Space News & Blog Articles

Star birth is a messy and chaotic event. Some of the process remains well hidden behind clouds of gas and dust that make up star-forming regions. However, part of it happens in wavelengths of light we can detect, such as visible light and infrared. It’s an intricate process that the Webb telescope (JWST) can study in detail.

In the next decade, space agencies will expand the search for extraterrestrial life beyond Mars, where all of our astrobiology efforts are currently focused. This includes the ESA’s JUpiter ICy moon’s Explorer (JUICE) and NASA’s Europa Clipper, which will fly past Europa and Ganymede repeatedly to study their surfaces and interiors. There’s also NASA’s proposed Dragonfly mission that will fly to Titan and study its atmosphere, methane lakes, and the rich organic chemistry happening on its surface. But perhaps the most compelling destination is Enceladus and the lovely plumes emanating from its southern polar region.

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.