Space News & Blog Articles

The corona of the Sun is an extraordinary place, with temperatures exceeding one million degrees Celsius, far hotter than the Sun's visible surface below. During solar flares, violent releases of magnetic energy, plasma can cool dramatically and condense into dense blobs that plummet back toward the Sun's photosphere, its visible surface. These falling streams of cooler material create the phenomenon of coronal rain. However, existing solar models couldn't explain the speed at which this cooling happens.

Black holes are the remains of dead supermassive stars. When a star reaches the end of its life, one of two things will happen, either the thermonuclear pressure from fusion will cause the star’s outer layers to expand or gravity wins and the star collapses. In this latter case, what gets left behind is often a black hole, an object whose conditions are so extreme that even light cannot escape.

Impulse Space, the California-based venture founded by veteran SpaceX engineer Tom Mueller, today unveiled its proposed architecture for delivering medium-sized payloads to the moon by as early as 2028.

Modularity is taking off in more ways than one in space exploration. The design of the upcoming “Lunar Gateway” space station is supposed to be modular, with different modules being supplied by different organizations. In an effort to extend that thinking down to rovers on the ground, a new paper from researchers at Germany’s space agency (DLR), developed an architecture where a single, modular rover could be responsible for both exploration and carrying payloads around the Moon or Mars.

A new study finds possible references to two classic supernovae in ancient texts.

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.