Space News & Blog Articles

One of the greatest mysteries the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was developed to investigate was the birth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). For more than twenty years, astronomers have puzzled over how these gravitational behemoths - weighing millions to billions of solar masses - could exist less than a billion years after the Big Bang. According to the most widely accepted cosmological models, massive black holes did not have enough time to form through the usual processes of black hole formation and mergers.

During the deployment of new space telescopes that are several critical steps each has to go through. Launch is probably the one most commonly thought of, another is “first light” of all of the instruments on the telescope. Ultimately, they’re responsible for the data the telescope is intended to collect - if they don’t work properly then the mission itself it a failure. Luckily, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) recently collected first light on its 10 primary instruments, and everything seems to be in working order, according to a press release from the Southwest Research Institute who was responsible for ensuring the delivery of all 10 instruments went off without a hitch.

Our middle-aged Solar System is mostly calm and stable, with fully-formed planets staying in their lanes while placidly orbiting the Sun. But it wasn't always this way. The Solar System had a tempestuous youth, full of collisions that shattered many bodies into tiny pieces. The debris-strewn main asteroid belt is evidence of this.

Do you know what time it is? It's an easy question, right? Just look at your phone or watch. But is that really the exact time? Oh, well, for that you can look to Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. It's what your phone clock is synced to, give or take, but you can get a more accurate measure of UTC with a device that can pick up the UTC radio time signal. Of course, UTC is only an agreed-upon standard that tries to stay in sync with Earth's rotation. It, in turn, is based upon International Atomic Time (TAI), which is a weighted average of 450 atomic clocks located all over the world.

Getting close to things is one way for scientists to collect better data about them. But that's been hard to do for the Sun, since getting close to it typically entails getting burnt to a crisp. Just ask Icarus. But if Icarus had survived his close encounter with the Sun, he might have been able to see massive magnetic “tadpoles” tens of thousands of kilometers wide reconnecting back down to the surface of our star. Or maybe not, because he had human eyes, not the exceptionally sensitive Wide-Field imagers the Parker Solar Probe used to look at the Sun while it made its closest ever pass to our closest star. A new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters from Angelos Vourlidas of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors describes what they say on humanity’s closest brush with the Sun so far.

Long before scientists discovered that other stars in the Universe host their own planetary systems, humanity had contemplated the existence of life beyond Earth. As our technology matured and we began monitoring the night sky in multiple wavelengths (i.e., radio waves), this curiosity became a genuine scientific pursuit. By the 1960s, a scientific field dedicated to the search for advanced life (similar to ours) emerged: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Since then, multiple SETI surveys have been conducted to search for potential signs of technological activity (aka. "technosignatures").

Astronomers may have just seen the first ever ‘superkilonova,’ a combination of a supernova and a kilonova. These are two very different kinds of stellar explosions, and if this discovery stands, it could change the way scientists understand stellar birth and death.

Nature sends us its signals in the form of light. Astrophysical phenomena emit light in all its forms, from harmless radio waves to deadly gamma-rays, and its up to us to build the facilities that can sense and dissect this light, and to understand the phenomena behind it all.

The JWST was built with the power to observe the red-shifted light from objects in the very early Universe. Once it got going, the telescope practically inundated us with surprising, theory-challenging observations from the Universe's earliest ages. Some ancient galaxies were much larger and fully-formed than thought. So were their supermassive black holes (SMBH).

With new technologies comes new discoveries. Or so Spider Man’s Uncle Ben might have said if he was an astronomer. Or a scientist more generally - but in astronomy that saying is more true than many other disciplines, as many discoveries are entirely dependent on the technology - the telescope, imager, or processing algorithm - used to collect data on them. A new piece of technology, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is exciting scientists enough that they are even starting to predict what kind of discoveries it might make. One such type of discovery, described in a pre-print paper on arXiv by Vito Saggese of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics and his co-authors on the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team, is the discovery of many more multiplantery exoplanet systems an astronomical phenomena Roman is well placed to detect - microlensing.

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was first detected on July 1st 2025 as it approached the Sun. Multiple telescopes, including the Very Large Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope have taken turns observing the comet as it continued on its hyperbolic trajectory out of the Solar System. It reached solar conjunction on October 21st, and on October 29th it came closest to the Sun.

*ESA’s premier X-ray observatory images interstellar comet 3I ATLAS. *

In astronomy, there is a concept called “degeneracy”. It has nothing to do with delinquent people, but instead is used to describe data that could be interpreted multiple ways. In some cases, that interpretation is translated into exciting new possibilities. But many times, when that happens, other, more mundane explanations are ignored for the publicity that the more interesting possibilities provide. That seems to have been the case for many “sub-Neptune” exoplanets discovered recently. Some theories have described them as Hycean worlds - worlds that are filled with water oceans or ice. But a new paper from Robb Calder of the University of Cambridge and his co-authors, available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that, most likely, these planets are almost all made of molten lava instead.

For decades, science fiction writers have tried their best to prepare us for eventual contact with aliens. Their efforts are dominated by several recurrent tropes. There's the invasion by a warlike species, there's the highly-evolved species trying to communicate with our primitive species, there's the benevolent aliens come to save us from ourselves, and there's the mischievous anal-probers and medical experimenters.

The cosmos is populated with many puzzling, gigantic, and awe-inspiring objects. Supermassive black holes billions of times more massive than the Sun reside in the center of massive galaxies. Huge stars explode in cataclysmic collisions whose light reaches us from more than 10 billion light-years away. Enormous galaxies collide and merge, leading to tremendous bursts of star formation.

If you read enough articles about planets in binary star systems, you’ll realize almost all of them make some sort of reference to Tatooine, the fictional home of Luke Skywalker (and Darth Vader) in the Star War saga. Since that obligatory reference is now out of the way, we can talk about the new “super-Jupiter” that researchers from two separate research teams, including one at Northwestern University and one at the University of Exeter, simultaneously found in old data from the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI).

Chinese taikonauts have a new set of spacesuits that will enable future missions in orbit and beyond. The suits were recently tested (Tuesday, Dec. 9th) during a series of extravehicular activities (EVAs) aboard China's Tiangong space station. The Shenzhou-21 crew (Zhang Lu and Wu Fei) donned the newly delivered D and E spacesuits to conduct their inaugural spacewalks. The suits are essentially a second-generation version of the Feitian spacesuits ("flying into space" in Chinese) used for intravehicular activity (IVA), but specifically designed for station EVAs.

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.