Space News & Blog Articles

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.

The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed many wonders of the early universe, but few discoveries have puzzled astronomers more than some mysterious "little red dots." These tiny, brilliant galaxies appear scattered across deep space images like cosmic breadcrumbs, challenging everything scientists thought they knew about how galaxies formed in the early universe.

When global events set our minds to wondering if humanity has what it takes to persist, it's natural to wonder about other worlds, other life, other intelligent species, and if those others might be better suited to survive whatever Great Filters they face. Those are fanciful thoughts, but there's an underpinning of nuts-and-bolts thinking to them. It starts with identifying which planets in habitable zones around other stars might actually be habitable.

Mars still holds the promise of being one of the first places in the solar system humanity will colonize. However, if there was evolutionarily distinct, extant life on the planet, it might sway the heart of even the most ardent Mars colonization fans. So astrobiologists are in a race against time to try to determine whether or not such life exists, before the entire planet becomes an analogue of the Earth’s biosphere, if only unintentionally, and only a shadow of the ones that exists here. A new paper from the Christopher Temby and Jan Spacek of the Agnostic Life Finder (ALF) team discusses one of the most promising ways to prove definitively that life exists on the Red Planet - finding polyelectrolyte polymers - in other words, DNA.