Space News & Blog Articles

You’re in the lab analyzing Martian regolith samples within your cozy Mars habitat serving on fifth human mission to Mars. The power within the habitat has been flowing flawlessly thanks to the MARS-MES (Mars Atmospheric Resource & Multimodal Energy System), including the general habitat lighting, science lab, sleeping quarters, exercise equipment, the virtual reality headsets the crew use for rest & relaxation, oxygen and fuel generation, and water. All this from converting the Martian atmosphere into workable electricity.

Imagine a mountain range many times larger than the entire Earth, floating in mid-air, held up by nothing you can see. It sounds like something from a fantasy novel but that is essentially what solar prominences are and for decades, scientists have struggled to explain how they exist at all.

If you have ever pushed your finger against the hole of a bicycle pump and felt the air grow warm as you compressed it, you already understand the physics at the heart of a new discovery about our own Galaxy. Because it turns out the Milky Way has a hot side and a cool side and the reason why comes down to exactly the same principle.

Where exactly is the edge of the Milky Way? That question is harder to answer than one might expect. Since we’re inside of the galaxy itself, it’s obviously hard to judge the “edge” to begin with. But it gets even more complicated when defining what the edge even is - the galaxy simply gets less dense the farther away from the center it goes. A new paper by researchers originally at the University of Malta thinks they have an answer though. The “edge” can be defined as the star-forming region, and in their paper, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, they very clearly show that “edge” to be between 11.28 and 12.15 kiloparsecs (or about 40,000 light years) from the center.

The Sombrero Galaxy is so picture perfect it looks like a painting. It sits in space as if its hung on a gallery wall. It's an iconic deep space object, and a popular target for amateur and professional astronomers alike.

NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat - fungi.

Space travel has taught us valuable lessons for living and working in outer space, specifically regarding how microgravity (often mistakenly called zero-gravity) impacts the human body during short- and long-term spaceflight. This includes decreased muscle and bone mass, fluid shifts, reduced heart rate, psychological health, compromised immune system, and radiation exposure. But with agencies like NASA aspiring to build a lunar base and establish a long-term presence on the Moon, and eventually Mars, how could space travel impact potentially having babies in space?

We don't know for sure how many dwarf galaxies are attached to the Milky Way because they're dim and hard to see. There's at least 50 of them, and astronomers keep finding more. Among the dwarf galaxies are the ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, the smallest and least bright of them all.

A team of scientists at the University of Virginia is using data from an instrument in Arizona to study cosmic structure and the result is the largest 3D map of the Universe ever created. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) sits on a telescope high above the Sonoran Desert, and is one of the tools of choice to get a handle on the mystery of dark energy by charting the positions of galaxies and other objects.

I watched Armageddon again fairly recently with Bruce Willis, oil drillers in space and an asteroid the size of Texas bearing down on Earth. Buried beneath the Hollywood chaos is a genuinely interesting question, what exactly could we do with an asteroid if we got our hands on one? As it turns out, the answer has nothing to do with blowing it up, sorry Bruce but everything to do with building a new world.

Finding planets used to be a painstaking business. Astronomers would fix their gaze on a handful of carefully chosen stars, watch and wait, and hope to catch the faint dip in starlight that signals a world passing in front of its host. It worked. It worked brilliantly. But it also meant we were fishing with a very small net in a very big ocean.

The farthest spacecraft from Earth, the Voyager 1 probe, has just shut down another instrument. The reason for this shutdown is that Voyager's mission team wants to conserve power, which the aging spacecraft is in short supply of. The instrument in question is the Low-energy Charged Particles (LECP) experiment, which the Voyager probes used to study solar wind and the interstellar medium (ISM). Basically, the decision was made to power down this instrument so humanity's first interstellar mission could continue exploring the Universe.

Antarctica, which harbors one of the harshest environments on Earth, would hardly seem to be a Valhalla for conventional astronomical observations. But for over a decade and a half, a French- and U.K.-led team of astronomers have been using a 40-cm telescope atop the high Antarctic plateau to look for transiting exoplanets.

The giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—have challenged our understanding of planetary formation and evolution. Specifically, their atmospheric formations and compositions have provided awe-inspiring images from spacecraft and given scientists key insights into the interior mechanisms of these massive worlds. But what about exoplanets? What can their atmospheres teach scientists about their formation, evolution, composition, and interior mechanisms? And how do longstanding exoplanet models stack up against the real thing?

Exoplanet science and the search for life beyond Earth continue to advance at break-neck speeds, with the number of confirmed exoplanets by NASA rapidly approaching 6,300, with 223 of those exoplanets being designated as terrestrial (rocky) exoplanets. With the promise of discovering an increasing number of Earth-sized exoplanets increasing every day, new telescopes from across the world have the opportunity to contribute to this incredible field.

A few years ago, I attempted to make an origami (paper folded) animal. Armed with a square of paper and what I can only describe as misplaced confidence, I managed to produce something that looked vaguely threatening rather than like a flapping crane. If I struggled that much with a single sheet of paper on a kitchen table, I can’t begin to imagine what it takes to apply the same principle to a satellite antenna destined for space. But that is exactly what a team of engineers in Japan has just pulled off and the results are really quite extraordinary.

Alpha Centauri is the nearest star system to our own, sitting just over four light years away and it’s fascinated astronomers and storytellers alike for generations. With conventional rockets, reaching it would take hundreds of thousands of years, even for the Orion spacecraft it would take around 100,000 years. But a team of researchers at Texas A&M University think they may have taken the first tentative step towards a technology that could get us there in just twenty years.

Scientists know that the behaviour of stars can dictate planetary habitability. Research shows that young stars emit powerful radiation that can strip planetary atmospheres away. And without an atmosphere, it's extremely unlikely that life could exist.

The planet Uranus is a weird place. Not only does it roll around the Sun on its side once every 84.3 Earth years, it also sports a spindly set of rings corralled in some places by strange little moons. Two of those rings, the μ (mu) and ν (nu) rings are incredibly faint, which makes them challenging to study.

Imagine holding a wine glass up to a candle (of course I had to pour a glass to try this.) The curved glass bends and distorts the flame, stretching it into arcs and rings of light. Now scale that up to the size of a galaxy, replace the glass with a trillion solar masses of matter, and the candle with an entire galaxy billions of light years away. What you get is one of the most beautiful and scientifically powerful phenomena in all of astronomy, a gravitational lens.

Imagine a world where the Sun never rises and never sets! It feels like that here in the UK sometimes with what feels like a never-ending cover of cloud. On one side of a world like this, a permanent blazing day whilst on the other, an endless frozen night. No seasons, no dawn, no dusk just an eternal, pitiless divide. For more than three quarters of the stars in our Galaxy, this is the reality facing their planets. And now, for the first time, astronomers have mapped the climate of two such worlds in extraordinary detail.