Space News & Blog Articles

Astrobiology can be split into two very distinct fields. There’s the field that astronomers are likely more familiar with, involving large telescopes, exoplanets, and spectroscopic signals that are pored over to debate whether they show signs of life. But there is another camp, collective known as the Origins researchers that focus on developing a scientific understanding of how life originally developed on Earth. A new paper from Cole Mathis at Arizona State and Harrison B. Smith at the Institute of Science in Tokyo suggests a new path forward to tackling those challenges - set them up as competitions and let a hefty prize motivate scientific teams and individuals to pursue them.

Stars don’t form out of nothing, but tracking the gas and dust that do eventually form stars is hard. They float around the galaxy at almost absolute zero, emitting essentially no light, and generally making life difficult for astronomers. But, part of how they make life difficult is actually the key to studying them - they have “absorption lines” that detail what kind of material the light is passing through on its way to Earth. A new paper from Harvey Liszt of America’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Maryvonne Gerin of the Sorbonne details how tracking those absorption lines via radio astronomy can trace the “dark neutral medium” of interstellar gas throughout the galaxy.

Looking at the prospects for seeing the latest interstellar visitor to our solar system for yourself.

There's very little scientific debate about the existence of surface water on Mars in its past. The evidence at this point is overwhelming. Orbiter images clearly show river channels and deltas, and rovers have found ample minerals that only form in the presence of water. Now the scientific debate has moved on. Scientists are trying to learn the extent of Martian surface water, both on the planet's surface and through time.

Though our Solar System and the movement of its planets appears relatively sedate, there are many things that could upset it. Anything with enough mass that got close enough could disrupt planetary orbits. This includes primordial black holes (PBH).

There was a total solar eclipse in the UK back in 1999. I travelled down to Cornwall, a loooooong 8 hour car drive and quite typically for UK, it was cloud. For me, I either need to wait until 2090 when I will be the ripe old age of 117 or travel abroad. Even if I had seen it, I would have been able to enjoy the spectacle for just over 2 minutes! Imagine though, experiencing a total solar eclipse that lasts 48 minutes instead of the usual four minutes or so that we see on Earth. A UK led space mission plans to make this possible by creating artificial solar eclipses in space, revolutionising how we study our nearest star and potentially saving decades of waiting for natural eclipses.

Protoplanetary disks made of gas and dust form around young stars, and this is where planets from. These disks don't last forever. Eventually, the star's energetic output dissipates the disk through photoevaporation, the material gets taken up in planets, and the planet-forming process ceases.

For decades, astronomers have yearned for the day when they could observe the period known as "Cosmic Dawn." This period, which took place roughly 50 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, is when the first galaxies in the Universe formed. Observing these galaxies is crucial to understanding cosmic evolution and the forces that govern the Universe (e.g., Dark Matter, Dark Energy, etc.) Thanks to next-generation observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers are starting to get their first look behind the veil.

On July 11, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope finished its commissioning and commenced science operations. In the three years since, the powerful infrared space telescope has delivered on its promise. It's looked back in time and surprised us with the galaxies it found. It's directly-imaged exoplanets and studied the atmospheres of others. Among this and all of its other science, it's delivered a stream of stunning images.

When it is deployed in 2027, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide new insights into the cosmos. As the successor to the venerable Hubble mission, it will rely on a 2.4 m (7.9 ft) wide primary mirror and a field of view 100 times greater than its predecessor. This next-generation observatory will join the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), using its high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments to view objects too faint, cool, or distant for other telescopes to observe. The mission is currently in the System Assembly, Integration and Test, and Launch phase of development at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

A remarkable 2.35 billion year old meteorite found in Africa in 2023 has opened a new window into the Moon's volcanic history, filling a gap in our understanding of how Earth's closest neighbour evolved over billions of years.

In our homes, dust is a nuisance. In space, it's a basic material from which stars, planets, and living things are made. Understanding where cosmic dust comes from is a ground-level question in astronomy, and researchers working with the JWST have uncovered one source: Wolf-Rayet stars.

Astronauts on future missions won't be surviving on freeze-dried meals and protein bars. Instead, they might be harvesting fresh rice from compact plants just 10 centimetres tall, engineered specifically for life beyond Earth. The revolutionary ‘Moon Rice’ project is developing the perfect crop for sustained space habitation, combining cutting edge genetics with the practical needs of deep space exploration.

Venus has always seemed like the last place you'd expect to find life. With surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and crushing atmospheric pressure, our neighboring planet appears utterly hostile. But high in its clouds, where conditions are surprisingly Earth-like, scientists have discovered something extraordinary: mysterious gases that shouldn't exist, unless something is alive up there….perhaps!

Names are a strange thing in astronomy. Sometimes scientists come up with grandiose, simple name, like the Extremely Large Telescope. Other times, they come up with unique sounding names, like quasars. And sometimes they come up with names that, while descriptive in some sense, are completely misleading in others. That is the case for Little Red Dots (LRD) - active galactic nuclei in the early universe that show up as a little red dot in the images captured by whatever telescope found them. However, they actually represent supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of times the size of our Sun. A new paper from Federica Loiacono and her colleagues at Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy describes one of these behemoths they found with the James Webb Space Telescope at a period of the early universe, about 11 billion years ago, known as the “cosmic noon”.

We live in an exciting time of technological innovation and breakthroughs in astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics. This is similarly true for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which seeks to leverage advances in instrumentation and computing to find evidence of "technosignatures" in the Universe. While the scope has expanded considerably since Cornell Professor Frank Drake and colleagues conducted the first SETI experiment over sixty years ago (Project Ozma), the vast majority have consisted of listening to space for signs of possible radio transmissions.

Was there once life on Mars? That question has been the subject of ongoing exploration and research for more than half a century, and is closely tied to questions about how and when life emerged on Earth. At present, there are six active missions exploring the Red Planet for possible evidence of past life (and possibly present), including NASA's Perseverance rover, the Curiosity rover, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the UAE's Hope orbiter, the ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), and China's Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover. In the near future, they will be joined by Tianwen-3, a sample-return mission consisting of two spacecraft.

Some exoplanets in their stars' habitable zones may be distinctly uninhabitable due to solar flaring. Red dwarfs are known for powerful flaring, and since they're dim and their habitable zones are close to the star, these flares could sterilize any planets and render them totally uninhabitable. But red dwarfs aren't the only stars that flare; most do, including our Sun.

The question of how life began has captivated humanity for millennia. Now, a team of scientists are preparing to use NASA's upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) to test different theories about life's origins by studying planets beyond our Solar System.

Imagine a space telescope with a mirror stretching 50 meters across! That’s larger than the width of a UK soccer field and nearly eight times wider than the James Webb Space Telescope. Now imagine that this enormous mirror is made not of precisely manufactured glass segments, but of liquid floating in space. This might sound like science fiction but it's the cutting edge concept behind the Fluidic Telescope (FLUTE), a joint NASA-Technion project that could revolutionise how we explore the universe.

Every time you take off from Heathrow, land at JFK, or pass through any major airport, you might be inadvertently announcing humanity's existence to alien civilizations up to 200 light years away. New research reveals that the radar systems keeping our skies safe are simultaneously broadcasting powerful signals deep into space, signals that could serve as cosmic adverts of our very existence.