Space News & Blog Articles

The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is evolving. We’ve moved on from the limited thinking of monitoring radio waves to checking for interstellar pushing lasers or even budding Dyson swarms around stars. To match our increased understanding of the ways we might find intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is working through an update to its protocols for what researchers should do after a confirmed detection of intelligence outside of Earth. Their new suggestions are available in a pre-print paper on arXiv, but were also voted on at the 2025 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, with potential full adoption early next year.

Space-based solar power has been gaining more and more traction recently. The recent success of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project, which demonstrated the feasibility of transmitting power from space to the ground, has been matched by a number of pilot projects throughout the world, all of which are hoping to tap into some of the almost unlimited and constant solar energy that is accessible up in geostationary orbit (GEO). But, according to a new paper from a group of Italian and German researchers, there are plenty of constraints on getting that power down here to Earth - and most of them are more logistical than technical.

What can cryovolcanism on Pluto teach scientists about the dwarf planet’s current geological activity? This is what a recent study published in *The Planetary Science Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated potential cryovolcanic sites within specific regions on Pluto. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the current geological activity, including how it can be active while orbiting so far from the Sun.

On the surface of Mars, there are numerous features that tell of a past age when the planet was warmer and wetter, with rivers, lakes, and even an ocean that covered much of its northern hemisphere. These include river channels, delta fans, sedimentary deposits, and low-lying regions rich in clay minerals. The discovery and study of these features over the past fifty years have raised some pressing questions for scientists. These include the question of how much water once flowed on Mars and what led to the gradual transition that left the planet a frigid, desiccated world, where the only water on the surface comes in the form of ice and permafrost.

At the dawn of time, so the theory goes, the cosmos underwent a flash of rapid expansion. Almost instantly the visible Universe grew from a volume smaller than a proton to a spherical region nearly two meters across. It's a moment known as early cosmic inflation. Although Inflation solves several cosmic problems, such as the homogeneity of the Universe and the ratio of hydrogen to helium we observe, we haven't been able to prove it. But we might be able to prove it by looking for a particular type of gravitational wave.

The ice giants remain some of the most interesting places to explore in the solar system. Uranus in particular has drawn a lot of interest lately, especially after the 2022 Decadal Survey from the National Academies named it as the highest priority destination. But as of now, we still don’t have a fully fleshed out and planned mission ready to go for the multiple launch windows in the 2030s. That might actually be an advantage, though, as a new system coming online might change the overall mission design fundamentally. Starship recently continued its recent string of successful tests, and a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference by researchers at MIT looked at how this new, much more capable launch system, could impact the development of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) that the Decadal Survey suggested.

Is anybody out there? Probably. Most stars have planets; we've discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets thus far, and the most basic statistics point toward the existence of countless potentially habitable worlds in the Universe. But when we have looked for any scrap of evidence for alien civilizations, we have found nothing so far. The question is why?

*Swarm Sees Key Changes in the Southern Atlantic Anomaly and more. *

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operations, one of its earliest surveys was of galaxies that existed during the very early Universe. In December 2022, these observations revealed multiple objects that appeared as "Little Red Dots" (LRDs), fueling speculation as to what they might be. While the current consensus is that these objects are compact, early galaxies, there is still debate over their composition and what makes them so red. On the one hand, there is the "stellar-only" hypothesis, which states that LRDs are red because they are packed with stars and dust.