Space News & Blog Articles

Space flight is an expensive business and that money has to come from somewhere. The White House has just released their budget for fiscal year 2025. What does that mean for NASA?, they will get $25.4 billion, the same as it received last year but $2 billion less than it requested. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the constraints come from a debt ceiling agreement that limits non-defence spending. Alas the $2 billion deficit means NASA will need to cut costs from various missions.

Our solar system does not exist in isolation. It formed within a stellar nursery along with hundreds of sibling stars, and even today has the occasional interaction with interstellar objects such as Oumuamua and Borisov. So it’s reasonable to presume that some interstellar material has reached Earth. Recently Avi Loeb and his team earned quite a bit of attention with a study arguing that it had found some of this interstellar stuff on the ocean seabed. But a new study finds that the material has a much more local origin.

If you, like me, have dabbled with telescope making you will know what a fickle friend light can be. On one hand you want to capture as much as you can (but only from the object, not from nearby lights) and want to reflect or refract it to the point of observation or study.  What you most certainly don’t want is stray light to be bounced around inside the telescope so components (except the mirror!) are sprayed as black as possible. Unfortunately black paints tend to be quite susceptible to damage and struggle to cope with the harsh conditions and cold temperatures telescopes are subjected to. A team has recently developed a new atomic-layer deposition method which absorbs 99.3% of light and is durable too. 

I often drag out the amazing fact that the Andromeda Galaxy, that faint fuzzy blob just off the corner of the Square of Pegasus, is heading straight for us! Of course I continue to tell people it won’t happen for a few billion years yet but a recent study suggests that we are already seeing hypervelocity stars that have been ejected from Andromeda already. It is just possible that the two galaxies have already started to exchange stars long before they are expected to merge. 

Gamma-ray telescopes observing neutron star collisions might be the key to identifying the composition of dark matter. One leading theory explaining dark matter it that is mostly made from hypothetical particles called axions. If an axion is created within the intensely energetic environment of two neutron stars merging, it should then decay into gamma-ray photons which we could see using space telescopes like Fermi-LAT.

The Voyager spacecraft carried on board a plethora of scientific instruments but attached to the side was a golden record. The sounds of Earth were recorded upon it. Now, another mission is going to be carrying a message out into space. The Europa Clipper mission will launch in October and it will carry a plaque with images, illustrations and messages. There will be more than 2.6 million names and the word for ‘water’ converted into waveform from 103 languages. 

Galaxy NGC3799 lies around 16 million light years from Earth. Any event observed today within that galaxy took place 16 million years ago. One such event was observed in February 2023 when a surge in brightness in the core was followed by a rapid dimming. The observations that followed revealed that the event was a star being torn apart by a supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy. This is not the first time such an event has been observed but it is the first to be within our galactic backyard suggesting it may be more common that first thought. 

Some parts of the Universe only reveal important details when observed in radio waves. That explains why we have ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimetre-submillimetre Array, a collection of 7-meter and 12-meter radio telescopes that work together as an interferometer. But, ALMA-type arrays have their limitations, and astronomers know what they need to overcome those limitations.