Space News & Blog Articles

Bit by bit, scientists are piecing together Mars' climate history. Thanks to orbiters armed with powerful cameras and rovers carrying suites of scientific instruments, the red planet's history is becoming clearer year-by-year. In the past decade or so, evidence of Mars' ancient habitability is becoming more and more convincing.

New Space is a term now commonly used around the rocketry and satellite industries to indicate a new, speed focused model of development that takes its cue from the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and (hopefully don’t) break things.” Given that several of the founders of rocketry and satellite companies have a Silicon Valley background, that probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but the mindset has resulted in an exponential growth in the number of satellites in orbit, and also an exponential decrease in the cost of getting them to orbit. A new paper, recently published in pre-print form in arXiv from researchers at Schmidt Space and a variety of research institutes, lays out plans for the Lazuli Space Observatory, which hopes to apply that same mindset to flagship-level space observatory missions.

Our red neighbour Mars, seems to experience many similar phenomena to Earth. It does however seem to lack the hurricanes and typhoons that lash Earth, but don’t underestimate the Martian winds. Over millions of years, these persistent atmospheric currents have carved spectacular grooves and ridges across the landscape, carrying sand grains like microscopic chisels to sculpt the surface. ESA’s Mars Express has now captured some of the most striking examples of this erosion near the planet’s equator.

The universe’s most massive galaxies present astronomers with a puzzle. Each containing more than 100 billion stars, making our Milky Way look modest by comparison, these ultramassive systems had already reached enormous sizes less than two billion years after the Big Bang. What astronomers couldn’t easily determine was whether these ancient giants were still actively building stars or had already shut down their stellar factories and retired into quiet old age.

Our Solar System, it turns out, is something of an oddball. While we have rocky planets close to the Sun and gas giants further out, most stars in the Milky Way harbour something entirely different. They are worlds between the sizes of Earth and Neptune and orbit closer to their stars than Mercury does to ours. These super Earths and sub Neptunes are the Galaxy’s most common planets, found around nearly every Sun like star ever have studied. Until now that is.

This is Part 4 in a series on the mathematical universe hypothesis. Check out Parts 1, 2, and 3.

It's a well-known fact that Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH) play a vital role in the evolution of galaxies. Their powerful gravity and the way it accelerates matter in its vicinity causes so much radiation to be released from the core region - aka. an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) - that it will periodically outshine all the stars in the disk combined. In addition, some SMBHs accelerate infalling dust and gas into jets that emanate from the poles, sending streams of super-heated material millions of light-years at close to the speed of light.