Space News & Blog Articles

Tens of thousands of pieces of space debris are hurtling around Earth right now. These defunct satellites, spent rocket stages, collision fragments and even a toolbox threaten active spacecraft and could trigger cascading disasters that make space unusable for generations. Since removing just a single piece of debris can cost tens of millions of dollars, the critical question becomes which ones should we prioritise?

The Hubble Space Telescope continues to observe the cosmos and deliver some of the most breathtaking views of astronomical objects ever taken. The telescope recently imaged Abell 209, a galaxy cluster located 2.8 billion light years away in the constellation Cetus. The picture was selected as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week, as it beautifully illustrates the galaxies that constitute it and the lensing effect it has surrounding space. The galaxies appear as brightly shining points in the image, emitting light that appears to take an oval shape, crowded around a particularly massive one.

Gravitational waves are tiny distortions in spacetime itself, created when massive objects like black holes or neutron stars collide. These waves stretch and compress space as they pass through, but the effect is incredibly subtle, far smaller than the width of a proton. When Einstein predicted gravitational waves over a century ago, he likely never imagined that magnets could one day detect these gravitational ripples. Yet new research led by Valerie Domcke from CERN reveals that magnetic systems can function as exceptionally sensitive gravitational wave detectors, offering a fresh approach to studying some of the universe's most violent events.

One of the main objectives of the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, was to measure the size and age of the Universe, as well as the rate at which it is expanding (aka. the Hubble Constant). This was enabled for the first time with the Hubble Deep Fields, which visualized the farthest galaxies that are observable in visible light (~13 billion light years from Earth). However, when astronomers measured the distance to these galaxies, they noted a problem: they were inconsistent with measurements of the local Universe. This became known as the "Hubble Tension," which remains one of the biggest cosmological mysteries to this day.

From one perspective, the Sun is a benevolent orb of plasma and its warmth makes Earth habitable and has kept if habitable for billions of years, allowing complex things like human beings to evolve. From another perspective, it's a malevolent orb that sends deadly UV radiation our way, and sometimes erupts and hurls massive blobs of plasma toward Earth. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe to flesh out that truth.

In the vast expanse between Uranus and Neptune, a team of researchers have uncovered something really quite extraordinary, a minor planet that has been locked in precise gravitational manouevres with Uranus for at least a million years. This discovery sheds new light on the complex dynamics that govern our Solar System's outer reaches.