Space News & Blog Articles

Our knowledge of black holes is incomplete. We know there are stellar mass black holes that are created when massive stars collapse on themselves at the end of their lives of fusion. We know that supermassive black holes reside in the hearts of galaxies and sometimes merge with each other. The fact that there are two other hypothetical types of black holes that may or may not exist—primordial black holes and intermediate mass black holes—illustrates how our understanding is lacking.

When a massive asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, the solution seems straightforward; smash a spacecraft into it and knock it off course. That’s exactly what NASA successfully did with the DART mission in 2022, they proved this concept works and dramatically altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos. But new research reveals the chilling possibility that an asteroid hit in the wrong spot, and you might just be postponing the impact!

The story of minor planet discovery began in 1801 when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted Ceres between Mars and Jupiter, beginning an era of thousands of asteroid discoveries. The classification of these minor bodies has evolved dramatically over the years with Ceres itself moving from planet to asteroid to dwarf planet by 2006. Pluto's discovery in 1930 revealed an entirely different population of icy worlds in the outer Solar System, and advanced sky surveys later uncovered the Kuiper Belt populated by fascinating objects like Eris and Haumea. Today we know of hundreds of thousands of minor planets, from tiny asteroids to dwarf planets rivalling Mercury in size.

One of the issues that motivates astronomers concerns star formation. There are many unanswered questions about this fundamental process, including if it has always worked the same throughout the Universe's long history. One of the reasons the JWST was built and launched is to address this question, a testament to curiosity about the subject.

Interstellar visitors like Comet 3I/ATLAS grant astronomers a rare opportunity to study something from another solar system. It was first discovered on July 1st when it was entering the inner Solar System and was about 4.5 au from the Sun. It's an active comet with an icy nucleus, meaning it's warming up as it approaches the Sun and releasing gas and dust that form a coma and tail.

There are plenty of labs working on solutions to Kessler Syndrome, where there’s so much debris in low Earth orbit that rockets are no longer capable of reaching it without being hit with hypersonic parts of defunct equipment. While we haven’t yet gotten to the point where we’ve lost access to space, there will come a day where that will happen if we don’t do something about it. A new paper from Kazunori Takahashi of Tohoku University in Japan looks at a novel solution that uses a type of magnetic field typically seen in fusion reactors to decelerate debris using a plasma beam while balancing itself with an equal and opposite thrust on the other side.

How well do we understand the Universe if we struggle to understand its most energetic events? This question can trigger a wide-ranging philosophical or even epistemological discussion. It's the kind of question that can bring the Universe's most mysterious incidents into the foreground of busy lives.

The InSight lander arrived on Mars's surface in November 2018 with the singular purpose of taking the planet's vital signs: its pulse, temperature, and reflexes. This largely consisted of using an advanced seismometer to measure "marsquakes," seismic waves caused by rocks cracking under heat and pressure or meteoroid impacts. By analyzing how these waves pass through the planet, scientists were able to gain valuable insight (no pun!) into the interior structure and composition of Mars. While the InSight lander ended operations in 2022, scientists are still poring over the data it collected during its four-year primary mission.

Extremophiles are a favorite tool of astrobiologists. But not only are they good for understanding the kind of extreme environments that life can survive in, sometimes they are useful as actual tools, creating materials necessary for other life, like oxygen, in those extreme environments. A recent paper from Daniella Billi of the University of Rome Tor Vergata , published in pre-print form in Acta Astronautica, reviews how one particular extremophile fills the role of both useful test subject and useful tool all at once.

When the JWST finally began its long-awaited science operations in July 2022, there was a long list of targets awaiting its attention. Scientists compete for observing time by submitting proposals, and for every nine submitted proposals, only one gets approved. In the most recent Cycle 4 of the telescope's mission, scientists requested about 78,000 hours of observing time when only about 8700 were available.

The best opportunity to study black holes is when they're actively accreting matter. During these times, matter gathers in an accretion disk around the black hole, where it heats up and emits electromagnetic radiation. At other times, there's simply no light.

Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and is about 25 light-years away, making it a galaxy amenable to detailed observations. It's also a young star, only about 440 million years old. At that age, stars like Fomalhaut are surrounded by active debris disks made of rock and dust from collisions between planetesimals. Exoplanets form in these disks, and one of the hot topics in exoplanet science concerns how planets form in these circumstellar disks.

Circumstellar discs are believed to be key components in planetary formation. However, we have very little actual evidence of planets growing in the “rings” that surround young stars. So planet formation theorists were ecstatic to learn that two new papers in Astrophysical Journal Letters describe a planet that is actively forming in the gap it most likely created in the ring system of a young, Sun-like star.

The greatest challenge facing astrobiologists is that there is only one planet known to us that has life. Of all the bodies of the Solar System, only Earth has a dense atmosphere, liquid water on its surface, and the organic chemistry that supports life. However, these conditions did not exist billions of years ago when Earth was still young. While the nebula from which the planets formed was rich in volatile elements, the high temperatures in the inner Solar System largely prevented them from condensing, leaving them mostly in a gaseous state.

The detection of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in July produced quite the stir in the scientific community. This comet is the third interstellar object (ISO) to pass through the Solar System, the previous two being 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, which arrived in 2017 and 2019, respectively. Like its predecessors, the arrival of 3I/ATLAS highlighted just how common these objects are and inspired mission concepts for studying them up close. The latest comes from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), where a team has developed a mission study for a spacecraft that could perform a flyby with 3I/ATLAS.

The JWST has a well-earned reputation for delivering incredible images of the cosmos. From its very first image, the powerful space telescope has regularly wowed us with images of galaxies, nebulae, star clusters, and other cosmic objects. One of the telescope's main science themes concerns the birth of stars, and in a new image, the JWST zoomed in on Pismis 24-1, a brilliant young star in the Pismis 24 cluster.

Radio astronomy took another step forward recently, with the completion of Phase III of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Western Australia. We’ve reported before on how the MWA has investigated everything from SETI signals to the light from the earliest stars. WIth this upgrade, the MWA will continue to operate with much needed improvements while the radio astronomy awaits the completion of the successor it helped enable - the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

One of the confounding things about astronomy is that simple dust is an obstacle that astronomers must work hard to overcome. In a Universe that contains beguiling things like supermassive black holes, amino acids on the surface of comets, and puzzling, powerful bursts of extragalactic radio waves, it's somewhat humbling that simple dust particles require so much effort to deal with. One of the reasons the powerful JWST was built is to deal with this dust.

Jupiter is well-known for the massive aurorae that occur near the planet's polar regions, the brightest and most powerful in the Solar System. Much like aurora here on Earth, these shimmering lights are the result of interaction between the planet's magnetic field and solar wind. Unlike Earth's, though, Jupiter's largest moons - Io, Europa, and Ganymede (aka. the Galileans) - leave their own auroral signatures in the planet's atmosphere. These induced aurorae are known as "satellite footprints" and track how each moon interacts with Jupiter and the local space environment.

Observers from Europe to Australia will see the final lunar eclipse of 2025 this weekend.

Large exoplanets are more easily detected than small ones. It's axiomatic. While large planets block out more starlight during transits, small planets block out much less, letting them hide in the overpowering glare from their stars. To help detect sub-Jupiter mass exoplanets, astronomers search for the effect these planets can have on their surroundings.