Space News & Blog Articles

Although they are technically gas giants, Uranus and Neptune are referred to as "ice giants" due to their composition. This refers to the fact that Uranus and Neptune have more methane, water, and other volatiles than their larger counterparts (Jupiter and Saturn). Given the pressure conditions in the planets' interiors, these elements become solid, essentially becoming "ices." However, new research from the University of Zurich (UZH) and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS is challenging our understanding of these interior regions of these planets.

Every biologist knows how important the Great Oxygenation Event was. It took the first photosynthetic organisms hundreds of millions of years to enrich Earth's atmosphere with oxygen, leading to complex life like us. But before complex, multi-cellular life could appaer, oxygen had to enter the ocean first.

I've been fortunate enough to witness the aurora on several occasions over the years, and each sighting leaves an impression that never quite fades. There's something about watching the sky transform from gentle curtains of light into something far more dramatic that stays with you. Within minutes, the aurora can erupt into intense waves of green and red that ripple and dance across the sky. These spectacular events, called magnetospheric substorms, represent some of Earth's most powerful displays of atmospheric electricity and they're exactly the kind of experience that burns itself into memory.

Long before Earth existed, before the Sun ignited, the materials that would eventually become our Solar System drifted through the darkness between stars. These interstellar clouds, vast expanses of ice, gas, and dust stretching across light years, held within them the chemical seeds of everything that would follow; rocky planets, gas giants, and perhaps even life itself. Understanding exactly how those primordial materials transformed into worlds remains one of astronomy's most long standing mysteries.

A “House of Cards” is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It’s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.

(This is Part 4 of a series exploring the mythic side of the Big Bang. Check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3!)

The Sun is far more than a steadily glowing sphere as our ancestors once thought. Across its surface and atmosphere, countless tiny features flicker in and out of existence, magnetic loops hundreds of times larger than Earth, and plasma flows in ways that still puzzle scientists. Understanding this complexity requires more than just looking harder, it requires looking from multiple angles at once.

Omega Centauri dominates the southern sky as the Milky Way's largest and brightest globular cluster, a dense sphere containing roughly ten million stars. Earlier this year, astronomers found evidence that an intermediate mass black hole hides within the cluster's core, revealed by seven stars moving far too quickly to remain bound unless something massive holds them gravitationally. Now researchers have searched for the black hole itself using radio telescopes, and their discovery is what they didn't find.

The giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to their current positions. Exactly what triggered this chaos remains uncertain, but researchers at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux and the Planetary Science Institute now propose a close encounter with a wandering substellar object during the Sun's youth.

The universe is getting bigger, and there's a problem. Two different ways of measuring its expansion rate give two different answers, and nobody knows why. Now researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated a completely independent method that adds compelling evidence this discrepancy represents something real, not just measurement error.

Since it commenced science operations in mid-2022, the James Webb Space Telescope has made significant strides in detecting atmospheres around exoplanets. These included providing the first clear evidence of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet atmosphere (WASP-39b), atmospheric water vapor (WASP-96 b), and even heavier elements like oxygen and carbon (HD149026b). According to the latest release, researchers announced that they have detected the strongest evidence to date for an atmosphere around a rocky planet.

Carl Sagan famously said that “We’re all made of star-stuff”. But he didn’t elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been creative in massive supernovae explosions - hence the saying, and scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled - the isotopes created in the supernovae flew here on tiny dust grains (stardust) that eventually accreted into Earth, and later into biological systems. However, a new paper from Martin Bizzarro and his co-authors at the University of Copenhagen upends that theory by showing that much of the material created in supernovae is captured in ice as it travels the interstellar medium. It also suggests that the Earth itself formed through the Pebble Accretion model rather than massive protoplanets slamming together.

(This is Part 3 of a series exploring the mythic side of the Big Bang. Check out Part 1 and Part 2!)

For decades, scientists have recognized that large galaxies in our Universe have supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at their centers. These behemoths, which are millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun, play a vital role in star formation and the long-term evolution of galaxies. According to a recent study based on observations performed using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, it appears that most dwarf galaxies may buck this trend. This stands in stark contrast to their theory that nearly every galaxy has a massive black hole within its core.

(This is Part 2 of a series exploring the mythic side of the Big Bang. Check out Part 1!)

Tracking down resources on the Moon is a critical process if humanity decides to settle there permanently. However, some of our best resources to do that currently are orbiting satellites who use various wavelengths to scan the Moon and determine what the local environment is made out of. One potential confounding factor in those scans is “space weathering” - i.e. how the lunar surface might change based on bombardment from both the solar wind and micrometeroid impacts. A new paper from a researchers at the Southwest Research Institute adds further context to how to interpret ultra-violet data from one of the most prolific of the resource assessment satellites - the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) - and unfortunately, the conclusion they draw is that, for some resources such as titanium, their presence might be entirely obscured by the presence of “old” regolith.

Radio astronomy has a pollution problem. Satellites thousands of kilometres overhead, designed to broadcast communications or relay data, are increasingly contaminating the frequencies astronomers use to study the universe. While much attention has focused on SpaceX's Starlink and other low Earth orbit constellations, but what about the satellites much farther away?

What could force a supermassive black hole (SMBH) out of its host galaxy? They can have hundreds of millions, even billions of solar masses? What's powerful enough to dislodge one of these behemoths?

On July 1st, 2025, the third interstellar object (ISO) ever detected was seen making its way through our Solar System. Shortly after being alerted by automated detection systems, astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) began using observatories in Hawaii, Chile, and Australia to get a better look at the interstellar interloper. Since then, 3I/ATLAS has been observed by multiple space observatories, including the venerable NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. On Nov. 30th, Hubble viewed the ISO again, which is about to make its closest approach to Earth.

When astronauts finally set foot on Mars, they'll arrive carrying the weight of centuries of speculation about whether life exists beyond Earth. Now a new report from the National Academies has settled a fundamental question about priorities: searching for evidence of past or present Martian life should be the primary science objective for humanity's first crewed mission to the red planet, ranking above all other scientific goals including understanding the effects of Mars on human health.

(This is Part 1 of a series exploring the mythic side of the Big Bang!)