Space News & Blog Articles

Six years ago the Cassini spacecraft, which had spent nearly two decades in orbit around Saturn, finished its mission with a grand finale, plunging itself into the depths of Saturn’s atmosphere. Those last few orbits and the final plunge revealed a wealth of information about Saturn’s interior. A team of astronomers have collected all of the available data and are now painting a portrait of the interior of the solar system’s second largest planet.

Jupiter is the King, Earth is teeming with life, Venus is a weird, spacecraft-crushing hellhole, and now Saturn has the most moons. Again.

Challenges have been a mainstay of space exploration for several years at this point. In the past, they have ranged from making a potential space elevator to designing a solar power system on the Moon. The European Space Agency is continuing that tradition and has recently released a new challenge focusing on lunar resources. Called the Identifying Challenges along the Lunar ISRU Value Chain campaign, this new ESA platform is the next step in the agency’s efforts to develop an entire “value chain” of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) technologies.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, was designed to find other worlds. Following in the tradition of the Kepler spacecraft, TESS has a hundred thousand stars looking for small but regular dips in their brightness. These dips are typically caused by planets as they pass in front of the star. TESS has been quite effective, logging nearly 6,000 candidate exoplanets. Confirming or rejecting these candidates takes time, but it has led to some interesting discoveries.

Be sure to set your alarm for early Wednesday morning, as the Moon occults the King of Planets.

At the extreme end of astrophysics, there are all sorts of phenomena that seem to be counter-intuitive. For example, how can an object not possibly get any brighter? For a long time, this limit, known as the Eddington limit, was thought to be an upper bound on how bright an object could be, and it was directly correlated with the mass of that object. But observations showed that some objects were even brighter than this theoretical limit, and now data collected by NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) confirms that these objects are, in fact, breaking the Eddington limit. But why?

A team of theoretical physicists have discovered a strange structure in space-time that to an outside observer would look exactly like a black hole, but upon closer inspection would be anything but: they would be defects in the very fabric of the universe.

One of the challenges of gravitational wave astronomy is moving its abilities beyond observations of stellar mass mergers. The collision of two black holes or neutron stars releases a tremendous amount of gravitational energy, but even this is a challenge to detect. Gravitational waves do not couple strongly with most matter, so it takes a tremendous amount of sensitive observations to observe. But we are getting better at it, and there are a few proposals that hope to take our observations even further. One example of this is a recent study that looks at utilizing the magnetospheres of Earth and Jupiter.