Space News & Blog Articles

A half century after NASA’s Apollo 17 lunar module lifted off the Moon’s northeastern near side quadrant, planetary scientists still don't completely understand when or how our Moon first formed.

Io is a world of extremes. It is by far the most volcanically active world in our solar system. Being continually squeezed in the never-ending tug-of-war between Jupiter and its larger satellites will do that to a moon. As a result, Io has over 400 “paterae” - volcanic depressions that spew lava up onto its surface. And, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and utilizing data from Juno’s Jupiter InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) tool, we have been massively underestimating the power output of those paterae for decades.

Mars has lots of glaciers located along its mid-latitudes. We’ve known this for years thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO’s) SHARAD sounder. But, despite all of the excellent data it’s managed to gather, SHARAD doesn’t have high enough resolution to accurately measure the boundary between the glacier itself and the rocky material that has been deposited on top of it over the course of billions of years. A new study, published in the journal JGR Planets, details a potential method of finding that boundary—by using a drone.

The exoplanet census continues to grow at a prodigious rate, with 6,273 confirmed planets to date and close to 20,000 candidates awaiting confirmation. What's more, the rate of discovery is accelerating, having passed 5,000 in early 2023 and 6,000 in September 2025. With such a large exoplanet census, along with improvements in instrumentation and data analysis, scientists are now focused on "exoplanet characterization" in addition to discovery. As always, the goal is to find planets that could be habitable for life as we know it (or "Earth-like").

The Orion Nebula provides a master class in the study of stellar formation. Yet, many of its youngest stellar objects are still swaddled in their birth crèches, hidden by clouds of gas and dust. The Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescopes have managed to punch through the dusty obscuring veil to study a pair of young binary systems called Brun 656 and HD 294300 born in the Nebula.

Our most massive satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), has been the center of a heated debate in the astrophysics community over the last few years. That debate centers on whether this is the LMC’s first or second “pass” by the Milky Way itself - and it has huge implications for the evolution of our galaxy given the disruption such a large grouping of stars has. A new paper from Scott Lucchini, Jiwon Jesse Han, Sapna Mishra, and Andrew J. Fox and his co-authors, currently available in pre-print on arXiv, provides what they claim to be definitive evidence that this is, in fact, the first time LMC has encountered the Milky Way.

Rogue planets sound like rare travelers amongst the stars, freed from the gravitational constraints of a host system, left to forever wander the interstellar void. But modern models suggest these Free Floating Planets (FFPs) as they are technically known, are actually very common - nineteen times more common than planets beyond the “snow line”, which is the distance from the central star where it becomes cold enough that hydrogen compounds like water, ammonia, and methane can condense into ice. But why are FFPs so common? What forces them out of the stellar systems where they form? A new paper from Xiaochen Zheng of the Beijing Planetarium and his co-authors, available in pre-print in arXiv, offers a plausible explanation - planetary “bouncers”.

For the past decade, astronomers thought they had a reasonable answer to that question. Around stars like our Sun, the two dominant planet types are sub-Neptunes, worlds resembling a shrunken Neptune, with thick gaseous envelopes and super-Earths, rocky planets up to ten times the mass of our own. Surveys had found them everywhere, orbiting star after star, and the assumption quietly took hold that these planets must be equally widespread across the Galaxy as a whole.

Studying the thing you can never step outside of and look back at is the fundamental problem facing every cosmologist who has ever looked up at the night sky. The Universe is not a laboratory you can peer into from above, it’s the thing you are already inside. The only way to truly test your ideas about how it works is to build a copy of it, run the clock forward from the Big Bang, and see if what emerges matches what your telescopes are actually telling you.

For most of human spaceflight history, the go to for communications has been radio waves, a technology that has served us remarkably well, but one that is beginning to show its age. When NASA's Artemis II mission carried four astronauts around the Moon in April the year, engineers quietly tested a laser communications terminal that could one day rewrite the rules of deep space exploration.

Our Sun is a bit of an outlier in the general stellar population. We typically think of stars as being solitary wanderers throughout the galaxy. But roughly half of Sun-like stars are locked in with more than one companion star. If there are two, it’s known as a “binary” system, but in many cases there are even more stars all collectively tied together by gravity. Astronomers have long debated why this happens, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Ryan Sponzilli, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, makes an argument for a mechanism known as disk fragmentation.

There are tens of thousands of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that represent some of the most easily accessible resources in the solar system. If we can get to them at least. Planning trajectories to rendezvous with these miniature worlds is notoriously difficult, and requires a massive amount of computational power to calculate. But a new paper from astrodynamicist Alessandro Beolchi of Khalifa University of Science and Technology and his co-authors offers a much less computationally intensive way to find these trajectories, and has the added bonus of finding the much less energy-intensive paths to boot.

Early May is a good time to watch for a powerful yet often elusive meteor shower, the annual Eta Aquariids.

Despite outward appearances, the internal workings of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune are extremely chaotic. Pressures millions of times greater than Earth’s sea level combine with temperatures in the thousands of degrees to make some pretty weird materials. Now, a new paper from researchers at the Carnegie Institution, published in Nature Communications, describes a completely new state of matter that might exist in these extreme environments - a “quasi-1D superionic” phase.

You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’re told the Odyssey spacecraft designed to take you there will be the smoothest ride you’ll ever take. It features a newly christened electric propulsion engine which was in the late stages of testing during the first three missions. The mission starts and the spacecraft travels at a crawl, and you wonder if it’s broken. A week goes by and you’re now traveling at more than 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour, and your mind is blown as to how fast you’re going, how quickly that happened, and that this mission might be more awesome than you thought.

You’re based at Artemis Station on the lunar south pole, and you’re monitoring your 12 autonomous rovers that are exploring the surrounding terrain for signs of water ice or other essentials minerals. They’re about 3 kilometers out when you suddenly get a NASA Alert for an incoming solar storm. You know the rovers won’t return to base before the storm hits, but you’re calm knowing the rovers all recently got retrofitted with the latest hair-thin nanotube shielding to protect them from the harsh electromagnetic waves and radiation.

Mercury is one of the four rocky planets of the Solar System, yet its chemistry is very different from Earth, Venus, and Mars. Missions to the planet show that it has an iron-poor, but sulfur- and magnesium-rich crust, which has implications for its interior makeup. Furthermore, it's known to planetary scientists as the most reduced planet in the Solar system. That means the chemicals it contains are dominated by sulfides, carbides, and silicides, as opposed to oxides like we see here on Earth.

Astronomers don't have to work hard to find binary stars in the Milky Way. They're common, even abundant. For a long time, they thought that these stars are unlikely to host exoplanets. The complex gravitational environment made things so chaotic, so the thinking went, that the planet formation process is disrupted.

One of the most intriguing puzzles in cosmology is the existence of supermassive black holes that seem to appear very early in the history of the Universe. Astronomers keep finding them at times when, by all that they understand about the infant Universe, they shouldn't be there. The standard theory of black hole formation suggests that they hadn't enough time to grow as massive as they appear to be. Yet, there they are, monster black holes with the mass of at least a billion suns. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a large population of them in early epochs, and they've been observed in very early quasars as well by such missions as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

In a first, ESA’s Proba-3 space-based coronagraph tracks space weather back to its source.

Laser sail propulsion is an idea that won't go away. By aiming powerful Earth-based lasers at tiny spacecraft with light sails, tiny spacecraft can be accelerated to near-relativistic speeds without carrying fuel or an energy source, and without carrying any kind of propulsion system at all. There are clear advantages to this idea, if it can be implemented.