Space News & Blog Articles

Answers to some of cosmology's most pressing questions are obscured by simple dust. It concerns the Cosmic Noon, a period of time that began around two billion years after the Big Bang, when nearly all galaxies experienced a burst of growth and rapid star formation. Galaxies formed stars at rates 10 to 100 times higher than today, and they became more massive through mergers with other galaxies. Dark matter haloes grew rapidly during this time as well. Astronomers want to understand how galaxies grow and evolve, and the Cosmic Noon and its high star formation rate (SFR) and rapid growth is a critical stage in galactic evolution.

The European research project called "gEICko" aims to develop satellites that can literally stick to space junk and drag it safely out of orbit. The secret lies in synthetic materials that mimic the microscopic structures on the feet of gecko, which allow these remarkable reptiles to cling to virtually any surface using molecular forces called van der Waals interactions.

Imagine the entire universe suddenly blazing with light in a flash that lasted just a brief moment in time and then vanishing, leaving behind the most massive black holes ever discovered. This dramatic scenario forms the heart of a new theory that could solve one of astronomy's biggest mysteries about supermassive black holes and how they got so enormous so quickly after the Big Bang.

The connection between greenhouse gases and space weather might seem surprising, but it illustrates just how interconnected Earth's atmospheric layers really are. While carbon dioxide warms the lower atmosphere by trapping heat, it has the opposite effect in the thin regions of the upper atmosphere, roughly 300-400 miles above Earth's surface. At these extreme altitudes, carbon dioxide actually cools the atmosphere by radiating heat directly into space, causing the air to become significantly less dense over time.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) established a reputation worldwide in 2019 when it released the first-ever image of a black hole. This was made possible by the science of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), a technique in which multiple instruments collect light to create a complete picture of what an object looks like. In this case, the image was of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth. This was followed by images of the relativistic jets emanating from two bright galaxies, and of Sagitarius A*, the SMBH at the center of the Milky Way.

Our Moon is a seismically active world with a long history of quakes stretching back to its early history. It turns out those quakes can and will affect the safety of permanent base structures for anybody planning to explore and inhabit the Moon. That's one conclusion from a study of quakes along the Lee-Lincoln fault in the Taurus-Littrow valley where the Apollo 17 astronauts landed in 1972. “The global distribution of young thrust faults like the Lee-Lincoln fault, their potential to be still active and the potential to form new thrust faults from ongoing contraction should be considered when planning the location and assessing stability of permanent outposts on the Moon,” said Smithsonian senior scientist emeritus Thomas R. Watters, lead author of the paper.