Space News & Blog Articles

You come for the king, you best not miss.

The ESA's Euclid space telescope has been in space for just over a year, investigating some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. By observing cosmic structures up to a distance of 10 billion light-years, the observatory will chart the evolution of the Universe, attempt to constrain the influence of Dark Energy, and study the morphology of galaxies. In terms of galaxies, Euclid will attempt to answer the question of why the Universe contains such a variety of galaxies, characterized by size, shape, and colours.

Blue Origin needed a ship to catch rockets falling from space. They bought a massive roll-on/roll-off cargo ferry, hired engineers to convert it, and named it Jacklyn after Jeff Bezos's mother. Then, after four years of work, they scrapped the entire project and started over.

According to the textbook version of Solar System formation, planets should orbit the Sun in elliptical orbits, all lined up in the same plane. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune don't follow this script. Their orbits are a little more elliptical and tilted relative to each other, not dramatically, but enough to puzzle astronomers for decades. Standard formation models predict the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk on the same plane as the rest of the planets. Instead, something seems to have pushed them off course.

Early one February morning in 2025, Adam Borucki discovered something extraordinary behind his warehouse in Poland, a charred metal tank, roughly 1.5 metres across, sitting in his back yard. It had crashed from space during the night, part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that failed to complete its controlled descent into the Pacific Ocean. The debris damaged some electrical equipment and a concrete block. Nobody was hurt, but the incident raised an uncomfortable question; who pays when a private company's space hardware crashes into your property?

In 2023, gravitational wave detectors picked up the signature of a collision 7 billion light years away. Two black holes had merged in an explosion of warped space-time, but when astronomers analysed the data, they found something that violated the rules of physics. The black holes were spinning faster than any previously observed and fell within a mass range where black holes simply aren't supposed to exist.

When the James Webb Space Telescope detected potential biosignatures in the atmosphere of K2-18 b last year, the discovery sparked intense debate. Here was a sub-Neptune exoplanet 124 light years away, possibly harboring methane, carbon dioxide, and even dimethyl sulfide which is a gas produced by phytoplankton on Earth. But before we get too excited about alien life it’s necessary to understand if this planet's atmosphere can even survive the harsh environment from the host star!

The Moon has no atmosphere, no weather, and no wind. Yet it faces an invisible bombardment more relentless than any terrestrial storm, a constant rain of micrometeoroids, tiny fragments of rock and metal travelling at speeds up to 70 kilometres per second. As NASA's Artemis program prepares to establish a permanent lunar base, understanding this silent threat has become critical to keeping future astronauts safe.

The Sun produces more power than 100 trillion times humanity's entire electricity generation. In orbit, solar panels can be eight times more productive than their Earth bound counterparts, generating energy almost continuously without the need for heavy battery storage. These facts have led a team of Google researchers to ask what if the best place to scale artificial intelligence isn't on Earth at all, but in space?

Weather forecasting is notoriously wonky - climate modeling even more so. But their slowing increasing ability to predict what the natural world will throw at us humans is largely thanks to two things - better models and increased computing power. Now, a new paper from researchers led by Daniel Klocke of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and available in pre-print form on arXiv, describes what some in the climate modeling community have described as the “holy grail” of their field - an almost kilometer-scale resolution model that combines weather forecasting with climate modeling.

For decades, astronauts traveling to space were forced to subsist on a diet that largely consisted of freeze-dried and packaged food. This changed with the introduction of plant-growing operations in orbit, like the Vegetable Production System (Veggie) aboard the International Space Station (ISS). But in what is a really big first, the China National Space Agency (CNSA) has installed a new in-orbit barbecue system aboard the Tiangong space station. In a recent video (shown below) released by the China Central Television (CCTV), we see the current crew of the Tiangong giving the BBQ a whirl!

As stars age, they expand. That’s bad news for planets orbiting close to their stars, according to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this month. The study suggests that planets closest to their stars, especially those that orbit their stars in just 12 days or less, are at a higher risk of being sent to their doom by their aging suns.

Long before humans reached orbit, insects had already proven they could handle spaceflight. Fruit flies travelled aboard a V-2 rocket in 1947, becoming the first animals to reach space and survive the journey. Since then, countless creepy crawlies have followed, from bumblebees and houseflies to ants and stick insects, helping scientists understand how living organisms cope with the extreme environment beyond Earth's atmosphere.

October and November 2024 proved to be particularly productive for gravitational wave astronomy. Within the two months, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration detected two black hole mergers with such unusual properties that they're changing our understanding of how they form and evolve. Both events feature rapidly spinning black holes in unequal mass pairs, properties that point toward a violent history of previous collisions rather than a quiet stellar origin.

At a young age, we're told how the Sun warms the Earth and makes life possible. That idea sticks with most of us for life. But when we want to understand things more thoroughly and we dig more deeply, we learn that Earth its own heat sources that help it maintian habitability: remnant heat and radioactive decay. Other rocky worlds can have these sources, too.

Tracking time is one of those things that seems easy, until you really start to get into the details of what time actually is. We define a second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom. However, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, mass slows down these oscillations, making time appear to move more slowly for objects in large gravity wells. This distinction becomes critical as we start considering how to keep track of time between two separate gravity wells of varying strengths, such as on the Earth and the Moon. A new paper pre-print on arXiv by Pascale Defraigne at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and her co-authors discusses some potential frameworks for solving that problem and settles on using the new Lunar Coordinate Time (TCL) suggested by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

Astronauts lose significant amounts of muscle mass during any prolonged stay in space. Despite spending 2-3 hours a day exercising in an attempt to keep the atrophy at bay, many still struggle with health problems caused by low gravity. A new paper and some further work done by Emanuele Pulvirenti of the University of Bristol’s Soft Robotics Lab and his colleagues, describe a new type of fabric-based exoskeleton that could potentially solve at least some of the musculoskeletal problems astronauts suffer from without dramatically affecting their movement.

Work continues on designs for robots that can help assist the first human explorers on the Moon in over half a century. One of the most important aspects of that future trip will be utilizing the resources available on the Moon’s surface, known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). This would give the explorers access to materials like water, structural metals, and propellant, but only if they can recover it from the rock and regolith that make up the Moon’s surface. A new paper from researchers mainly affiliated with Tohoku University describes the design and testing of a type of robot excavator that could one day assist lunar explorers in unlocking the world’s potential.

Back in 2009, astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope noticed that there was a lot more gamma-ray light coming from the center of the Milky Way than might otherwise be expected given the objects there. Since then, two theories have appeared to explain this Galactic Center Excess (GCE) as it’s become known. One theory posits that the extra gamma rays are created by thousands of unseen milli-second pulsars (MSPs) in the Galactic center, while the other suggests that dark matter annihilating itself could also be the source. A new paper from Moortis Muru and hisco-authors at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) hasn’t necessarily solved the conundrum, but does level the playing field between the two theories again.

Conditions on Venus’ surface have largely remained a mystery for decades. Carl Sagan famously pointed out that people were quick to jump to conclusions, such as that there are dinosaurs living there, from scant little evidence collected from the planet. But just because we have little actual data doesn’t mean we can’t draw conclusions, and better yet models, from the data we do have. A new paper from Maxence Lefèvre of the Sorbonne and his colleagues takes what little data has been collected from Venus’ surface and uses it to valid a model of what the wind and dust conditions down there would be like - all for the sake of making the work of the next round of Venusian explorer easier.

Astronomy would be a lot easier if there were no clouds of gas and dust in space. There'd be no need for telescopes with the abilty to see through these thick veils. Alas, space is not only full of things we want to see, but full of things that get in the way.