Space News & Blog Articles

Iron rusts. On Earth, this common chemical reaction often signals the presence of something far more interesting than just corroding metal for example, living microorganisms that make their living by manipulating iron atoms. Now researchers argue these microbial rust makers could provide some of the most promising biosignatures for detecting life on Mars and the icy moons of the outer Solar System.

Astronomers using the Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii have captured the closest ever view of a protoplanetary disk, the swirling cloud of gas and dust where planets form from interstellar debris. Their target, a young star called HD 34282 located 400 light years away, offers a front row seat to planetary birth.

You come for the king, you best not miss.

Tracking time is one of those things that seems easy, until you really start to get into the details of what time actually is. We define a second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom. However, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, mass slows down these oscillations, making time appear to move more slowly for objects in large gravity wells. This distinction becomes critical as we start considering how to keep track of time between two separate gravity wells of varying strengths, such as on the Earth and the Moon. A new paper pre-print on arXiv by Pascale Defraigne at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and her co-authors discusses some potential frameworks for solving that problem and settles on using the new Lunar Coordinate Time (TCL) suggested by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

The ESA's Euclid space telescope has been in space for just over a year, investigating some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. By observing cosmic structures up to a distance of 10 billion light-years, the observatory will chart the evolution of the Universe, attempt to constrain the influence of Dark Energy, and study the morphology of galaxies. In terms of galaxies, Euclid will attempt to answer the question of why the Universe contains such a variety of galaxies, characterized by size, shape, and colours.

Blue Origin needed a ship to catch rockets falling from space. They bought a massive roll-on/roll-off cargo ferry, hired engineers to convert it, and named it Jacklyn after Jeff Bezos's mother. Then, after four years of work, they scrapped the entire project and started over.

According to the textbook version of Solar System formation, planets should orbit the Sun in elliptical orbits, all lined up in the same plane. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune don't follow this script. Their orbits are a little more elliptical and tilted relative to each other, not dramatically, but enough to puzzle astronomers for decades. Standard formation models predict the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk on the same plane as the rest of the planets. Instead, something seems to have pushed them off course.

Early one February morning in 2025, Adam Borucki discovered something extraordinary behind his warehouse in Poland, a charred metal tank, roughly 1.5 metres across, sitting in his back yard. It had crashed from space during the night, part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that failed to complete its controlled descent into the Pacific Ocean. The debris damaged some electrical equipment and a concrete block. Nobody was hurt, but the incident raised an uncomfortable question; who pays when a private company's space hardware crashes into your property?