Space News & Blog Articles

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.

Exoplanet scientists are eagerly awaiting the discovery of an atmosphere around a terrestrial exoplanet. Not a thin, tenuous, barely perceptible collection of molecules, but a thick, robust, potentially life-supporting atmosphere. Due to the way we detect exoplanets, most of the terrestrial planets we find are orbiting red dwarfs (M dwarfs).

In 1949, famed mathematician and physicist John von Neumann delivered a series of addresses at the University of Illinois, where he introduced the concept of "universal constructor." The theory was further detailed in the 1966 book, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, a collection of von Neumann's writings compiled and completed by a colleague after his death. In the years that followed, scientists engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) considered how advanced civilizations could rely on self-replicating probes to explore the galaxy.

A few days ago, I wrote about non-singular black hole models, specifically one known as the Hayward model. Since its introduction in 2006, several variations of the Hayward model have been introduced, including a rotating model similar to the Kerr metric used to study the supermassive black holes we've observed directly. This raises an interesting question: what if we use a rotating Hayward model instead of the usual Kerr model? A recent study answers that question.

Star formation has a lot of complex physics that feed into it. Classical models used something equivalent to a “collapse” of a cloud of gas by gravity, with a star being birthed in the middle. More modern understandings show a feature called a “streamer”, which funnels gas and dust to proto-stars from the surrounding disc of material. But our understanding of those streamers is still in its early stages, like the stars they are forming. So a new paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Pablo Cortes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his co-authors is a welcome addition to the literature - and it shows a unique feature of the process for the first time.

The cosmic voids of the universe are empty of matter. But we all know there’s more to the universe than just matter. Nothing in this universe is completely empty, and that’s because there’s always your constant companions. Me? No, not me, I only visit once a month.

Is there anything more dramatic than an exploding star? More than just extraordinarily bright, energetic events that can light up the sky for months, these explosions play important roles in the cosmos. Supernova create heavy elements and spread them out into their surroundings, where they can be taken up in the next round of planet and star formation.

Brown dwarfs are a growing area of focus for astronomers, thanks to improved instruments that have the necessary resolution to visualize them. The term describes substellar objects that are about 13 to 80 Jupiter masses, making them too small to become stars, but massive enough to experience some nuclear fusion in their cores and produce heat. Initially theorized in the 1960s, it was not until the mid-1990s that this class of stellar object was confirmed through direct observation. And thanks to next-generation telescopes and improved data-sharing techniques, there are growing opportunities to study these objects.

When it comes to finding baby, still-forming planets around young stars, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory is astronomers' most adept tool. ALMA has delivered many images of the protoplanetary disks around young stars, with gaps and rings carved in them by young planets. In new research, a team of researchers used ALMA to image 16 disks around young class 0/1 protostars and found that planets may start forming sooner than previously thought.

Sometimes space exploration doesn’t go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might not have succeeded, allowing them to try again. A group from MIT’s Space Enabled Research Group, part of its Media Lab, recently released a paper in Space Science Reviews that describes the design and testing results of a pair of passive sensors sent to the Moon on the ill-fated Rashid-1 rover.

At the heart of the Milky Way, just 27,000 light-years from Earth, there is a supermassive black hole with a mass of more than 4 million Suns. Nearly all galaxies contain a supermassive black hole, and many of them are much more massive. The black hole in the elliptical galaxy M87 has a mass of 6.5 billion Suns. The largest black holes are more than 40 billion solar masses. We know these monsters lurk in the cosmos, but how did they form?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.