Space News & Blog Articles

How can machine learning help astronomers find Earth-like exoplanets? This is what a recently accepted study to Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated how a novel neural network-based algorithm could be used to detect Earth-like exoplanets using data from the radial velocity (RV) detection method. This study holds the potential to help astronomers develop more efficient methods in detecting Earth-like exoplanets, which are traditionally difficult to identify within RV data due to intense stellar activity from the host star.

Universe Today has had the privilege of spending the last several months venturing into a multitude of scientific disciplines, including impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary geophysics, cosmochemistry, meteorites, radio astronomy, extremophiles, organic chemistry, and black holes, and their importance in helping teach scientists and the public about our place in the cosmos.

Jupiter’s moon Io is a volcanic powerhouse. It’s the most geologically active world in the Solar System, sporting more than 400 spouting volcanoes and vents on its surface. Has it always been this way? A team of planetary scientists says yes, and they have the chemical receipts to prove it.

There are some things that never cease to amaze me and the discovery of distant objects is one of them. The James Webb Space Telescope has just found the most distant galaxy ever observed! It has the catchy title JADES-GS-z14-0 and it has a redshift of 14.32. This means its light left when the Universe was only 290 million years old! That means the light left the source LOOOONG before even our Milky Way was here! How amazing is that!

On July 14th, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft conducted the first-ever flyby of Pluto, which once was (and to many, still is) the ninth planet of the Solar System. While the encounter was brief, the stunning images and volumes of data it obtained revealed a stunningly vibrant and dynamic world. In addition to Pluto’s heart, floating ice hills, nitrogen icebergs, and nitrogen winds, the New Horizons data also hinted at the existence of an ocean beneath Pluto’s icy crust. This effectively made Pluto (and its largest moon, Charon) members of the “Ocean Worlds” club.

The earliest black holes in the Universe called primordial black holes (PBHs), are strong contenders to help explain why the Universe is heavier than it looks. There’s only one problem: these miniature monsters haven’t exactly been observed—yet. But, when astronomers do find them, they might turn out to be part of the Universe’s dark matter component.

Astronomy is a profession that, so far, has only been done at night, at least on Earth. Light from the Sun overwhelms any light from other stars, making it impractical for both professional and amateur astronomers to look at the stars during daytime. There are several disadvantages to this, not the least of which is that many potentially exciting parts of the sky aren’t visible at all for large chunks of the year as they pass too close to the Sun. To solve this, a team from Macquarie University, led by graduate student Sarah Caddy, developed a multi-camera system for a local telescope that allows them to observe during daytime.

When the Arecibo Observatory dish in Puerto Rico collapsed in 2020, astronomers lost a powerful radio telescope and a unique radar instrument to map the surfaces of asteroids and other planetary bodies. Fortunately, a new, next-generation radar system called ngRADAR is under development, to eventually be installed at the 100-meter (328 ft.) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia. It will be able to track and map asteroids, with the ability to observe 85% of the celestial sphere. It will also be able to study comets, moons and planets in our Solar System.