Space News & Blog Articles

Now that we have tools to find vast numbers of voids in the universe, we can finally ask…well, if we crack em open, what do we find inside?

When the Sun reaches the end of its main sequence, approximately 5 billion years from now, it will enter what is known as its Red Giant Branch (RGB) phase, during which it will expand and potentially consume Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth. Not long after, it will undergo gravitational collapse and blow off its outer layers, leaving behind a dense remnant known as a white dwarf. While this is how planet Earth will eventually meet its end, it will not mark the end of the Solar System, as the white dwarf remnant of our Sun surrounded by clouds of trace elements.

Meteorites are both the messengers and time capsules of the Solar System. As pieces of larger asteroids that broke apart, or debris thrown up by impacts on other bodies, these "space rocks" retain the composition of where they originated from. As a result, scientists can study other planets, moons, and objects by examining the abundance of chemical elements in meteorites. Unfortunately, such studies are limited when it comes to meteorites retrieved on Earth, due to erosion, atmospheric filtration, and geological processes (like volcanism and mantle convection).

To answer that question of what’s inside a void, we have to first decide what a void…is. I know it’s easy enough to describe in big, broad, vague terms. Voids are the empty places. Voids are the things that aren’t. If you zoom out to truly enormous scales, well beyond the sizes of mere galaxies, where you take such a huge portrait of the universe that individual galaxies appear as nothing more than tiny points of light, then a) welcome to cosmology, and b) holy crap the voids really stand out. In fact, we got our first taste of voids all the way back in the late 1970’s, right when we started to build our first deep surveys of the universe. Once we started making maps, we noticed places where the maps were empty. And two different groups found the voids around the same time, although only one group called them voids. The other group called them “big holes” for one I’m glad they didn’t win that particular jargon war.

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.