Space News & Blog Articles

Sometimes the easiest way to understand the physics of a phenomenon is to make a physical model of it. But how do you make a model of a system as large as, say, a protoplanetary disc? One technique, suggested in a recent paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and the University of Greifswald, would be familiar to any grade schooler who took a science class - spin water around in a circle really fast.

While NASA maintains the lead in human space exploration, other nations have already begun their own projects. Take the China National Space Agency for example, with their CLEP, or Chinese Lunar Exploration Program. If you have any doubts about the objectives of the program, just check out their logo: a stylized crescent moon with two footprints in the middle.

Between September 2003 and January 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope conducted its deepest observations of the cosmos ever. Known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the images produced showed nearly 10,000 galaxies of various ages, sizes, and shapes, including some that existed when the Universe was just 800 million years old. Recently, astronomers were able to revisit this iconic snapshot of the cosmos using two instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Their observations set a new record for the longest and deepest observations of an extragalactic field to date.

In the northern hemisphere, we're getting on to enjoying summer time which traditionally includes vacationing. Typically, vacations are a time to pause from work and remember life's possibilities beyond work. Now, perhaps you the vacationer want to rekindle a brief fling you had with science or maybe begin a new science tryst. Ersilia Vaudo's book "The Story of Astrophysics in Five Revolutions" could be just the impetus necessary for such a diversion.

The United States and China aren’t the only powerful, wealthy nations in the world, and they’re certainly not the only nations active in space. For example, there are the Russians, which are…kind of distracted at the moment, so for our purposes there really isn’t much to talk about there.

If you want to get to the moon, you need to spend an enormous amount of resources developing, creating, testing, and deploying a variety of spacecraft and technologies. All you need is money. Lots of money. For decades the only entities with enough green in checking accounts were large governments or multi-national consortia. But nowadays we have some absurdly wealthy, and absurdly motivated, individuals who have stars in their eyes and designs on space missions of their own.

On November 1st, 2024, Project Hyperion - an international, interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers, anthropologists, and urban planners - launched a design competition for crewed interstellar travel. The event was hosted by the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), a UK-based non-profit organization dedicated to the robotic and human exploration of exoplanets around nearby stars, and eventually settlement. With a prize purse of $10,000, competitors were tasked with producing concepts for a Generation Ship (aka. Worldships) using current technologies and those that could be realized in the near future.