Space News & Blog Articles

Turn on a tap and watch the water hit the sink basin. Right where it lands, the water is fast and thin. Then, just a centimetre or two out, it suddenly slows and thickens. That abrupt transition is called a hydraulic jump. It happens in an instant, it's entirely unremarkable, and it's the same process driving the largest atmospheric wave ever found in the Solar System and that wave is on Venus.

When scientists at the Green Bank Observatory shared a fuzzy image of a few scattered pixels with their colleagues, the reaction wasn't exactly awe. Then one of them said it quietly: "There are four people in those pixels."

You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. You’re chilling for several hours and eventually notice the water hasn’t touched you. You remember over-hearing some otherworldly fellows who briefly landed and discussed the landscape didn’t look well formed, so they left.

As Earth's climate warms, glaciers are retreating. This is evident all around the world. Glacial retreat isn't always a peaceful process and can significantly effect the landscape. Our fleet of Earth-observing satellites bears witness to these changes.

NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter reveals a planet with an interior structure that is much more complex than ever previously thought. At least that’s the latest word from several of Juno’s scientific team members who were on hand at a press conference at the European Geosciences Union’s 2026 General Assembly last week in Vienna.

Trying to solve quantum gravity is frustrating. We have made tremendous progress in quantum theory, but it seems that every time we find a new quantum technique, there's a reason it doesn't quite work with gravity. Take, for example, the case of quantum fluctuations and renormalization.

If you’ve ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you’ve probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has been a “cheat sheet” for stellar astrophysics for over a century. But the universe is full of more than just stars, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Gabriel Steward and Matthew Hedman of the University of Idaho, attempts to do for the density and mass of all objects what the HR diagram did for the lifecycle of stars - provide a coherent, visual map to represent them.

What made Earth the planet that life chose? It's a question scientists have wrestled with for decades, and the answers are rarely simple. Distance from the Sun matters, liquid water matters and a magnetic field that deflects lethal radiation matters. But a new study published in the journal Terra Nova adds something unexpected to that list…. the slow, geological rise of the continents themselves, and a semi precious gemstone most people know from jewellery shops.

What are the little red dots? It's the question that has quietly obsessed astronomers since the James Webb Space Telescope first opened its eyes and started revealing the early universe in unprecedented detail. Hundreds of tiny, faint, reddish objects all sitting some 12 billion light years away, meaning we see them as they existed when the universe was barely a toddler. They showed up almost immediately and nobody could agree on what they were. Now, one maverick object hiding in a decade old data archive might finally have cracked it.

On a February morning in 2013, a rock the size of a house appeared without warning in the skies above Russia. The scary thing is that nobody saw it coming.

Decades of research shows that Earth was once entirely or almost entirely frozen. The episode is known as Snowball Earth, and though its occurrence is widely accepted, many of its details remain hypothetical. Snowball Earth took place in Earth's Cryogenian Period, which spanned from about 720–635 million years ago during the Neoproterozoic Era.

Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, is also the Solar System's largest satellite, even larger than the planet Mercury. It is also the only celestial body aside from Earth (and the gas giants) to have an intrinsic magnetic field. As if this didn't make the icy body interesting enough, scientists also predict that it has a massive interior ocean with more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. At present, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is in transit to Ganymede to explore it for signs of habitability.

Life on Earth depends on organic chemicals—the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur—often referred to as CHNOPS. These elements enable life and make up about 98% of all living matter. But they don't do it alone. Biochemical activity inside of cells also requires small amounts of metals. These metals enable critical biochemical reactions.

Welcome back to our ongoing series, A Brief-ish History of SETI, where we examine the ideas and milestones that have come to define the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In Part I, we looked at the purpose and motivations for this field of study, some of the earliest experiments, and how they reflected a growing sense of curiosity about the cosmos and our place in it. In Part II, we examined the first SETI survey (Project Ozma) and its enduring legacy.

The search for Earth 2.0 has begun in earnest. But there’s a huge variety of exoplanets out there, so narrowing down the search to focus valuable telescope time on only the best candidates is critical. One variable of a planet that will have a huge impact on its habitability is its size. A new paper, now available in pre-print on arXiv, by researchers at the University of California Riverside, looks into the impact of a planet’s size on one of its more critical features for habitability - whether it holds onto an atmosphere - and determines that slightly smaller than Earth is likely the smallest a planet can be and still be viable for life to develop.

Step outside on a clear night almost anywhere in Britain and look up. For roughly a third of the global population, the Milky Way is simply gone, permanently bleached out by the orange glow of our own making. But light pollution is no longer just an astronomer's complaint, it has become a public health crisis, an ecological emergency, and a regulatory blind spot all at once.

The venerable Hubble Space Telescope has taken some truly stellar (no pun!) images over its many years of dedicated service. A new image recently released by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows the spiral galaxy NGC 3137 in all its glittering glory. Located about 53 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Antlia, NGC 3137 offers astronomers an excellent opportunity to study the life cycle of stars in a galaxy similar to our own.

There’s a specific sequence in the anime Dragonball Z that for some reason has stuck in my head for over two decades. Goku, the main character of the show, travels to King Kai’s planet and can barely stand up when he arrives because the planet’s gravity is 10 times stronger than Earth’s. Over time, he trains in this gravity, and his body begins to adapt to it. Eventually, after leaving the planet, he’s stronger, faster, and more agile than he ever was before. But would that really happen if you were exposed to 10G over a long period of time? Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) decided to test that idea and report their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But instead of using anime characters, they used fruit flies as their test subjects.

They are known as "buckyballs," ball-shaped molecules that resemble a hollow sphere, and are found in space. These strange customers were first observed by Professor Jan Cami and a team from Western University in 2010 using the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST). And now, more than 15 years later, Cami and his colleagues have detected buckyballs again using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The rich data they retrieved from Webb's observations have pointed to the origin of these strange cosmic molecules.

You’re a long-necked Titanosaurs grazing the plains and chomping away on tree leaves about 100 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous in what would eventually become a future Starbucks location. You look up at the night sky and notice a bright dot that seems slightly larger and brighter than usual since you’ve seen it a bunch. You grunt at your cousin (official dinosaur language) asking if he notices it, too. Your cousin grunts back that it does seem bigger and brighter and wonders what’s up.

Welcome back to A Brief-ish History of SETI, where we examine the major milestones and foundational principles that have defined the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In part I, we examined the purpose and motivations behind this field of study, as well as how Fermi's big question ("Where is everybody?") helped define the challenges it entails. We also looked at some of the earliest experiments and how they reflected a growing sense of curiosity about the cosmos and our place in it.