Space News & Blog Articles

For over a century, rocket propulsion has followed a simple principle; burn fuel, expel it backward, and Newton’s third law pushes you forward. Since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first formulated the rocket equation in 1903, spacecraft have carried their propellant with them, limiting mission capabilities by the mass ratios. The more fuel you carry, the heavier your rocket becomes, requiring even more fuel to lift that fuel, in a vicious cycle that makes interstellar travel seem impossibly distant. But what if spacecraft didn’t need to carry propellant at all?

How does water form on exoplanets and what could this mean for the search for life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated the processes responsible for exoplanets producing liquid water. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life beyond Earth, and specifically which exoplanets could be viable future targets for astrobiology.

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto has forced astronomers to rewrite their textbooks — but that’s not all: New Horizons also forced Les Johnson to rewrite a novel.

Whenever someone talks about black holes, they almost always talk about the event horizon and the singularity. After all, that's what defines a black hole, right? Well, it depends on what you mean by black hole. There are some that would argue a black hole doesn't need a singularity, and that could mean they don't even have an event horizon.

So where do we go after years of empty searches for dark matter? We haven’t learned nothing. After decades of searches, we’re narrowing down the range of what dark matter can and cannot be.

The Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) hasn't yet begun it's much-anticipated Legacy Survey of Space and Time. But it saw its first light in June 2025, when it captured its Virgo First Look images as part of commisioning its main camera. Those images are a sample of how the observatory will perform the LSST and feature the Virgo Cluster of galaxies.

Nature's like a photographer's canvas backdrop, lit up by the different types of electromagnetic radiation. Gamma radiation is the most powerful, strong enough to rip your double helix in two. Radio waves are at the low end. They're generally safe, and are almost omnipresent; we live in a sea of radio waves.

What if I told you that while you can’t see dark matter, maybe you can hear it? I know, I know, it sounds crazy…and it is crazy. But it’s crazy enough that it just might work. It’s a real life experiment, called the…let me see here…the Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers, or CRESST – that’s a double s in case you didn’t catch that. Look it’s not the greatest of acronyms but we’re going to just go with it.

There is a limit to how big we can build particle colliders on Earth, whether that is because of limited space or limited economics. Since size is equivalent to energy output for particle colliders, that also means there’s a limit to how energetic we can make them. And again, since high energies are required to test theories that go Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics, that means we will be limited in our ability to validate those theories until we build a collider big enough. But a team of scientists led by Yang Bai at the University of Wisconsin thinks they might have a better idea - use already existing neutrino detectors as a large scale particle collider that can reach energies way beyond what the LHC is capable of.

How could the principle of “radical mundanity” proposed by the Fermi paradox help explain why humans haven’t found evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs)? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a lone researcher investigated the prospect for finding ETCs based on this principle. This study has the potential to help scientists and the public better understand why we haven’t identified intelligent life beyond Earth and how we might narrow the search for it.

We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime. According to a new paper by Leonard Schulz of the Technical University of Braunschweig and his co-authors, material from satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, especially transition metals, could have unforeseen consequences on atmospheric chemistry - and we’re now the biggest contributor of some of those elements.

Why is it important to know about exoplanets having their atmospheres stripped while orbiting F-type stars? This is what a recent study submitted to *The Astronomical Journal* hopes to address as an international team of scientists conducted a first-time investigation into atmospheric escape on planets orbiting F-type stars, the latter of which are larger and hotter than our Sun. Atmospheric escape occurs on planets orbiting extremely close to their stars, resulting in the extreme temperature and radiation from the host star slowly stripping away the planet’s atmosphere.

It's a well-known fact that Jupiter plays a vital role in the dynamics of the Solar System. As the largest planet beyond the "Frost Line," the boundary where volatiles (like water) freeze, Jupiter protects the planets of the inner Solar System from potential impacts by asteroids and comets. In addition to this "guardian" role, Jupiter has also been an "architect" planet that affected the evolution of the early Solar System and the orbits of its planets. According to new research from Rice University, Jupiter reshaped the Solar System by carving rings and gaps in the protoplanetary disk, leading to the formation of late-stage meteorites.

We are truly lucky to live in an age where modern instruments - like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) - exist and are pulling back the veil on the period known as the Cosmic Dark Ages (aka. the Epoch of Reionization). Thanks to its sophisticated suite of infrared optics and spectrometers, Webb has observed some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe, shedding new light on the formation history and evolution of the cosmos. Alas, there are still many unanswered questions about the first stars (Population III), galaxies, and black holes formed.

A nearby dwarf galaxy could teach astrophysicists something new about dark matter and black holes. It's named Segue 1 and it's about 75,000 light years away. Segue 1 is one of the Milky Way's smallest and dimmest satellite galaxies. It has about 600,000 solar masses and is only as bright as about 300 Suns.

Gravitational wave telescopes work in a very different way than optical or radio telescopes, but they do have one thing in common: they are tuned to a specific range of frequencies.

As a kid you ever play that game Guess Who? If you haven’t, it’s actually kinda fun. You have two players, each with a board in front of them. On the board are a bunch of flip cards with different characters. You have to guess your opponent’s secret identity through a process of elimination. You ask if they’re a kid or an adult, or a boy or a girl, or if they’re wearing glasses or bald. If you ask the right questions, and eliminate the correct possibilities, you’re left with only one remaining option: your opponent’s secret identity.

In partnership with NASA, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works has executed the first test flight of the X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft. This week's first flight was subsonic, but eventually the plane will demonstrate technologies aimed at reducing sonic booms to gentle thumps.

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed NGC 6537, the Red Spider Nebula in unprecedented detail, complete with sprawling legs, a glowing heart, and possibly a hidden companion lurking at its core.

Our Sun seems pretty calm these days with a largely stable regular solar cycle revealed by sunspots and flare activity but billions of years ago, it was quite simply a menace. Scientists have just captured evidence of what the Sun and early Solar System might have looked like, and it's more violent than we imagined.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is slated to be the next Great Observatory for the world. Its main focus has been searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-like exoplanets. However, to do that, it will require a significant amount of effort with only a coronagraph, the currently planned primary instrument, no matter how powerful that coronagraph is. As new paper from Fabien Malbet of the University of Grenoble Alpes and his co-authors suggest an improvement - add a second instrument to HWO’s payload that will be able to astrometrically track planets down to a precision of .5 micro-arcseconds (µas). That would allow HWO to detect Earth-size planets around hundreds of nearby stars - dramatically increasing the number of potential candidates for atmospheric analysis.