Space News & Blog Articles

Astronomers have a brown dwarf problem. They should be seeing a lot more of these objects, which are cooler than stars but hotter than planets. Yet, there have only been about 40 directly imaged over the past few decades. Why aren’t astronomers finding more of them? It helps to remember that brown dwarfs are dim, low-temperature objects. They don’t stand out in a crowded starfield. If they’re too close to their stars, the starlight hides them from our view. They’re much better observed in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. All these characteristics make hunting for them difficult.

SpaceX’s massive and totally-reusable launch vehicle, the Starship and Super Heavy, is getting closer to its first orbital test flight! According to the flight plan filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), this will consist of a fully-stacked spacecraft and booster prototype (SN24 and BN7) taking off from the SpaceX Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas. The booster element will separate at suborbital altitude and land off the coast of Texas, while the Starship will carry on to an altitude of 200 km (125 mi), placing it in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

The search for technosignatures has always taken a back seat in the broad search for extraterrestrial life forms. Biosignatures, such as methane in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, have long been front and center. But while we are searching for signs of biology, signs of technology might be hiding in plain sight. According to a new report from the members of the TechnoClimes conference, humanity could potentially find signs of technology by simply using data that will already be collected for other purposes. To prove their point, they came up with a list of possible technosignatures and cross-referenced them with a list of observatories that could potentially find them. The result is a framework of how to best search for technosignatures and a plethora of references for those seeking them out.

As most everyone knows, Venus is called Earth’s twin, though its scorching temperatures and extreme surface pressure are more like an evil twin. For a twin and our closest planetary neighbour, we don’t know it very well. Venus’ dense clouds keep the planet’s surface hidden in visible-light observations.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia Observatory is a mission dedicated to astrometry, a branch of astronomy where the velocity and proper motion of celestial objects are measured to learn more about the formation and evolution of the cosmos. For the past eight and a half years, this space-based has been studying over two billion objects in the Universe. This includes stars in the Milky Way but also planets, comets, asteroids, and distant galaxies. This information obtained by this mission will be used to create the most-detailed 3D catalog of the Milky Way ever.

NASA has dipped into the debate over UFOs for decades, but today the space agency said it’s commissioning an independent study team to survey a wide range of what are now known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.