Space News & Blog Articles

You’re in the lab analyzing Martian regolith samples within your cozy Mars habitat serving on fifth human mission to Mars. The power within the habitat has been flowing flawlessly thanks to the MARS-MES (Mars Atmospheric Resource & Multimodal Energy System), including the general habitat lighting, science lab, sleeping quarters, exercise equipment, the virtual reality headsets the crew use for rest & relaxation, oxygen and fuel generation, and water. All this from converting the Martian atmosphere into workable electricity.

Imagine a mountain range many times larger than the entire Earth, floating in mid-air, held up by nothing you can see. It sounds like something from a fantasy novel but that is essentially what solar prominences are and for decades, scientists have struggled to explain how they exist at all.

If you have ever pushed your finger against the hole of a bicycle pump and felt the air grow warm as you compressed it, you already understand the physics at the heart of a new discovery about our own Galaxy. Because it turns out the Milky Way has a hot side and a cool side and the reason why comes down to exactly the same principle.

Where exactly is the edge of the Milky Way? That question is harder to answer than one might expect. Since we’re inside of the galaxy itself, it’s obviously hard to judge the “edge” to begin with. But it gets even more complicated when defining what the edge even is - the galaxy simply gets less dense the farther away from the center it goes. A new paper by researchers originally at the University of Malta thinks they have an answer though. The “edge” can be defined as the star-forming region, and in their paper, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, they very clearly show that “edge” to be between 11.28 and 12.15 kiloparsecs (or about 40,000 light years) from the center.

The Sombrero Galaxy is so picture perfect it looks like a painting. It sits in space as if its hung on a gallery wall. It's an iconic deep space object, and a popular target for amateur and professional astronomers alike.

NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat - fungi.

Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to our own, sitting just over four light years away and it’s fascinated astronomers and storytellers alike for generations. With conventional rockets, reaching it would take hundreds of thousands of years, even for the Orion spacecraft it would take around 100,000 years. But a team of researchers at Texas A&M University think they may have taken the first tentative step towards a technology that could get us there in just twenty years.