Space News & Blog Articles

When the Mariner 9 flew past Mars in 1972, scientists were treated to the first evidence that water once flowed on the surface of Mars. Subsequent missions confirmed this theory based on the study of features that form in the presence of water (flow channels, delta fans, and sedimentary deposits), the presence of hydrated minerals and clays in impact basins, and the discovery of subsurface ice and permafrost across the planet. These findings indicate that Mars once had an atmosphere thick enough to maintain temperatures to maintain surface water in a liquid state.

Astronomers recently used a pair of powerful telescopes to zero in on a cosmic battle occurring some 11 billion light-years away from Earth. The combatants are a pair of galaxies charging at each other over and over again, at velocities upwards of 500 kilometers per second. According to one of the scientists studying the scene, one galaxy is cutting into the heart of the other with a blast of radiation. “We hence call this system the ‘cosmic joust,’” said study co-lead Pasquier Noterdaeme of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris.

The COSMOS scientific collaboration has released the largest map of the Universe ever created. It contains almost 800,000 galaxies, some from the Universe's earliest times. The map challenges some of our ideas about the early universe.

Getting to Mars takes a really long time, about 9 months using today's rocket technology. This is because regular rocket engines burn fuel and oxygen together (like a car engine), but they're not very efficient. The fundamental problem is that spacecraft must carry both fuel and oxidiser since there's no air in space to support combustion. This creates a vicious circle: the more fuel you carry to go faster, the heavier your spacecraft becomes, requiring even more fuel to accelerate that extra weight. To go faster, you'd need massive amounts of fuel, making the rockets incredibly expensive and heavy. Current chemical propulsion systems are just about at their theoretical limits, with little room for improvement in efficiency.

In this series we are exploring NASA's top five challenges as detailed in its Civil Space Shortfall Ranking, which is basically NASA's Christmas wish list. These are the technologies that NASA believes we need to develop if we want to go to space…and stay there.

In this series we are exploring NASA's top five challenges as detailed in its Civil Space Shortfall Ranking, which is basically NASA's Christmas wish list. These are the technologies that NASA believes we need to develop if we want to go to space…and stay there.

In this series we're exploring NASA's top five challenges as detailed in its Civil Space Shortfall Ranking, which is basically NASA's Christmas wish list. These are the technologies that NASA believes we need to develop if we want to go to space…and stay there.

In this series we are exploring NASA's top five challenges as detailed in its Civil Space Shortfall Ranking, which is basically NASA's Christmas wish list. These are the technologies that NASA believes we need to develop if we want to go to space…and stay there.

With the federal government cutting funds for research, scientific organizations are facing a budget crunch. This includes astrophysics and cosmology, where researchers test theories fundamental to our understanding of the Universe. A good example is the search for Dark Matter (DM), which usually consists of smashing protons in particle accelerators to find evidence of this elusive particle. According to a recent study that appeared in the Physical Review Letters, black holes could represent a cheaper, natural alternative.

The monster black hole lurking at the center of galaxy M87 is an absolute beast. It is one of the largest in our vicinity and was the ideal first target for the Event Horizon Telescope. Scientists have taken a fresh look at the supermassive black hole using those iconic Event Horizon Telescope images and have now figured out just how fast this monster is spinning and how much material it's devouring.

Japan's private space company ispace experienced another setback on Thursday 5th June when its Resilience lunar lander crashed into the surface of the Moon, marking the company's second consecutive failed landing attempt in just over two years.

Every single organism on Earth, no matter the biome, the kingdom, the domain, whether it's an extremophile in a hot spring or some lithotroph buried in the crust, depends on water.

It's official. NASA's Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Request (FY 2026) has been released, and the news is decidedly mixed. In a previous article, we examined the FY 2026 Budget Request (released on May 2nd) and its recommendations for the coming year. With the release of the FY 2026 Budget, what was previewed and the anxiety it caused for many have been confirmed. While the Budget bolsters funding for NASA's exploration programs for the Moon and Mars, it also contains deep cuts to many other programs and the cancellation of key elements in NASA's Moon to Mars architecture.

The discovery of a Saturn-sized gas giant orbiting a small red dwarf is urging astronomers to reconsider their theories of planet formation. Typically, astronomers find larger planets around larger stars, but this discovery breaks that connection. The finding puts pressure on the core-accretion theory, the leading explanation for planet formation.

The Hubble Tension is perhaps, one of the most frustratingly unresolved mysteries in cosmology. Here's the problem: when astronomers measure how fast the universe is expanding today using nearby stars, they get one answer. When it's calculated from the afterglow of the Big Bang—the cosmic microwave background—there is a completely different number. The gap between these measurements has persisted for over a decade, surviving countless attempts to explain it away as experimental error. Either the instruments are systematically wrong, or something fundamental about the universe's evolution is missing from our models.

Astronomers have found another super-Earth. It's about 10 times more massive than Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star 2475 light-years away. These massive Earth-like planets hold key information about how planets form and evolve.

Before diving into their collision, it's worth understanding just how extreme these objects are. A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light can escape once it crosses the "event horizon." Black holes form when the most massive stars collapse at the end of their lives, creating a point of infinite density surrounded by this inescapable boundary.

When the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto and Charon in 2015, it revealed two amazingly complex worlds and an active atmosphere on Pluto. Those snapshots redefined our understanding of the system. Now, new observations using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) taken in 2022 and 2023, show that Pluto's atmosphere is completely different from any other one in the Solar System. For one thing, it contains haze particles that rise and fall as they are heated and cooled.

As the years go by the chances of Europa hosting life seem to keep going down. But it's not out of contention yet.

On the surface (you're welcome for the joke), Venus is not even close to being hospitable to life. But that's not the end of the story.

The idea that the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) will collide emerged after decades of observations by a host of astronomers. The Hubble played a decisive role in the determination during the early 2000s. It was a triumph of precision astronomy and space telescopes. Now, the Hubble has played an equally important role in cancelling the collision.