Space News & Blog Articles

On any clear, moonless night, the light from the billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy can be seen arching across the sky. A large spiral galaxy, the Milky Way we see today is the result of billions of years of galactic evolution. A team of astronomers have announced the discovery of a galaxy very similar to our own but this one is less than a billion years old! Typically galaxies like the Milky Way with a developed central bulge and spiral arms are only seen in nearby galaxies suggesting it’s a process that takes time. This latest discovery challenges that theory!

Planetary scientists have plenty of theories about Mars and its environmental past. Two of the most widely accepted are that there was a carbon dioxide atmosphere and, at one point, liquid water on Mars' surface. However, this theory has a glaring problem: Where should the rocks have formed from the interactions between carbon dioxide and water? According to a new paper by scientists at several NASA facilities using data collected by the rover Curiosity, the answer is right under the rover's metaphorical feet.

Studying the Sun is becoming increasingly important as more and more of our infrastructure moves off the surface and into the realm where coronal mass ejections and the solar wind can begin to affect them. Scientists recognize this problem and have started devoting more and more resources to studying the Sun, specifically the "space weather" that might affect us. Recently, one of the newest members of the group of satellites focused on studying the Sun hit a milestone when the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission took on its first light.

Where did the water we believe is on the Moon come from? Most scientists think they know the answer - from the solar wind. They believed the hydrogen atoms that make up the solar wind bombarded the lunar surface, which is made up primarily of silica. When that hydrogen hits the oxygen atoms in that silica, the oxygen is sometimes released and freed to bond with the incoming hydrogen, which in some cases creates water. But no one has ever attempted to replicate that process to prove its feasibility. A new paper by Li Hsia Yeo and their colleagues at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center describes the first experimental evidence of that reaction.

After spending 220 days on board the International Space Station, astronaut Don Pettit is back on Earth. He returned to Earth on Sunday, April 20th, which coincides with his 70th birthday.

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft made a successful flyby of the second asteroid on its must-see list over the weekend, and sent back imagery documenting the elongated object’s bizarre double-lobed shape. It turns out that asteroid Donaldjohanson — which was named after the anthropologist who discovered the fossils of a human ancestor called Lucy — is what’s known as a contact binary, with a couple of ridges in its narrow neck.

Scientists are still trying to understand the origin of multicellular life. It emerged about 1.2 billion years ago (or even earlier, according to some debated evidence). The timing of multicellular life's appearance on Earth is not the only thing being debated; so are the mechanisms behind it. New research supports the idea that multicellular life began when single-celled bacteria started grouping together.

Just how powerful is the world’s most powerful telescope?

How can you fairly compare one telescope to another? It’s all in the (angular) resolution.

A team of NASA scientists proposed a new initiative at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (2025 LPSC). Known as the Commercial Hall Propulsion for Mars Payload Services (CHAMPS), the

You never know when a central supermassive black hole is going to power up and start gobbling matter. Contrary to the popular view that these monsters are constantly devouring nearby stars and gas clouds, it turns out they spend part of their existence dormant and inactive. New observations from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft opened a window on the "turn on event" for one of these monsters in a distant galaxy.

Scientists have known for a while that Mars currently lacks a magnetic field, and many blame that for its paltry atmosphere - with no protective shield around the planet, the solar wind was able to strip away much of the gaseous atmosphere over the course of billions of years. But, evidence has been mounting that Mars once had a magnetic field. Results from Insight, one of the Red Planet's landers, lend credence to that idea, but they also point to a strange feature - the magnetic field seemed to cover only the southern hemisphere, but not the north. A team from the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics thinks they might know why - in a recent paper, they described how a fully liquid core in Mars could create a lopsided magnetic field like the one seen in Insight’s data.

The solar system is currently embedded deep within the Local Bubble, a region of relatively low density stretching for a thousand light-years across. It was carved millions of years ago by a chain of supernova explosions. And the evidence for it is right under our feet.

In a recent paper, a team of researchers indicated that photosynthetic bacteria could exist just beneath the snow and ice around Mars' mid-latitudes. If true, this could be the most easily accessible place to look for present-day life on Mars.

Astrobiologists are dying to send another mission to study Enceladus, the icy moon that orbits Saturn and has active plumes emanating from its surface, A team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) proposes an Enceladus Orbitlander that would conduct in-situ measurements of Enceladus' plumes, which could confirm the presence of organics and maybe even life in its interior.

In our neighborhood of the Milky Way, we see a region surrounding the solar system that is far less dense than average. But that space, that cavity, is a very irregular, elongated shape. What little material is left inside of this cavity is insanely hot, as it has a temperature of around a million Kelvin.

According to a recent study by the non-profit Explore Titan, a nuclear-fission propulsion spacecraft could enable the first crewed mission to Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

What can Helium-3 (3He) being discharged from the Sun teach us about 3He creation and the Sun’s activity? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated 3He-rich solar energetic particles (SEPs) emitted by the Sun in late 2023. This study has the potential to help astronomers better understand how solar activity could contribute to the production of 3He, the latter of which remains one of the most desired substances due to its potential for nuclear fusion technology on Earth.

Everything in the Universe spins. Galaxies, planets, stars, and black holes all rotate, even if just a bit. It comes from the fact that the clouds of scattered gas and dust of the cosmos are never perfectly symmetrical. But the Universe as a whole does not rotate. Some objects spin one way, some another, but add them all up, and the total rotation is zero. At least that's what we've thought. But a new study suggests that the Universe does rotate, and this rotation solves the big mystery of cosmology known as the Hubble tension.

Who knew that magnetic fields could be so useful?

Sometimes an old telescope can still impress. That is certainly the case for Hubble, which is rapidly approaching the 35th anniversary of its launch. To celebrate, the telescope's operators are collaborating with ESA to release a series of stunning new photographs of some of the most iconic astronomical objects the telescope has observed. As of the time of writing, the latest one to be released is a spectacular new image of a favorite of millions of amateur astronomers - the Sombrero Galaxy.