Space News & Blog Articles

In our homes, dust is a nuisance. In space, it's a basic material from which stars, planets, and living things are made. Understanding where cosmic dust comes from is a ground-level question in astronomy, and researchers working with the JWST have uncovered one source: Wolf-Rayet stars.

Astronauts on future missions won't be surviving on freeze-dried meals and protein bars. Instead, they might be harvesting fresh rice from compact plants just 10 centimetres tall, engineered specifically for life beyond Earth. The revolutionary ‘Moon Rice’ project is developing the perfect crop for sustained space habitation, combining cutting edge genetics with the practical needs of deep space exploration.

Venus has always seemed like the last place you'd expect to find life. With surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and crushing atmospheric pressure, our neighboring planet appears utterly hostile. But high in its clouds, where conditions are surprisingly Earth-like, scientists have discovered something extraordinary: mysterious gases that shouldn't exist, unless something is alive up there….perhaps!

Names are a strange thing in astronomy. Sometimes scientists come up with grandiose, simple name, like the Extremely Large Telescope. Other times, they come up with unique sounding names, like quasars. And sometimes they come up with names that, while descriptive in some sense, are completely misleading in others. That is the case for Little Red Dots (LRD) - active galactic nuclei in the early universe that show up as a little red dot in the images captured by whatever telescope found them. However, they actually represent supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of times the size of our Sun. A new paper from Federica Loiacono and her colleagues at Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy describes one of these behemoths they found with the James Webb Space Telescope at a period of the early universe, about 11 billion years ago, known as the “cosmic noon”.

We live in an exciting time of technological innovation and breakthroughs in astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics. This is similarly true for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which seeks to leverage advances in instrumentation and computing to find evidence of "technosignatures" in the Universe. While the scope has expanded considerably since Cornell Professor Frank Drake and colleagues conducted the first SETI experiment over sixty years ago (Project Ozma), the vast majority have consisted of listening to space for signs of possible radio transmissions.