Space News & Blog Articles

Ground-based telescopes have a fundamental problem that no amount of engineering can fix. They're trying to observe the universe through Earth's atmosphere, a constantly moving blanket of air that distorts and blurs incoming light. It's a little like trying to take a photograph of the bottom of a stream where the water is gently flowing! Space telescopes like Hubble easily sidestep this issue by operating above the atmosphere, but they can only photograph tiny slivers of sky. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a clever mathematical solution that could give ground based telescopes near space quality vision whilst retaining their ability to survey vast swathes of space!

The Great Oxidation Event, which occurred between 2.1 and 2.4 billion years ago, fundamentally transformed Earth's atmosphere and made complex life possible. Before this period, oxygen producing cyanobacteria had evolved hundreds of millions of years earlier, yet atmospheric oxygen levels remained low for an extended period. Scientists have long wondered over this delay, exploring various explanations from volcanic gases to microbial activity. A recent study from Okayama University in Japan offers a fresh view on this ancient mystery by examining two unlikely culprits, nickel and urea.

Avoiding, or at least limiting the damage from, geomagnetic storms is one of the most compelling arguments for why we should pay attention to space. Strong solar storms can have an impact on everything from air traffic to farming, and we ignore them at our own peril and cost. Despite that threat, the tools that we have applied to tracking and analyzing them have been relatively primitive. Both simulations and the physical hardware devoted to it require an upgrade if we are to accurately assess the threat a solar storm poses. As a first step, a new paper from a group led by researchers at the University of Michigan created a much more detailed simulation that shows how important it is that we also have the appropriate sensing hardware in place to detect these storms as they happen.

Centuries before the Roswell UFO Incident, Native Americans had their own stories to tell about alien visitations — for example, about the “Sky People” who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and have a special bond with the Cherokee Nation.

The gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon has led to one hemisphere of the Moon being locked facing away from Earth. Don’t be misled though, the Moon does rotate, it just takes as long to rotate once on its axis as it takes to complete an orbit of Earth. This is known as synchronous rotation and on the far side there is a massive crater called the South Pole-Aitken basin. Spanning over 1,930 km from north to south and 1,600 km east to west. This ancient impact crater formed roughly 4.3 billion years ago when a giant asteroid delivered a glancing blow to the young Moon. A new study from the University of Arizona reveals that this colossal crater holds secrets about the Moon's formation and early evolution.