Space News & Blog Articles

The JWST has another feather in its cap. The perceptive space telescope has taken a break from peering into the ancient, distant Universe and probing the formation and evolution of galaxies. It's turned its gaze closer to home, examining Uranus for the presence of undiscovered moons, and it found one.

Earth’s atmosphere is large, extending out to around 10,000 km from the surface of the planet. It’s so large, in fact, that scientists break it into five separate sections, and there’s one particular section that hasn’t got a whole lot of attention due to the difficulty in maintaining any craft there. Planes and balloons can visit the troposphere and stratosphere, the two sections closest to the ground, while satellites can sit in orbit in the thermosphere and exosphere, allowing for a platform for consistent observations. But the mesosphere, the line section in the middle, is too close to have a stable orbit, but too sparse in air for traditional airplanes or balloons to work. As a result, we don’t have a lot of data on it, but it impacts climate and weather forecasting, so scientists have simply had to make a lot of assumptions about what it's like up there. But a new study from researchers at Harvard and the University of Chicago might have found a way to put stable sensing platforms into the mesosphere, using a novel flight mechanism known as photophoresis.

NASA's Psyche Mission launched in October 2023 to rendezvous with the asteroid of the same name. The Psyche asteroid is a metal-rich asteroid that could be the remnant core of a planetesimal that had its outer layers stripped away. It's due to reach the asteroid and begin orbiting it in 2029.

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) commenced operations, it provided the first views of the period known as Cosmic Dawn. This cosmological epoch, which took place between 50 million and one billion years after the Big Bang, was when the first stars and galaxies in the Universe formed. What Webb's observations revealed of this period surprised and intrigued scientists. In addition to spotting numerous "Little Red Dots" (LRDs), particularly bright and red galaxies, it also observed the "seeds" of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs).

There are things astrophysicists know and things they don't know about brown dwarfs. They know that as they were forming and accreting mass, they failed to gain enough mass to trigger hydrogen fusion and become stars. But they're too massive to be gas giant planets like Jupiter because they do fuse some deuterium. So brown dwarfs are stuck in an astrophysical no-man's-land between star and planet. They're often referred to as 'failed stars'.