of the overall multiverse pinched off, so to speak, to create their own bubble universes.

Blue Origin is committed to making a permanent human presence in space a reality. To this end, they have developed the New Shepard and New Glenn rockets to send payloads to orbit, and aim to create super-heavy launch vehicles to reach the Moon (New Armstrong and Blue Origin) and beyond. Another focus has been on developing systems that will enable In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) in extraterrestrial environments, which is essential for making space sustainable. This includes their Blue Alchemist ISRU system, which recently completed its Critical Design Review (CDR).