Space News & Blog Articles

When researchers look up at the sky and wonder if we’re not alone, they also realize the origins of life here on Earth might hold the key to finding out. The chaotic chemical soup of our early world eventually led to the staggering complexity of modern life, but how exactly did it start? Proteins were one of the key ingredients in the early years, but we’re still only just discovering how these marvels of modern biology first managed to fold, function, and survive. A new review paper, The borderlands of foldability: lessons from simplified proteins, published recently in Trends in Chemistry, showcases how scientists are attempting to answer this question - by researching “simplified proteins”.

The Universe is an unfathomably large and ancient place. It began with a giant explosion roughly 14 billion years ago (the Big Bang) and has been in a state of expansion ever since. Based on current estimates, there are more than 2 trillion galaxies in the "observable Universe," some with as many as a trillion stars each. Within our galaxy alone, there are between 100 and 400 billion stars and 100 to 160 billion planets. And according to every bit of scientific evidence available, the ingredients for life are everything in abundance.

Here's a sobering thought. Right now, there are asteroids and comets in our Solar System that could pose a genuine threat to Earth and we usually can't see them. Some are as dark as coal while others hide in the glare of the Sun where our telescopes simply can't look. A few are small enough to slip past our detection systems entirely and this is the problem NASA's NEO (Near Earth Objects) Surveyor has been designed, from the ground up, to solve.

Stars are the basic units of a galaxy. But they form from gas, which is even more elemental. How star-forming gas moves around in a galaxy shapes star formation, and also shapes the galaxy and how it evolves.

For years, when something happened on the far side of the Sun, it was invisible to us on Earth. Sunspots could form there, flares could lash out and the corona could send masses of material out to space. However, we didn't know about any of this until those active regions rotated around to our view. In the late 1900s, scientists came up with a technique called helioseismology to analyze sound waves influenced by such activity as they echoed through the Sun.

Astronomers have long been fascinated by the powerful jets emanating from black holes. These jets result from gas and dust being pulled into the black hole's gravity well, forming an accretion disk that is accelerated to velocities approaching the speed of light. While most of this material slowly accretes onto the black hole's event horizon, some will spiral away from the poles, creating powerful jets that can be seen many light-years away.

In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is our best bet for “living off the land” for a future Martian base, but tracking down those resources is no easy task. As of now, we have two options - send a rover to a specific location to scout it, or monitor it from orbit. Since rovers are expensive, and there are an absolute ton of sites that we would eventually want to scout, doing so from orbit would seem a better option. But monitoring for temperature, one of the most important orbital scans we can do, is notoriously blurry - based in part on the fact that most of the main instruments used to collect data on it are a few decades old. Now, a paper from researchers at Curtin University in Australia presented at the International Astronautical Congress meeting last September uses a fancy AI-like algorithm to improve that thermal resolution, and, as a result, provided a much better map to some of the most important resources we’ll be looking for.

The NASA planet-hunting satellites Kepler and TESS scanned the skies autonomously, searching for the tiny dips in light caused by exoplanets transiting in front of their stars. Their diligent observations uncovered more than 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. As scientists examined the types of planets the spacecraft found, they discovered some patterns that need explanations.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a city on Mars is likely going to take even longer to build than Rome itself. At the time of the first Martian colonists, it is likely that the entirety of humanity’s industrial capacity, including the infrastructure to make critical materials like metals, will be based in the Earth-Moon system. While Mars has some iron, it also lacks many of the materials needed to make advanced materials, like boron and molybdenum. To alleviate that resource bottleneck, a new study, available in pre-print on arXiv and led by Serena Suriano and a team of researchers, offers a workaround that seems obvious in theory but difficult in practice - mine the necessary material from Main Belt asteroids.

The Pandora exoplanet mission returns its first engineering images from space.

On Jan. 7th, 2026, the Subaru Telescope joined many of the world's observatories and space telescopes in observing the 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object (ISO) detected in our Solar System. This interstellar comet had just completed its closest approach to the Sun, which produced more intense outgassing. By observing the light from 3I/ATLAS' coma, astronomers were able to examine the chemical composition of the comet's interior and produce estimates of the ratio of carbon dioxide to water.

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.