Space News & Blog Articles

Thanks to missions that have been exploring the Red Planet since the 1970s, it has been established that Mars was once a much different place than what we see there today. Instead of an extremely cold, extremely dry, and irradiated planet with a very thin atmosphere, Mars once has a warmer, denser atmosphere and flowing water on its surface. Between 4.2 and 3.7 billion years ago, the planet began to undergo a transition whereby its atmosphere was slowly tripped by solar wind, causing its water to escape into space, collect in the polar ice caps, and retreat underground.

What is the meaning of life? Even the best of us couldn’t hope to answer that question in a universe today article. But there are those who would try to “constrain” it, at least in terms of physics. A new paper from Pankaj Mehta of Boston University of Jané Kondev of Brandeis that was recently pre-published on arXiv looks at how the fundamental constants of physics might be applied to life as we know it - and even life as we don’t know it yet. Their idea doesn't necessarily give the answer to the ultimate question, but it does tie two seemingly disparate fields nicely together.

One of the JWST's most startling discoveries was that black holes were extremely massive in the early Universe, less than one billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery defied explanation, since astrophysicists thought that it would take much more time for black holes to accrete so much mass. An explanation for this discrepancy may lie in a massive black hole observed with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Asteroids are rocky remnants from the early Solar System, chunks of stone and metal that range in size from pebbles to mountains. Most of them orbit peacefully in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but occasionally gravitational forces can nudge them toward Earth. The largest asteroid, Ceres, is almost 1,000 km across, while the one that likely killed the dinosaurs was roughly 10 km wide. Even relatively small asteroids can cause tremendous damage for example, the space rock that created Arizona's famous Meteor Crater was only about 45 metres across, yet it generated a crater just over 1km wide.

Exoplanets aren’t the only objects floating around other stars - they likely have comets and asteroids as well. Even some of the exoplanets themselves will have “exomoons”, at least according to our current understanding of the physics of planetary formation. However, we have yet to find any of these other objects conclusively, though there has been some hint at the presence of exomoons in the last ten years. A new paper from astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), recently pre-published on arXiv, suggests a way in which we might be able to finally detect the presence of an exomoon - using a technique that is also commonly used to find exoplanets themselves.

Some NASA missions are designed for very specific tasks, but all of them help feed into our understanding of our universe, and in some cases our pale blue dot, work. A new mission to study one of the more esoteric parts of the atmosphere is scheduled to launch today, and over the next 2-3 years will monitor the outer reaches of our planet’s atmosphere.

Small fragments of rock can reveal a lot when they're analyzed with powerful laboratory instruments. New research into tiny fragments of the asteroid Ryugu sampled by JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission showed that water flowed through it more than one billion years after it formed. This new insight overturns the previous understanding that asteroids only experienced water activity in the very earliest stages of solar system formation.

How does spaceflight influence sarcopenia, which is a common age-related muscle decline, specifically for elder adults? This is what a recent study published in Stem Cell Reports hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how microgravity influences muscle cell function. This study has the potential to help scientists, mission planners, astronauts, and the public better understand the long-term health impacts of microgravity on muscle decline and the steps that can be taken to mitigate it.