Space News & Blog Articles

It’s wonderful to watch the fascination on people’s faces when you explain to them that studying distant objects in the Universe means looking back in time! Reach out to the furthest corners of the Cosmos and you can see objects so far away that the light left them long before our Solar System even existed. With the commissioning of the JWST the race was on to push the boundaries even further and hunt down the most distant galaxy in the Universe and maybe even the first galaxies to ever have formed.

I can remember it very well, although not actually sure when it was, back around 1995/1996 I think. I was, like most other keen stargazers very familiar with the sight of Saturn with rings and all. Indeed the view of Saturn with its rings was one of the first things I had ever seen through a telescope and it inspired me into a lifetime passion of exploring the night sky. Every 15 years though, the Earth passes through the plane of the rings and from Earth they seem to vanish.  Now, an astronomer has used data taken during such ring plane crossings from the Cassini spacecraft to measure the transparency of the rings.

Exoplanets are definitely a bit of a hot topic at the moment. Throw in a sprinkling of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and you have the recipe for magic! I still cannot believe that we have discovered, yes actually discovered 5,539 exoplanets and there more being confirmed every day!The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992 and now over five and a half THOUSAND planets around other star systems are known! A team of astronomers have been exploring one in particular, the enigmatic WASP-107b using JWST and have made some incredible discoveries about its atmosphere.

While preparing for the threat of an asteroid strike might seem like a hypothetical exercise, it’s really not. The Solar System has calmed down a lot from earlier times when impacts were more frequent. But it is only a matter of time before an asteroid heads straight for Earth. The probability of an impact is not zero.

In the search for dark matter particles, there are two main approaches. The first is to look for particles that happen to decay naturally as they pass by. This typically involves neutrino observatories such as IceCube where a dark matter particle particle colliding with a nuclei might trigger a faint burst of light. So far this has turned up nothing. The second approach is to slam particles together in a particle accelerator. This approach has also failed to find dark matter particles, but there have been enough interesting hints that CERN is having a go. Their latest run is looking for what are known as dark photons.

Last year, astronomers warned that a large piece of debris was on a collision course with the Moon. Initially, they speculated that it was a SpaceX booster but later zeroed in on a Chinese Long March 3C rocket booster that launched the Chang’e 5 mission. When it did impact on March 4, 2022, astronomers noted a strange double crater.