Space News & Blog Articles

Anyone familiar with the search for alien life will have heard of the “Goldilocks Zone” around a star. This is defined as the orbital band where the temperature is just right for liquid water to pool on a rocky planet’s surface - a good approximation for what we thought of as the early conditions for life on Earth. But what happens if that life doesn’t stay on an Earth analog? If they, like we, start to move towards their neighboring planets, the idea of a habitable zone becomes much more complicated. A new paper from Dr. Caleb Scharf of the NASA Ames Research Center, and one of the agency’s premier astrobiologists, tries to account for this possibility by introducing the framework of an Interplanetary Habitable Zone (IHZ).

On April 8th, 2024, people across the world witnessed a solar eclipse, a relatively rare event in which the Moon occults (blocks out) light from the Sun. To capture this event, volunteers at 143 observatories across the U.S. trained their equipment on it as part of NASA's Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project. The images they took were groundbreaking and provided some of the most detailed images to date of the Sun's corona. After nearly two years of production and editing, the Eclipse Megamovie team has released the dataset from this project.

When most people think of a supernova, they're thinking of a Type II core-collapse supernova. These are massive stars that have reached the end of their time on the main sequence. They've used up their supply of hydrogen and continue fusing heavier elements until the star can't support its own mass. The core collapses and they explode, outshining their entire host galaxy for months.

For about a century, scientists have known that the Universe is in a state of constant expansion. In honor of the scientists who definitively showed this, this expansion has come to be known as the Hubble Constant (or Hubble-Lemaitre Constant). Today, scientists use two main techniques to measure the rate of expansion: the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and the Cosmic Distance Ladder. The former relies on redshift measurements of the CMB, the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang, while the latter relies on parallax and redshift measurements using variable stars and supernovae (aka "standard candles").

Red dwarfs make up the vast majority of stars in the galaxy. Such ubiquity means they host the majority of rocky exoplanets we’ve found so far - which in turn makes them interesting for astrobiological surveys. However, there’s a catch - astrobiologists aren’t sure the light from these stars can actually support oxygen-producing life. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Giovanni Covone and Amedeo Balbi, suggests that they might not - when it comes to stellar light, quality is just as important as quantity. And according to their calculations, Earth-like biospheres are incredibly difficult to sustain around red dwarfs.

Giant mpacts on Earth's surface can be cataclysmic events with far-reaching consequences. They can excavate massive craters like the Vredefort Crater. There's also growing evidence that impacts powerful enough can create a massive underground hydrothermal system of cracks and chemistry that could be conducive to life.

Radio astronomy offers scientists a means of observing the "unseen" Universe, where a wide range of natural phenomena take place that optical telescopes cannot observe. This is the purpose behind the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), a massive radio telescope with stations all across Europe. It is the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world, operating at low frequencies (10–240 MHz). After ten years of surveying the sky, the LOFAR Collaboration has produced the most detailed radio map of the Universe ever made.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and has proudly boasted about this since time immemorial, with its scientific confirmation occurring by Galileo Galilei in 1610. It was later found that Jupiter has a bulging equator caused by its rapid rotation, turbulent atmosphere, and complex interior mechanisms despite its massive size, and scientists have even measured its “waistline” down to a tenth of a kilometer. Now, imagine being the largest planet in the solar system and you’re told you’re not as big as you thought. Where probably most humans would be thrilled to find this out, how do you respond if you’re Jupiter?

Earlier today, NASA announced that it would be increasing the cadence of its missions to meet its objectives under the Artemis Program. It is also making changes to its mission architecture to include a standard vehicle configuration and undertake one surface landing every year after 2027. In real terms, this means that a lunar landing will not take place as part of Artemis III in 2027, but during Artemis IV, currently scheduled for 2028. Instead, Artemis III will involve a rendezvous in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to test the systems and operations for the first lunar landing in over sixty years.

Here's a thought experiment that keeps planetary scientists awake at night. Strip every living thing from our planet, every bacterium, every blade of grass, every creature that has ever drawn breath and ask a simple but profound question: would Earth still be a world capable of supporting life?

Imagine trying to reconstruct the history of a city by studying only its oldest surviving buildings. You can't watch it being built, you can't interview the architects, all you have are the structures themselves, their materials, their arrangement, the subtle clues locked into their very fabric. That is essentially what astronomers do when they study the formation of our Galaxy, and a new study has just given them their biggest collection of clues yet.

Imagine trying to study the foundations of an ancient city while it's still being built. The noise is deafening, the dust is everywhere, and the whole place is barely visible through the haze. That is almost exactly the challenge astronomers face when trying to understand how vast cities of hundreds of galaxies first came into being. A new discovery has just given them their best look yet.

It's been about 8 months since the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) saw first light. Now the telescope is scanning the night sky to detect transient changes and sending alerts to astronomers and observatories around the world so they can perform follow-up observations. This alert system is one of the last milestones before the VRO starts its primary endeavour: the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

In the future, farmers on the Moon and Mars will have a big challenge: how to grow healthy food in two extremely unhealthy environments. That's because the soil on both worlds isn't at all hospitable to plants and animals. Neither are other conditions. Both are irradiated worlds, Mars has a thin atmosphere and the Moon has none at all. So, how will future colonists on either world grow their food?

In the summer of 2023, something happened that engineers had talked about for decades but few genuinely expected to see in their lifetimes. SpaceX's Starship, a stainless steel tower taller than a thirty storey building lit its thirty three engines simultaneously and lifted off from the Texas coast. It did not go entirely to plan. But it went. And when the Super Heavy booster returned in flight test five to be caught, mid air, by the enormous mechanical arms of its own launch tower, it was clear that the rules of spaceflight had fundamentally changed.

Something arrived in our Solar System last summer that had been travelling for longer than the Earth has existed. It came from somewhere out there in the dark between the stars, possibly from a planetary system that formed billions of years before our own Sun even ignited. We don't know exactly where it came from. We may never know. But for a brief, extraordinary window of time, this ancient wanderer passed close enough to study, and the world's astronomers dropped almost everything to watch.

You could fit about a dozen of them across the full stop at the end of this sentence. Under a microscope they look like tiny eight legged bears shuffling around in slow motion. They have been frozen, boiled, irradiated, sent into the vacuum of open space and brought back alive. Scientists have been studying them for over two hundred years and they still have the capacity to astonish. Their name is tardigrade, though most people know them by the rather more charming nickname of water bears. And right now, they might be one of our best tools for figuring out how to survive on Mars.

Through the Artemis Program, NASA hopes to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon in its southern polar region. China, Russia, and the European Space Agency (ESA) have similar plans, all of which involve building bases near the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) - i.e., craters that contain water ice - that dot the South Pole-Aitken Basin. For these and other agencies, it is vital that these bases be as self-sufficient as possible since resupply missions cannot be launched regularly and take several days to arrive.

When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, they brought back something more valuable than any treasure, 382 kilograms of Moon rock that would keep scientists busy for generations. For decades those samples have been scrutinised, measured, and debated and, for decades one question has refused to be satisfactorily answered… Did the Moon once have a powerful magnetic field or was it always magnetically feeble?

It is one of the most famous questions in science, and it was asked, as legend has it, over lunch. Enrico Fermi, the physicist who helped build the first nuclear reactor and whose name graces a unit of length so small it makes an atom look generous, was chatting with colleagues about the possibility of alien life when he suddenly asked ‘where is everybody?’

Aging stars are prolific producers of dust, and the dust plays an important role in the cosmos. Their dust is ejected into the interstellar medium (ISM) where it is taken up in the next generation of stars and planets. This is how stars seed their environments with metals, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which are necessary for rocky planets and life to form.