Space News & Blog Articles

A close flyby past the Red Planet on Friday will send NASA’s Psyche mission on its way towards its final destination.

Brown dwarfs are notoriously difficult to find. These “failed stars” aren’t big enough to sustain nuclear fusion, and therefore aren’t as bright as more traditional main sequence stars. In fact, they’re nearly invisible in optical light, and faintly visible in infrared. But thanks to dozens of citizen scientists combing through archival infrared datasets from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and a paper published in the Astronomical Journal detailing their work, we now have an additional set of over 3,000 candidate new brown dwarfs in our stellar neighborhood, more than doubling the total number found so far.

The JWST has shown us that even very ancient galaxies have supermassive black holes in their centers, a finding that clashes with our understanding of the early Universe and how galaxies and black holes grow. Though not all of the ancient galaxies the telescope has observed appear to have SMBH, most do. This suggests a clear link between SMBH and galaxy evolution, but the exact nature of that link has so far eluded astrophysicists.

Earth, the only life-hosting world we know of, contains signs of that life in its atmosphere. Oxygen/ozone is most convincing, because without being replenished by life, it would disappear quickly. Methane is another one, because it's produces by methanogens. Nitrous oxide is another, because it's produced by microbes and has no known significant source of abiotic production.

Welcome back to a Brief-ish History of SETI! In our previous installments, we examined the earliest attempts to find extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) beyond Earth, as well as one of the most important philosophical underpinnings (Fermi's Paradox). We also looked at the first true example of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) experiment (Project Ozma) and the Drake Equation, followed by the first proposed searches for megastructures (Dyson Spheres) and classification schemes for ETIs (the Kardashev Scale).

Every now and then, a star dies in the most spectacular way imaginable. It detonates and in a matter of seconds, it outshines its entire host galaxy before fading back into darkness over the following weeks. These explosions, known as Type Ia supernovae, are some of the most violent events in the universe. They're also one of astronomy's most powerful measuring tools.

In our own Solar System, the gas giants sit far from the Sun; Jupiter is five times further out than Earth, Saturn nearly ten. For a long time, astronomers assumed that was simply how planetary systems worked. Then we started finding planets around other stars, and some of them broke every rule. Hot Jupiters are gas giants similar in size to Jupiter but orbiting their stars at a fraction of the distance, some completing a full orbit in just a few days. Temperatures on their surfaces can reach thousands of degrees. They are exotic, extreme, and until recently, deeply puzzling.

When a massive star reaches the end of its life, it collapses. The cessation of the outward pushing force from fusion means gravity finally wins and the collapse begins. If it's heavy enough, nothing can stop that collapse, not pressure, not heat, not any force in nature. The result is a black hole, a point of infinite density wrapped in a boundary from which not even light escapes. It's one of the most dramatic endings in the universe. But for the biggest black holes, that story turns out to be wrong. Or at least incomplete.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.