Space News & Blog Articles

What is the meaning of life? Even the best of us couldn’t hope to answer that question in a universe today article. But there are those who would try to “constrain” it, at least in terms of physics. A new paper from Pankaj Mehta of Boston University of Jané Kondev of Brandeis that was recently pre-published on arXiv looks at how the fundamental constants of physics might be applied to life as we know it - and even life as we don’t know it yet. Their idea doesn't necessarily give the answer to the ultimate question, but it does tie two seemingly disparate fields nicely together.

One of the JWST's most startling discoveries was that black holes were extremely massive in the early Universe, less than one billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery defied explanation, since astrophysicists thought that it would take much more time for black holes to accrete so much mass. An explanation for this discrepancy may lie in a massive black hole observed with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Asteroids are rocky remnants from the early Solar System, chunks of stone and metal that range in size from pebbles to mountains. Most of them orbit peacefully in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but occasionally gravitational forces can nudge them toward Earth. The largest asteroid, Ceres, is almost 1,000 km across, while the one that likely killed the dinosaurs was roughly 10 km wide. Even relatively small asteroids can cause tremendous damage for example, the space rock that created Arizona's famous Meteor Crater was only about 45 metres across, yet it generated a crater just over 1km wide.

Exoplanets aren’t the only objects floating around other stars - they likely have comets and asteroids as well. Even some of the exoplanets themselves will have “exomoons”, at least according to our current understanding of the physics of planetary formation. However, we have yet to find any of these other objects conclusively, though there has been some hint at the presence of exomoons in the last ten years. A new paper from astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), recently pre-published on arXiv, suggests a way in which we might be able to finally detect the presence of an exomoon - using a technique that is also commonly used to find exoplanets themselves.

Some NASA missions are designed for very specific tasks, but all of them help feed into our understanding of our universe, and in some cases our pale blue dot, work. A new mission to study one of the more esoteric parts of the atmosphere is scheduled to launch today, and over the next 2-3 years will monitor the outer reaches of our planet’s atmosphere.

Small fragments of rock can reveal a lot when they're analyzed with powerful laboratory instruments. New research into tiny fragments of the asteroid Ryugu sampled by JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission showed that water flowed through it more than one billion years after it formed. This new insight overturns the previous understanding that asteroids only experienced water activity in the very earliest stages of solar system formation.

How does spaceflight influence sarcopenia, which is a common age-related muscle decline, specifically for elder adults? This is what a recent study published in Stem Cell Reports hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how microgravity influences muscle cell function. This study has the potential to help scientists, mission planners, astronauts, and the public better understand the long-term health impacts of microgravity on muscle decline and the steps that can be taken to mitigate it.

Space agencies like NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), the China National Space Agency (CNSA), and others are working to return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era. Mounting missions beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO), something that has not happened in over 50 years, presents several major challenges. One of the biggest is that resupply missions take much longer to send to the Moon and require heavier launch vehicles. Whereas the International Space Station can be resupplied in a matter of hours by a Falcon 9, missions bound for the Moon take about three days and require a Space Launch System (SLS) or the Starship.

For over a century, scientists have known that the Universe is rapidly expanding. This phenomenon, named in honor of the astronomers who independently confirmed it (Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître), is known as the Hubble-Lemaitre Constant (or the Cosmological Constant). By the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope (designed to measure this constant) revealed that the rate at which the Universe was expanding was slower during the early Universe, which was in "tension" with measurements of recent cosmic epochs. This is what led to the "Hubble Tension" in astrophysics and cosmology, and the theory of Dark Energy (DE) as a possible means of explaining the discrepancy.

Scientists have long understood that Earth's geological evolution is influenced by extraterrestrial factors. This includes the distribution of water, volatiles, and minerals from asteroids and comets within the Solar System, precious metals from nearby supernovae, and perturbances from passing stars. Basically, galactic events over the past few billion years have left their mark on Earth. According to new research from Curtin University, the structural evolution of the Milky Way galaxy also had an effect on the evolution of Earth's crust, as evidenced by ancient crystals beneath the surface.

Let’s say you’ve picked the perfect spot for building a settlement on Mars. But this opens up some pretty nasty questions. Building…what? And building….with what? There are no trees to chop down to construct temporary structures. There are no campfires you can build to keep warm while you start. There’s no…I don’t know…WILD GAME to hunt to feed yourself.

On May 21st, 2010, the Akatsuki orbiter ("Dawn" in Japanese) launched from the Tanegashima Space Center atop a H-IIA Launch Vehicle, establishing orbit around Venus in December 2015. In so doing, Akatsuki became the first interplanetary mission launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). For the past eight years, this mission has been continuously monitoring Venus' atmosphere to monitor its weather patterns using four types of instruments: an ultraviolet and infrared cameras, a high-speed imager, a radio science suite, and an ultra-stable oscillator.

Let’s say you’re in charge of a Mars mission. Okay boss, where do we land? The total surface area of Mars is roughly equal to the land area of the Earth. Nobody’s ever built a settlement there (heck, nobody’s even GONE there). It’s free and wild and open territory. Yeah there might be some legal issues surrounding international laws and outer space treaties, but we’ll let the folks back home deal with that. You’re in charge, and you have to pick a spot to plant down roots.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 caused quite a stir last year when it was discovered and originally calculated to have a 3% chance of hitting Earth. Since then models have been refined and while it no longer has a chance of hitting Earth, it does have a 4% chance of hitting the Moon in December 2032. As that time gets closer, we’ll have a better idea of the probability, but engineers and scientists are also planning for what we would need to do in order to ensure it doesn’t hit our only natural satellite at all. A new paper from NASA and a bunch of other researchers details potential missions and timelines that could make sure the Moon isn’t pummeled with a decent-sized asteroid in less than a decade.

The Hubble Space Telescope is still working hard despite its age. Its UV observing capabilities make it particularly well suited to studying white dwarfs. The telescope has observed a particular white dwarf on two separate occasions over the years, as it has with dozens of white dwarfs. But this particular white dwarf, named WD 1647+375 and about 260 light years away, has shown astronomers something unusual.

The age of exoplanets began in 1992, when astronomers detected a pair of planets orbiting a pulsar. Then, in 1995, astronomers discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a main sequence star. As NASA's Kepler and TESS missions got going, the number of confirmed exoplanets continued to rise.

In February 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first detection of gravitational waves (GW). These ripples in space time, originally predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, are caused by the merger of massive objects (like neutron stars and black holes). Since then, gravitational wave observatories like LIGO, VIRGO, and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) have detected around 300 gravitational wave (GW) events.

A remote solar eclipse ends the final season of 2025.

Before we get to Mars, we’re going to have to practice. And develop radical leaps in technology, but also practice. A Mars mission will be utterly unlike anything attempted by humanity. We’re talking about a group of settlers, maybe as few as an initial team of four, traveling over a hundred million miles away from home to a literally alien environment, one that is so hostile to life that nothing lives there, and turn it into a home.

In November 2019, Japan's Hayabusa 2 mission departed the asteroid Ryugu after 1.5 years of observations. It had successfully collected a sample from the near-Earth object and in December 2020, the spacecraft returned the valuable sample to Earth. If its mission had ended there, it would've been deemed one of the most successful and challenging missions ever conducted.

K2-18b is a sub-Neptune about 124 light-years away from Earth first detected in 2015. Follow-up research found water vapour in its atmosphere, indicating that it could be a water planet, or what is called a 'hycean planet'. Hycean planets have thick hydrogen atmospheres and deep, global or near-global oceans. Or so scientists thought.