An artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander on the surface of the Moon. Graphic: Blue Origin
Blue Origin is still several years off from its currently contracted mission to bring astronauts to the Moon’s South Pole on the Artemis 5 mission. But it has a number of spacecraft in development with at least one set to fly to the lunar surface as soon as potentially later this year.
Two recent discoveries of black hole mergers add to the evidence that such mergers happen over and over again.
If you could zoom out from Earth far enough, our Milky Way would shrink to just one galaxy among roughly fifty neighbours clustered together by gravity. These galactic neighbourhoods vary dramatically in size, and the largest ones, containing hundreds or thousands of galaxies bound together, represent some of the most massive objects in the entire universe. Their immense scale makes them uniquely valuable laboratories for testing our understanding of fundamental physics.
For decades, astronomers have faced a frustrating puzzle when studying star formation in our Galaxy. They know that most stars are born inside clouds of cold molecular hydrogen gas, but this hydrogen is all but invisible to telescopes because it doesn't emit light that can easily be detected. To find these stellar nurseries, researchers have relied on carbon monoxide as a tracer molecule, find the marker and thats where molecular clouds exist. However, there's been a problem with this approach, substantial amounts of star forming gas simply don't light up in carbon monoxide observations, remaining hidden from view.
Albert H. Nagler, a pioneer of telescope optics, passed away at the office of his company Tele Vue Optics on Monday, October 27th. He was 90 years old.
Everyone’s favorite interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS isn’t hiding near perihelion this week, as amateur astronomers reveal.
In the 1970’s Vera Rubin didn’t set out to upend modern cosmology. She was just always curious about the heavens. It started with building a homemade telescope out of cardboard and glass, and it progressed with her becoming the only astronomy undergraduate student at Vasser College, graduating in 1948. She was qualified enough to get into Princeton, except for the fact that she was a woman, and so they wouldn’t let her in. Despite years of discouragement and harassment, she made a name for herself in cosmology, joining the first generation of scientists to piece together the large-scale structure of the universe.
Hurricane Melissa could make a record-breaking landfall in Jamaica, and satellites are monitoring the situation.
Astrobotic staff examine a propulsion tank sitting in front of Griffin-1’s structure. Image: Astrobotic
Astrobotic is now eyeing the summer of 2026 for the launch of its second mission with the goal of landing on the surface of the Moon.
Image: The Red Spider Nebula (Webb)
The 4MOST instrument on the European Southern Observatory's VISTA telescope has captured its first light.
The European Space Agency has announced it is establishing a new presence in Tokyo, Japan, its first in Asia.
Turn your telescope on the moon at sunset on Oct. 28 to see a colossal "X" and "V" form on the lunar surface as sunlight picks out broken terrain along the terminator.
Asteroids spin. Most of them do so rather slowly, and up until now most theories of asteroid rotation have failed to explain exactly why. A new paper from Wen-Han Zhou at the University of Tokyo and his co-authors might finally be able to fully explain that mystery as well as a few others related to asteroid rotation. Their work was presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in late September and could impact our understanding of how best to defend against a potentially hazardous asteroid.
Cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky will conduct a spacewalk outside the International Space Station today (Oct. 28), and you can watch the action live.
Image: This image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission show Hurricane Melissa as it barrelled through the Caribbean Sea
The Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission is about to get its fourth satellite, with Sentinel-1D now ready for liftoff. Launch will take place with an Ariane 6 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana and live coverage will be shown on Tuesday, 4 November, at 22:02 CET (18:02 at Kourou).
A new study has reviewed how space habitat designs have evolved from inflatable bubbles to 3D-printed structures built from Martian dust. The research traces how engineers have wrestled with extreme temperatures, the bombmardment of radiation, and the challenge of building on worlds without breathable air, transforming each obstacle into solved problems with innovative ideas and designs that could soon house the first permanent residents of the Moon and Mars.
Could scientists find life in the clouds of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recently submitted manuscript hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how the biosignatures of microbes could be identified in exoplanet atmospheres and clouds. This study has the potential to help scientists develop new methods for finding life on exoplanets, either as we know it or even as we don’t know it.
SpaceX launched yet another batch of its Starlink satellites today (Oct. 27), sending 28 of them up from California's central coast.
The question of whether we are alone in the universe has captivated humanity for centuries. The possibility of alien life, from simple microbial organisms to advanced civilizations, continues to drive scientific inquiry and fuel our collective imagination. This document explores the various facets of the search for extraterrestrial life, from scientific methodologies to philosophical implications.
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