The Milky Way has many satellite galaxies, most notably the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. They’re both visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. Now astronomers have discovered another satellite that’s the smallest and dimmest one ever detected. It may also be one of the most dark matter-dominated galaxies ever found.
Space News & Blog Articles
'Them space drugs cooked real good:' Varda Space just made an HIV medicine in Earth orbit
Varda Space has written up the results of its groundbreaking W-1 mission, which successfully crystalized the metastable Form III of the antiviral drug ritonavir in space and returned it to Earth.
Polar vortex is 'spinning backwards' above Arctic after major reversal event
Earlier this month, a sudden atmospheric warming event caused the Arctic's polar vortex to reverse its trajectory. The swirling ring of cold air is now spinning in the wrong direction, which has triggered a record-breaking "ozone spike" and could impact global weather patterns.
Thermal Modeling of a Pulsed Plasma Rocket Shows It Should Be Possible To Create One
We’ve reported on a technology called pulsed plasma rockets (PPRs) here at UT a few times. Several research groups have worked on variations of them. They are so popular partly because of their extremely high specific impulse and thrust levels, and they seemingly solve the trade-off between those two all-important variables in space exploration propulsion systems. Essentially, they are an extremely efficient propulsion methodology that, if scaled up, would allow payloads to reach other planets in weeks rather than months or years. However, some inherent dangers still need to be worked out, and overcoming some of those dangers was the purpose of a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project back in 2020.
Solar spacecraft 'SOHO' discovers its 5,000th comet
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory just hit a milestone with its 5,000th comet detection.
Lego Star Wars Executor Super Star Destroyer review
This impressive Lego Star Wars ship packs in plenty of detail without breaking the bank.
Civilizations Could Time Their Communications Based on the Movement of a Single Star
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been ongoing for decades at this point. Despite that, we have yet to find any rock-hard evidence of a signal from an alien civilization. When asked about this, experts point out just how little of the overall signal space we’ve analyzed. A signal could be coming from anywhere in the sky, at any frequency, and might not be continuous. Constraining the “search space” could help us find a signal faster, but what could we use to constrain it? It’s hard to think like an alien intelligence, let alone to mimic them.
The ESA’s Mars Rover Gets a New Map
Rosalind Franklin, the ESA’s Mars rover, is scheduled to launch no sooner than 2028. Its destination is Oxia Planum, a wide clay-bearing plain to the east of Chryse Planitia. Oxia Planum contains terrains that date back to Mars’ Noachian Period, when there may have been abundant surface water, a key factor in the rover’s mission.
Gorgeous James Webb Space Telescope image captures sparkling stars, old and new
A small galaxy is bursting with star formation in a dazzling new image from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Astronomers Catch a Supernova Explode Almost in Realtime
Catching a supernova in action is tricky business. There is no way to predict them, and they don’t occur very often. Within the Milky Way they only occur about once a century, and the last one was observed in 1604.
Most quasars are a ferocious force of nature, but not this one
A quasar over three billion light-years away was found to be rather gentle on its host galaxy, allowing its black hole to keep growing.
How to earn a 'black belt' in solar eclipse chasing
We explore how eclipses repeat and what it takes to earn a 'black belt' in eclipse chasing, according to our skywatching columnist Joe Rao.
NASA's 1st female chief engineer at Kennedy Space Center wants to put a space station around the moon (exclusive)
For Women's History Month, NASA's Teresa Kinney shared what she's learned in 40 years of working in agency circles, and how she's trying to help the next generation fly to space.
Europe's upcoming Mars rover now has a detailed map to aid its search for ancient Red Planet life (video)
The European Space Agency's Rosalind Franklin Mars rover now has a detailed map with which to help find its way around the Red Planet when it lands sometime in the next decade.
NASA's Lucy asteroid-hopping spacecraft pins down ages of 1st asteroid targets
Scientists shared preliminary results from Lucy's encounter with Dinkinesh and Selam late last year.
This Week's Sky at a Glance, March 29 – April 7
What? You say you're bored? The evening sky is moonless, the two Dog Stars align vertically, the Big Dipper dumps into the Little Dipper, and the Springs of the Gazelle cross the zenith.
Earth from Space: The Amazon plume
Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission takes us over northern Brazil, where the Amazon River meets the Atlantic Ocean.
Neutron Stars are Jetting Material Away at 40% the Speed of Light
It’s a well known fact that black holes absorb anything that falls into them. Often before material ‘vanishes’ inside it forms into an accretion disk around them. Like the progenitor stars, the black holes have powerful magnetic fields and these can generate jets that blast away from the black hole. A similar process occurs in neutron stars that are orbiting other stars and recent observations holes have shown that some material in the jets travel at speeds 35-40% the speed of light.
Lunar Night Permanently Ends the Odysseus Mission
On February 15th, Intuitive Machines (IM) launched its first Nova-C class spacecraft from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. On February 22nd, the spacecraft – codenamed Odysseus (or “Odie”) – became the first American-built vehicle to soft-land on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. While the landing was a bit bumpy (Odysseus fell on its side), the IM-1 mission successfully demonstrated technologies and systems that will assist NASA in establishing a “sustained program of lunar exploration and development.”
Webb Joins the Hunt for Protoplanets
We can’t understand what we can’t clearly see. That fact plagues scientists who study how planets form. Planet formation happens inside a thick, obscuring disk of gas and dust. But when it comes to seeing through that dust to where nascent planets begin to take shape, astronomers have a powerful new tool: the James Webb Space Telescope.