Space News & Blog Articles

Star formation should be a relatively straightforward process. Dense clouds of molecular hydrogen collapse under gravity, fragmenting into cores that grow into protostars. These infant stars are cold, deeply embedded in their parent clouds, and shouldn't produce ultraviolet radiation. They're not hot enough. Yet when astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope's MIRI instrument to observe five young stars in the Ophiuchus molecular cloud, 450 light years away, they found clear evidence of UV radiation affecting molecular hydrogen in outflows around these protostars.

What is the importance of studying explosive volcanism on Venus? This is what a recent study published in the *Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets* hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the potential altitudes of explosive volcanism on Venus. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the present volcanic activity on Venus, along with gaining insight about its formation and evolution and other planetary bodies throughout the solar system and beyond.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope continues its inexorable march toward launch. It recently completed another series of tests that brings it a few steps closer to a launch pad in Florida. This time, the telescope was split into two separate parts - an inner portion and an outer portion, each of which went through separate tests throughout the fall.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan recently accomplished something truly unprecedented. With the help of colleagues from the University of Tokyo and the Universitat de Barcelona, the team conducted the world's first Milky Way simulations that accurately represented more than 100 billion stars over 10,000 years. The simulation not only represented 100 times more individual stars than previous models, but was also produced 100 times faster.

The evolution of each individual galaxy is shaped by its surroundings, according to new research. The Deep Extragalactic Visible Legacy Survey (DEVILS), an endeavour of ICRAR and the University of Western Australia, has released its first data. It includes catalogues of morphological, redshift, photometric and spectroscopic data, as well as group environments and halo data for thousands of galaxies.

Studying the light from stars tells us their temperature, composition, age, and evolutionary state. But the red giant companion to Gaia BH2, a black hole system discovered in 2023, tells a contradictory story that doesn't make sense until you consider stellar violence!

I once filmed down a salt mine in North Yorkshire, descending into a dark matter laboratory buried deep underground where scientists wait for the rarest of collisions, dark matter particles interacting with ordinary matter. They're still waiting. But above ground, looking outward rather than inward, Professor Tomonori Totani from the University of Tokyo may have found what those underground detectors haven’t, dark matter revealing itself through light.

A first ever detection of a coronal mass ejection from a small red dwarf could have big consequences for life on any nearby planets.

Mosses conquered some of Earth's harshest environments long before humans arrived. They cling to Himalayan peaks, spread across Antarctic ice, and colonise fresh volcanic lava. These ancient plants, among the first to transition from water to land half a billion years ago, have survived multiple mass extinctions through sheer resilience. Researcher Tomomichi Fujita from Hokkaido University wondered if that resilience extended beyond Earth's atmosphere, so he sent moss to the ultimate extreme environment - the vacuum of space.

Gravitational waves are perhaps the most extraordinary signals in modern astronomy. When black holes or neutron stars collide billions of light years away, they send ripples through spacetime itself that eventually wash over Earth, stretching and squeezing space by distances smaller than a proton. The LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors exist to catch these impossibly faint whispers from the universe's most violent events, and their latest observation campaign proved remarkably successful.

The number 40,000 might not sound particularly dramatic, but it represents humanity's growing catalogue of near Earth asteroids, rocky remnants from the Solar System's violent birth that cross paths with our planet's orbit. We've come a long way since 1898, when astronomers discovered the first of these wanderers, an asteroid called Eros.

Understanding how exactly lunar dust sticks to surfaces is going to be important once we start having a long-term sustainable presence on the Moon. Dust on the Moon is notoriously sticky and damaging to equipment, as well as being hazardous to astronaut’s health. While there has been plenty of studies into lunar dust and its implications, we still lack a model that can effectively describe the precise physical mechanisms the dust uses to adhere to surfaces. A paper released last year from Yue Feng of the Beijing Institute of Technology and their colleagues showcases a model that could be used to understand how lunar dust sticks to spacecraft - and what we can do about it.

Using in-situ propellant has been a central pillar of the plan to explore much of the solar system. The logic is simple - the less mass (especially in the form of propellant) we have to take out of Earth’s gravity well, the less expensive, and therefore more plausible, the missions requiring that propellant will be. However, a new paper from Donald Rapp, the a former Division Chief Technologist at NASA’s JPL and a Co-Investigator of the successful MOXIE project on Mars, argues that, despite the allure of creating our own fuel on the Moon, it might not be worth it to develop the systems to do so. Mars, on the other hand, is a different story.

In early October, the third interstellar object (ISO) to visit our Solar System (3I/ATLAS) made its closest flyby to Mars, coming within 30 million km (18.6 million mi) of the Red Planet. This placed it within view of several missions currently operating there, which are operated by three space agencies: NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the China National Space Agency (CNSA). While the ESA released images taken by the Mars Express* and *ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), and China released images taken by the Tianwen-1 orbiter, NASA was unable to release any data due to the government shutdown.

Blue Origin just achieved another impressive milestone with its new heavy-launch vehicle, the partially reusable New Glenn rocket. On Thursday, Nov. 13th, during what was only the second launch of the New Glenn (NG-2), Blue Origin launched a NASA payload destined for Mars. This was the ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration Dynamics Explorers) mission, a pair of twin satellites that will study how solar wind interacts with Mars’ magnetic environment and how this interaction drives atmospheric escape.

According to the leading theory of how the Earth-Moon system formed (the Giant Impact Hypothesis), a Mars-sized object (named Theia) collided with a proto-Earth 4.5 billion years ago. This turned both objects into molten lava, which eventually coalesced and cooled to form the Earth and Moon. Over time, the Moon migrated outward, eventually reaching its current, tidally locked orbit around Earth, where one side is permanently facing us. For decades, scientists have debated where Theia may have originated, whether it formed in the inner or outer Solar System.

The surface of the Earth is finite. We can measure it. If it was expanding, then its size would grow with time. And once again, good ol’ Earth helps us understand what the universe might be doing beyond our observable horizon.

Material science plays a critical role in space exploration. So many of the challenges facing both crewed and non-crewed missions come down to factors like weight, thermal and radiation tolerance, and overall material stability. The results of a new study from Young-Kyeong Kim of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology and their colleagues should therefore be exciting for those material scientists who focus on radiation protection. After decades of trying, the authors were able to create a fully complete “sheet” of Boron Nitride Nanotubes (BNNTs).

The Milky Way contains more than 100 billion stars, each following its own evolutionary path through birth, life, and sometimes violent death. For decades, astrophysicists have dreamed of creating a complete simulation of our Galaxy, a digital twin that could test theories about how galaxies form and evolve. That dream has always crashed against an impossible computational wall.

It is a scientific consensus that water once flowed on Mars, that it had a denser atmosphere, meaning that it was once habitable. Unfortunately, roughly 4.2 to 3.7 billion years ago, Mars' rivers, lake, and global ocean began to disappear as solar wind slowly stripped its atmosphere away. For scientists, the question of how long it remained habitable has been the subject of ongoing inquiry. Whereas some scientists maintain that Mars ceased being habitable billions of years ago, recent research suggests that it experienced periods of habitability that lasted for eons.

An expanding universe complicates this picture just a little bit, because the universe absolutely refuses to be straightforward. Objects are still emitting light, and that light takes time to travel from them over to here, but in that intervening time the universe grows larger, with the average distance between galaxies getting bigger (yes, I know that sometimes galaxies can collide, but we’re talking on average, at big scales here).