Space News & Blog Articles

The light, rare element boron, better known as the primary component of borax, a longtime household cleaner, was almost mined to exhaustion in parts of the old American West. But boron could arguably be an unsung hero in cosmic astrobiology, although it's still not listed as one of the key elements needed for the onset of life.

Observations show that Jupiter's icy moon Europa has a thick icy shell covering a warm ocean. The ocean is chemically-rich, and may have all the essential ingredients for life. That's why Europa is such a juicy target in the search for life, and why NASA's Europa Clipper and the ESA's JUICE are on their way to examine the moon in greater detail.

We see stars as the main constituent of galaxies. They're the visible part, and they're what announce a galaxy's presence. But a galaxy's gas supply is its lifeblood, and tracing the gas as it flows in and through a galaxy reveals its inner workings.

The search for life-supporting worlds in the Solar System includes the Jovian moon Europa. Yes, it's an iceberg of a world, but underneath its frozen exterior lies a deep, salty ocean and a nickel-iron core. It's heated by tidal flexing, and that puts pressure on the interior ocean, sending water and salts to the surface. As things turn out, there's also evidence of ammonia-bearing compounds on the surface. All these things combine to provide a fascinating look at Europa's geology and potential as a haven for life.

The chemical is known as thiepine, or 2,5-cyclohexadiene-1-thione (C₆H₆S), a ring-shaped sulfur-bearing hydrocarbon produced in biochemical reactions. When examining the molecular cloud G+0.693–0.027, a star-forming region about 27,000 light-years from Earth near the center of the Milky Way, astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and the CSIC-INTA Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) detected this complex molecule in space for the first time. This detection represents the largest sulfur-bearing molecule ever detected beyond Earth, with significant implications for the study of the cosmic origins of life.

When the rover now named Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in early 2021, scientists already knew they had picked an interesting place to scope out. From space, they could see what looked like a bathtub ring around the crater, indicating there could once have been water there. But there was some debate about what exactly that meant, and it’s taken almost five years to settle it. A new paper from PhD student Alex Jones at Imperial College London and his co-authors has definitively settled the debate on the source of that feature - part of it was once a beach.

Deep space is far away. Really far away, and getting there quickly with conventional chemical rockets is like trying to cross an ocean in a rowing boat, technically possible but painfully slow and severely limited in what you can carry. NASA has just taken a major step toward changing that equation entirely.

WOH G64 has never been an ordinary star. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, this red supergiant holds multiple records as the most luminous, coolest, and dustiest of its kind in that galaxy. These stellar beasts live fast and die young, ending their brief lives in catastrophic supernova explosions that can briefly outshine entire galaxies.

"How did life begin?" That question has been pondered by philosophers, scholars, and scientists since time immemorial. In the modern age, it has been generally assumed that the building blocks of life as we know it - amino acids, DNA, and RNA - came together spontaneously to form the first proteins billions of years ago. However, all attempts to recreate this chemical reaction ("abiogenesis") in the laboratory have yielded null results. Nevertheless, it has been widely accepted that this event occurred on Earth, most likely in its early oceans.

Solar flares are one of the most closely watched processes in solar physics. Partly that’s because they can prove hazardous both to life and equipment around Earth, and in extreme cases even on it. But also, it’s because of how interestingly complex they are. A new paper from Pradeep Chitta of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and his co-authors, available in the latest edition of Astronomy & Astrophysics, uses data collected by ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft to watch the formation process of a massive solar flare. They discovered the traditional model used to describe how solar flares form isn’t accurate, and they are better thought of as being caused by miniaturized “magnetic avalanches.”

It’s 2050 and you’re living on Venus. This might come as a surprise due to the planet’s crushing surface pressures (~92 times of Earth) and searing surface temperatures (~465 degrees Celsius/870 degrees Fahrenheit), which is equivalent to ~900 meters (3,000 feet) underwater and hot enough to melt lead, respectively. But you’re not living on the surface. Instead, you’re safe and sound inside a lava tube habitat scanning data from the latest orbiter images while sipping on some habitat-made espresso.

Photographing a black hole has presented one of the most unique challenges in astronomy, you can't simply point a telescope at one and snap a picture. Black holes are so distant and compact that capturing their details requires multiple radio telescopes scattered across the globe to work together as one gigantic instrument. The catch? They all need to observe at precisely the same moment, with their signals perfectly aligned.

Despite the US administration's threats to cancel the nearly complete Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, it's on track to launch this year or next. When it's launched and sent toward its orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 point, it'll carry two instruments and be ready to tackle three new astronomical surveys. One of them is the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey (GBTDS).

NASA's Kepler exoplanet-hunting space telescope ended its mission in 2018, but its contribution to exoplanet science is ongoing. It generated a huge dataset, one that astronomers are still working through. Researchers found a new candidate exoplanet in Kepler's data named HD 137010 b that's orbiting a Sun-similar star nearly 150 light-years away. The new exoplanet is only slightly larger than Earth, and its orbit is about as long as Earth's.

When Edwin Hubble revealed in the 1920s that distant galaxies were retreating from us in all directions, he laid the foundation for our understanding of the expansion of the universe. But even then, the picture wasn't quite clean. Some nearby galaxies, like Andromeda, were moving toward us rather than away, exactly what you'd expect from gravity between neighboring galaxies.

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile offers some of the clearest, darkest skies on Earth. High altitude, minimal cloud cover, and distance from major cities combine to create conditions astronomers dream about. It's why the European Southern Observatory chose Paranal for its Very Large Telescope array and the four 8.2 meter instruments that can work individually or combine their light to achieve staggering resolution.

From 2013 to 2019, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) carried out a deep, wide-area survey of the sky in a collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae, and measure the rate at which the cosmos is expanding. For more than a century, scientists have been trying to constrain this cosmological phenomenon - the Hubble-Lemaitre Constant - named in honor of astronomers Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaitre (who independently confirmed that the Universe is expanding in the early 20th century).

Jupiter’s atmosphere and clouds have mesmerized stargazers for centuries, as their multi-colored, swirling layers can easily be viewed from powerful telescopes on Earth. However, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has upped the ante regarding our understanding of Jupiter’s atmospheric features, having revealed them in breathtaking detail. This includes images of massive lightning storms, clouds swallowing clouds, polar vortices, and powerful jet streams. Yet, despite its beauty and wonder, scientists are still puzzled about the processes occurring deep inside Jupiter’s atmosphere that result in these incredible features.

The Lambda Cold Dark Matter (Lambda CDM) model is the current cosmological model and explains much of what we see in the cosmos. One of Lambda CDM's core features is the prediction that structure grows hierarchically from the bottom up. It begins with dark matter density fluctuations, then dwarf galaxies form, then those dwarfs merge to form more massive galaxies, which merge into still larger galaxies. Eventually, there are galaxy clusters.

For decades, Mercury has carried the reputation of being a dead, dry planet whose geological story ended long ago. Its cratered surface, baked by the Sun and seemingly frozen in time, appeared to tell a tale of ancient violence followed by billions of years of silence. That story just got considerably more interesting.

BepiColombo is slowly uncovering more and more fun facts about Mercury as it continues its preliminary mission. One of the more interesting things found so far is a magnetic “chorus” that appears similar to a phenomenon found in Earth’s much larger magnetic field. A new paper in Nature Communications from the researchers responsible for the probe’s Mio instrument that is studying Mercury’s magnetic field describes what could be thought of as a form of magnetic birdsong.