Space News & Blog Articles

We all know what it's like when Earth is on the receiving end of a solar flare. Things get spicy in the upper atmosphere, and the outbursts have the potential to disrupt technology here at home. Catastrophic flares of radiation devastate planets around other stars, too. Now it looks like scientists have found that planets orbiting close to their stars can trigger the flares that threaten to harm them.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can tell us a lot about the subjects of its observations if it spends enough time with them. That includes lonely rocks on the edges of our solar system, such as the Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) Quaoar. Recent observations using the NIRCam on JWST and pre-published on arXiv by researchers at the University of Central Florida, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Kyoto University add a plethora of new data to our understanding of this enigmatic object, including insights into what might be causing its ring system and its hydrocarbon atmosphere.

Sometimes there are profound questions in life that must be answered, like “What is the meaning of existence?”, “Are we alone in the universe?” or “What happens if you throw a paper airplane from the International Space Station?” Luckily, that third one has finally been answered, because of course someone would eventually. A new paper from Maximilien Berthet and Kojiro Suzuki from the University of Tokyo looks at “the dynamics of an origami space plane during Earth atmospheric reentry” - in other words, what happens when you throw a paper plane out of the ISS.

Earth is the only habitable world we know of and it remains habitable because of natural cycles that maintain a balanced climate. Earth's carbon cycle plays a critical role in maintaining its temperate climate, and carbonate rocks are a big part of it. Carbonate rocks like limestone and dolomite are huge carbon sinks, and if their carbon was released into the atmosphere, Earth's temperature would spike catastrophically, rendering our planet uninhabitable. Conversely, if all of Earth's carbon were locked away in rock, Earth would likely become glaciated, photosynthesis would cease, and a mass extinction would leave extremophiles as the sole survivors of life's rich, living heritage.

Gravitational waves come in all shapes and sizes - and frequencies. But, so far, we haven’t been able to capture any of the higher frequency ones. That’s unfortunate, as they might hold the key to unlocking our understanding of some really interesting physical phenomena, such as Boson clouds and tiny block hole mergers. A new paper from researchers at Notre Dame and Caltech, led by PhD student Christopher Jungkind, explores how we might use one of the world’s most prolific gravitational wave observatories, GEO600, to capture signals from those phenomena for the first time.

Research shows that modern disk galaxies have two overall components: a thin disk containing higher-metallicity young stars, and a thick disk containing lower-metallicity older stars. The thin disk sits inside the thick disk. Astronomers are trying to understand how these parts form and how disk galaxies evolve. To make progress, astronomers need to observe edge-on rather than face-on galaxies. They also need to observe them in the past, something that the JWST is built to do.