Space News & Blog Articles

When you open your fridge, you expect it to be cooler than your kitchen. Similarly, when astronomers look back billions of years into the universe's history, they expect to find it was hotter than today. A team of Japanese researchers has just confirmed this prediction with remarkable precision, offering one of the strongest tests yet of our understanding of how the universe evolved.

Comet 3I/ATLAS, only the third known visitor from beyond our Solar System, has been brightening far more rapidly than expected as it approaches perihelion, its closest point to the Sun. From Earth, the comet has been positioned almost directly behind the Sun for the past month, making ground based observations nearly impossible during this crucial period. Instead, the team of astronomers have been watching from space based observatories.

Space clouds, or nebulae as they are more properly known are vast nurseries where stars are born from swirling collections of gas and dust scattered throughout a galaxy. These aren't fluffy white clouds like the ones we see in the sky, they're enormous regions stretching light years across, filled with hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of heavier elements left over from previous generations of stars. Some glow brilliantly with vibrant colours as nearby stars illuminate them, while others appear as dark silhouettes blocking the light of stars behind them. Inside these clouds, gravity slowly pulls matter together over millions of years, creating dense pockets that eventually collapse to form new stars and planetary systems.

For decades, astronomers have studied Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and swirling cloud bands through increasingly powerful telescopes, building a detailed understanding of our giant neighbor’s dynamic atmosphere. Now, for the first time, scientists have created a three-dimensional map of a planet orbiting a distant star, a breakthrough that promises to transform how we study worlds beyond our Solar System.

For over a century, rocket propulsion has followed a simple principle; burn fuel, expel it backward, and Newton’s third law pushes you forward. Since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first formulated the rocket equation in 1903, spacecraft have carried their propellant with them, limiting mission capabilities by the mass ratios. The more fuel you carry, the heavier your rocket becomes, requiring even more fuel to lift that fuel, in a vicious cycle that makes interstellar travel seem impossibly distant. But what if spacecraft didn’t need to carry propellant at all?

How does water form on exoplanets and what could this mean for the search for life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated the processes responsible for exoplanets producing liquid water. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life beyond Earth, and specifically which exoplanets could be viable future targets for astrobiology.

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto has forced astronomers to rewrite their textbooks — but that’s not all: New Horizons also forced Les Johnson to rewrite a novel.

Whenever someone talks about black holes, they almost always talk about the event horizon and the singularity. After all, that's what defines a black hole, right? Well, it depends on what you mean by black hole. There are some that would argue a black hole doesn't need a singularity, and that could mean they don't even have an event horizon.

So where do we go after years of empty searches for dark matter? We haven’t learned nothing. After decades of searches, we’re narrowing down the range of what dark matter can and cannot be.

How could the principle of “radical mundanity” proposed by the Fermi paradox help explain why humans haven’t found evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs)? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a lone researcher investigated the prospect for finding ETCs based on this principle. This study has the potential to help scientists and the public better understand why we haven’t identified intelligent life beyond Earth and how we might narrow the search for it.