Space News & Blog Articles

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.

AI faces daily criticism from people worried about its ill-effects. But the type of AI that draws this ire are Large Language Models (LLMs). There are other types of AI with specialized functions that don't make it onto the front pages. Combing through vast troves of astronomical data is a perfect task for AI that is unlikely to be replicated by human minds.

Dark matter doesn't emit light, it doesn't absorb light and it doesn't even block it, passing through ordinary matter like a ghost through walls (I’m very proud of that sentence.) Yet this invisible substance makes up roughly 85% of all matter in the universe, and its gravitational influence has shaped everything from galaxy clusters millions of light years across down to the rocky planet beneath our feet.

When Halley's Comet blazed across English skies in April 1066, an elderly Benedictine monk named Eilmer watched from Malmesbury Abbey with growing recognition. "You've come, have you?" he reportedly said, crouching in terror at the glowing apparition. "You've come, you source of tears to many mothers." But Eilmer's words carried weight beyond mere dread, he realised he had seen this exact comet before, during its previous appearance in 989 when he was just a young man.

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope has been watching one of the most extreme neighbourhoods in our Galaxy, and it's just caught something extraordinary happening there. Astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. These aren't your average stellar flares, we're talking about energy releases so intense they make our Sun's most dramatic outbursts look like flickering candles.

When astronomers look out into the cosmos, they see supermassive black holes (SMBH) in two different states. In one state, they're dormant. They're actively accreting only a tiny amount of matter and emit only faint, weak radiation. In the other, they're more actively accreting matter and emitting extremely powerful radiation. These are normally called active galactic nuclei (AGN).

Astronomers have puzzled over Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) since the Lorimer Burst (the first confirmed FRB) was detected in 2007. These rapid bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies last between milliseconds and a few seconds and release as much energy as the Sun produces in days. Whereas most FRBs are one-off events, astronomers have found some rare cases where FRBs were repeating in nature. For years, scientists have speculated as to what causes these events, with theories ranging from neutron stars and black holes to extraterrestrial communications.