Space News & Blog Articles

Reading the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson brings the benefits and pitfalls of efforts to terraform the Red Planet into sharp relief. Since the 1970s, when Carl Sagan first suggested the possibility that we could make Mars more Earth-like, that process has been a staple of science fiction. But there’s always been a significant amount of humanity that thinks we shouldn’t. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago and his co-authors skirts around the ethical and moral questions of whether we should and tries to take a long hard look at whether we can.

Despite all we've learned about star formation, the process is still riven with mystery. Our prying telescopic eyes struggle to pierce the thick gaseous regions that give birth to stars. Progress has been steady, though, and we can thank the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) for some of it.

NASA's Artemis II mission has completed its pass of the far side of the Moon, establishing a new distance record for a crewed spaceflight, over 400,000 km (250,000 mi) from Earth. And in the process, its four-person crew is capturing images of lunar regions no human has ever seen! Fortunately for the rest of us, they are beaming these images home and providing a treasure trove of scientific data in the process. The images, released on Tuesday, were captured by the crew on April 6th during their seven-hour flyby of the far side of the Moon.

Space is getting crowded - and not just with satellites, but with the massive amounts of data they’re generating. The amount of information being generated and passed through orbit is exploding. From high-resolution Earth observation images to global maritime monitoring, it’s also become a critical link in our infrastructure. But there’s another space this growing crowd of satellites is dependent on that is also filling up fast - the radio frequency spectrum. If we want to keep expanding our orbital infrastructure, we need to rethink how we move data around. On March 30, 2026, the European Space Agency (ESA) supported a series of eight CubeSats and one specialized payload on SpaceX’s Transporter-16 rideshare mission with the overarching goals of testing high-throughput laser communication, inter-satellite networking, and in-orbit artificial intelligence processing to make space data transfer faster, more secure, and vastly more efficient.

The nebular hypothesis states that stars and the planets that orbit them form from the same reservoir of material, called a solar nebula. It's the most commonly accepted explanation for how solar systems form. But despite its ability to explain many things about solar system formation, there are some outstanding questions.

Jupiter and Saturn, the two largest planets in the Solar System, are known for their large and varied systems of moons. At present count, Jupiter has more than 100 moons, while Saturn has more than double that, with over 280 known satellites. However, Jupiter's system of satellites includes four large moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto - and this system contains the largest moon in the Solar System (Ganymede). Meanwhile, Saturn's system of satellites is dominated by one large moon (Titan), the second largest in the Solar System.

Ten undergraduate students from the University of Chicago made an astounding discovery using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). As part of their "Field Course in Astrophysics," they located one of the oldest stars in the Universe living in the Milky Way. The star, SDSS J0715-7334, is a red giant with 29 times as much mass as our Sun, located 79,256 light-years away. But here's where things truly get interesting: according to their findings, this star wasn't born in the Milky Way, but migrated here from another galaxy. The team is led by Professor Alex Ji, the deputy Project Scientist for SDSS-V, and graduate teaching assistants Hillary Andales and Pierre Thibodeaux.

On March 25, 1938, a 31-year-old physicist named Ettore Majorana bought a ticket for a ferry from Palermo to Naples. That night, before boarding, he sent a letter to Antonio Carrelli, director of the Naples Physics Institute:

Look up at a full Moon on a clear night and you are staring at a face that has been punched, gouged, and battered for four billion years. Those dark patches are vast basins blasted open by impacts so colossal they reshaped a world. The lighter highlands are pocked and pitted, crater upon crater, each one a frozen record of a collision that happened long before humans walked the Earth. Unlike our own planet, the Moon has no weather to smooth things over, no rivers to fill the hollows and no wind to soften the edges. What hits it, stays.

How does something come from nothing? It is perhaps the most profound question in all of science and one we still cannot fully answer. How did a barren, lifeless planet transform itself, over billions of years, into a world teeming with life? Where did it actually begin?

Every electronic device you have ever owned shares a critical weakness. Push it past roughly 200 degrees Celsius and it begins to fail. Your phone, your car's computer, the satellites orbiting above your head right now, all of them have the same thermal ceiling baked into their design. For decades, that ceiling has been one of the most stubborn walls in engineering. Now, a team at the University of Southern California may just have broken through it.

When India's Chandrayaan-1 orbiter released the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) into the Shackleton crater on the Moon, they confirmed something scientists had speculated about for decades. The Moon, an airless and vacuum-desiccated body, has abundant sources of water ice around its poles! Located in the many craters that litter the region, these permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) prevent this water from being exposed to sunlight, which would cause it to sublimate and be lost into space.

Space is full of objects that push the boundaries of imagination, but few do it quite as effectively as a black hole. At its simplest, a black hole is a region of space where gravity has become so overwhelmingly powerful that nothing, no matter, no light, nothing can escape its grip. They form when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse catastrophically inward, crushing an enormous amount of mass into an extraordinarily small space. The result is an object so dense that it warps the very fabric of space and time around it.

We have been searching for signals from other civilisations for over sixty years. Radio telescopes on Earth have swept the sky, listened patiently, and found nothing but silence. It is a search that demands extraordinary sensitivity and that is the problem, Earth and our very existence itself is getting in the way.

Even a modest telescope reveals the breathtaking Saturnian ring system that has captivated astronomers for four centuries, a world so alien in its beauty that first time observers often struggle to believe what they are seeing is real. But Saturn's rings are just the beginning. Beneath that iconic silhouette lies a planet of extraordinary extremes, a gas giant eleven times wider than Earth, spinning so fast that a single day lasts barely ten hours, and wrapped in a magnetic field so powerful it dominates a region of space millions of kilometres in every direction.

An ultra-hot Jupiter exoplanet orbiting a young A-type star gave scientists using the Gemini South telescope a look at how both a star and its hot planet can have similar chemical compositions. The team, led by Arizona State University graduate student Jorge Antonio Sanchez, took spectra of the planet, called WASP-189b, using the Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph instrument on loan from McDonald Observatory in Texas. The observations measured the abundance of magnesium compared to silicon in the hot planet's atmosphere and allowed the team to compare it to the makeup of its parent star.

(This is Part 3 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1 and Part 2.)

(This is Part 2 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1 first.)

On August 19, 2022, solar astronomers using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on the Hawaiian island of Maui caught the fading remnants of a C-class solar flare. Their observations showed something unusual: very strong spectral fingerprints of calcium II H and hydrogen-epsilon lines. It was the first time these two light signatures were seen in great detail during the decline of a solar flare. According to computer models, those lines were stronger than expected and play a not well-understood role in how flares heat the solar atmosphere where they occur. The same models can be used to study flares in other stars, as well.

The James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) picture of the month shows Tau 042021 (left) and Oph 163131 (right), two protoplanetary disks located about 450 and 480 light-years from Earth in the constellations Taurus and Ophiuchus (respectively). These disks are composed of material left over from the formation of new stars, which coalesce into planetesimals that can eventually form a planetary system. The gas that remains is blown away by solar radiation while smaller objects (asteroids and iceteroids) settle into belts or follow the orbit of planets.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering have reached a milestone with the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment. Located deep underground at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Laboratory (SNOLAB) in Canada, the world's deepest underground laboratory, this experiment is designed to detect the Universe's unseen mass, aka. Dark Matter. The SuperCDMS team recently announced that they had successfully cooled the experiment to its operational temperature, hundreds of times colder than outer space.