Space News & Blog Articles

Getting close to things is one way for scientists to collect better data about them. But that's been hard to do for the Sun, since getting close to it typically entails getting burnt to a crisp. Just ask Icarus. But if Icarus had survived his close encounter with the Sun, he might have been able to see massive magnetic “tadpoles” tens of thousands of kilometers wide reconnecting back down to the surface of our star. Or maybe not, because he had human eyes, not the exceptionally sensitive Wide-Field imagers the Parker Solar Probe used to look at the Sun while it made its closest ever pass to our closest star. A new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters from Angelos Vourlidas of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors describes what they say on humanity’s closest brush with the Sun so far.

Long before scientists discovered that other stars in the Universe host their own planetary systems, humanity had contemplated the existence of life beyond Earth. As our technology matured and we began monitoring the night sky in multiple wavelengths (i.e., radio waves), this curiosity became a genuine scientific pursuit. By the 1960s, a scientific field dedicated to the search for advanced life (similar to ours) emerged: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Since then, multiple SETI surveys have been conducted to search for potential signs of technological activity (aka. "technosignatures").

Astronomers may have just seen the first ever ‘superkilonova,’ a combination of a supernova and a kilonova. These are two very different kinds of stellar explosions, and if this discovery stands, it could change the way scientists understand stellar birth and death.

Nature sends us its signals in the form of light. Astrophysical phenomena emit light in all its forms, from harmless radio waves to deadly gamma-rays, and its up to us to build the facilities that can sense and dissect this light, and to understand the phenomena behind it all.

The JWST was built with the power to observe the red-shifted light from objects in the very early Universe. Once it got going, the telescope practically inundated us with surprising, theory-challenging observations from the Universe's earliest ages. Some ancient galaxies were much larger and fully-formed than thought. So were their supermassive black holes (SMBH).

With new technologies comes new discoveries. Or so Spider Man’s Uncle Ben might have said if he was an astronomer. Or a scientist more generally - but in astronomy that saying is more true than many other disciplines, as many discoveries are entirely dependent on the technology - the telescope, imager, or processing algorithm - used to collect data on them. A new piece of technology, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is exciting scientists enough that they are even starting to predict what kind of discoveries it might make. One such type of discovery, described in a pre-print paper on arXiv by Vito Saggese of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics and his co-authors on the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team, is the discovery of many more multiplantery exoplanet systems an astronomical phenomena Roman is well placed to detect - microlensing.