Space News & Blog Articles

The China National Space Administration's (CNSA) Tianwen-2 probe is currently at a distance of about 43 million km (26.7 million mi) from Earth. This places it in a stable geosynchronous orbit (GSO) and almost halfway between its first destination, the Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) 469219 Kamo'oalewa, which is still 45 million km (~28 million mi) away. As is customary for interplanetary missions, its controllers are using the flight phase to test the spacecraft's instruments and make sure they are in working order.

Peering back into the early years of the universe requires scientists to make a lot of assumptions. But sometimes, we get better instruments that then allow them to either confirm or replace those assumptions. That happened recently when it came to our study of J0529, a supermassive black hole that is currently the brightest known quasar in the universe. A new paper from a massive team of researchers used the GRAVITY+ instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT) Interferometer to map this unique object’s Broad Line Region (BLR), and thereby calculated a new, updated mass that is 10 times smaller than previous estimates.

Periodically, the European Space Agency (ESA) releases images that provide breathtaking views of the cosmos, courtesy of its premier missions. This includes a relative newcomer to party with the ESA/Webb Picture of the Month, which showcases the high-resolution and ultra-sensitive capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This month's feature: eight stunning images of gravitationally-lensed galaxies observed by Webb during its Cycle 1 General Observation (GO) surveys. The study of these lensed galaxies are providing insight into the early Universe and how galaxies have evolved with time.

Interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS has been constantly changing as it makes its way through our solar system. That’s to be expected, as, for the first time in potentially billions of years, it's getting close to the energy put out by a star. Scientists have been keeping a close watch on those changes, both to ensure there’s nothing unexplainable by our current understanding, but also to compare 3I/ATLAS to both previous interstellar visitors as well as comets in our own solar system. A recent paper from European researchers describes how the changes in a particular material ratio in 3I/ATLAS’ coma fit with our current understanding of cometary geology.

Making a black hole is easy. Just squeeze a bunch of stuff into a small enough volume. It doesn't even matter what you use. You can collapse stars, planets, old car tires, Labubus, or missing left socks. The resulting black hole will only depend on the mass, rotation, and electric charge of the original material.

The Copernican Principle, named in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus (who proposed the heliocentric model of the Universe), states that Earth and humans do not occupy a special or privileged place in the Universe. In cosmological terms, this essentially means that Earth is representative of the norm, and life is likely to exist throughout the cosmos. While our efforts to find extraterrestrial life, a field of study known as astrobiology, have yielded no results so far, these efforts have been limited in scope. As a result, scientists are forced to speculate based on the only planet known to support life—i.e., Earth.

Rogue planets, also known as free-floating planets (FFP) or isolated planetary-mass objects (iPMO), have become a major focus for astronomers. The first such objects were detected in 2000 by teams at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) and the Keck Observatory, though earlier detections were made that were unconfirmed at the time. Since then, research has shown that these planets may actually be more common than planets that orbit stars, with some estimates placing the population as high as 4 trillion in our galaxy alone.

In principle, discovering new exoplanets is pretty easy. Simply measure the brightness of a star over time, and when a planet passes in front of the star, the brightness will dim slightly. The more the brightness dips, the larger the planet in relation to the star. This transit method is so effective it is how we have found the majority of exoplanets. But astronomers want to do much more than simply discover planets, and for that you need to dive into the details.

For more than twenty years, the Mars Express orbiter has studied the Red Planet and remains the European Space Agency's (ESA) only operational mission. In that time, it has provided the most complete map of the Martian atmosphere and its chemical composition. It has also studied Mars' innermost moon (Phobos) in stunning detail, and traced the flow channels, delta fans, and chaos terrain that demonstrate that liquid water once flowed on the planet's surface. In addition, the images taken by the orbiter have been used to create detailed mosaics that have breathtaking 3D views of the landscape.

Watch Jupiter and its major moons undergo a complex series of events in October.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the James Webb Space Telescope is the way it has allowed scientists to examine galaxies that existed when the Universe was very young. This is one of the major objectives that informed Webb's design, which was to provide high-resolution images of the earliest galaxies, allowing astronomers and cosmologists to gain a better understanding of how they have evolved over time. Intrinsic to this is the study of early massive black holes that have since evolved into the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that reside at the centers of galaxies today.

Modeling something like geysers on a far-away moon seems like it should be easy. How much complexity could there possibly be when a geyser is simply a hole in some ice shooting superheated water through it? The answer is pretty complex, to be honest - enough that accurate models require a supercomputer to run on. Luckily, the supercomputing cluster at the University of Texas, known as the Texas Advanced Computing Center, gave some time to researcher modeling Enceladus’ ice plumes, and their recent paper in JGR Planets discusses the results, which show there might not be as much water and ice getting blown into orbit as originally thought.

Interest in icy moons has been growing steadily as they become more and more interesting to astrobiologists. Some take the majority of the attention, like Enceladus with its spectacular geysers. But there are interesting ones that might be hiding amongst even thicker ice shells in the Uranian system. A new paper published in Icarus from researchers at the Planetary Science Institute, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of North Dakota, looks at what Ariel, the fourth biggest moon in the Uranian system, might look like under its icy surface.

Enceladus’ ice continues to get more and more intriguing as researchers continue to unlock more secrets taken from a probe over ten years ago. When Cassini crashed into Saturn in 2017, it ended a 13 year sojourn that is still producing new research papers today. A recent one in Nature Astronomy from the researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Stuttgart found hints of organic molecules discovered for the first time on the icy moon, some of which could serve as precursors to even more advanced biomolecules.

There are plenty of exoplanets scattered throughout the galaxy, so it would stand to reason there are also plenty of stars that are in the process of forming new exoplanets. Tracking down stars that are in different stages of that process can shed light on the exoplanet formation process, and potentially even on how planets in our own solar system developed. But determining what star systems are going through that process, let alone where they are in the process itself, can be tricky. A new paper in Nature Astronomy from Tomohiro Yoshida and his co-authors at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and several other Japanese and American research institutions, seems to have found one that finally answers a mystery that has stood in planetary formation theory for decades - how do gas giant exoplanets form so far away from their stars?

One dedicated amateur shows what can be done with remote telescope access, knowledge and a little patience.

Reanalyzing old data with our modern understanding seems to be in vogue lately. However, the implications of that reanalysis for some topics are more impactful than others. One of the most hotly debated topics of late in the astrobiological community has been whether or not life can exist on Venus - specifically in its cloud layers, some of which have some of the most Earth-like conditions anywhere in the solar system, at least in terms of pressure and temperature. A new paper from a team of American researchers have just added fuel to that debate by reanalyzing data from the Pioneer mission to Venus NASA launched in the 70s - and finding that the Venus’ clouds are primarily made out of water.

Dark matter is hidden from our view making it difficult to study. Despite making up roughly 80 percent of all matter, we can't see it, touch it, or directly detect it with any of our instruments. It doesn't emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it completely invisible, and we only know it exists because of its gravitational effects on visible matter. The idea was first proposed by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 whilst studying the Coma Cluster. He noticed that the galaxies in this group were moving far too quickly to be held together by gravity alone.

Gamma ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe, briefly outshining entire galaxies in a violent flash of high energy radiation. These - excuse the pun - astronomical detonations release more energy in a few seconds than our Sun will produce over its entire ten billion year lifetime, sending jets of gamma rays racing through space. Despite their incredible brightness, gamma ray bursts are fleeting events, lasting anywhere from milliseconds to several minutes before fading away.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a data scale problem. There are just too many places to look for an interstellar signal, and even if you’re looking in the right place you could be looking at the wrong frequency or at the wrong time. Several strategies have come up to deal narrow the search given this overabundance of data, and a new paper pre-print in arXiv from Naoki Seto of the Kyoto University falls nicely into that category - by using the Brightest Of All TIme (BOAT) Gamma Ray Burst, with some help from our own galaxy.

Planetary formation has, by and large, been well understood and it involves flat discs of dust and gas slowly coalescing into new alien worlds. New research has just been published which seems to give that familiar process a bit of a twist. The international team of researchers behind the study and led by Dr Andrew Winter from Queen Mary University of London, have discovered compelling evidence that many protoplanetary discs are in fact subtly warped.