Space News & Blog Articles

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, with a thick atmosphere and liquid methane lakes, making it the only place besides Earth with stable liquid on its surface. A new paper reveals how a team of researchers have compared real craters on Titan with computer-simulated ones to determine the thickness of its icy shell. This information is important for understanding Titan's interior structure, how it evolved thermally, and its potential to produce organic molecules, making it significant for astrobiological research.

The search for life involves the most sophisticated observational machines known to humanity. They peer out across the light-years, looking for some proof - any proof - that other life exists, out there. What if, despite all our efforts, those observations turn up NO evidence of life elsewhere in our Milky Way Galaxy?

Jupiter’s moon Europa is a fascinating target for study. Data from the Galileo spacecraft’s Solid State Imager showed that Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, has a geologically young and varied surface featuring formations like pits, spots, and cryolava domes. A new study has revealed more about the composition of the cryovolcanoes and their domes but also and more excitingly perhaps that they may even provide some form of habitation as we explore the Solar System!

It’s no surprise that the future of humanity and even Earth’s biodiversity hangs in the balance and so the race to preserve life on our planet has never been more urgent. Species and ecosystems are vanishing at alarming rate so teams of scientists are turning to cutting-edge solutions to safeguard the natural world for future generations. A new paper explores cryopreservation as one solution, a technology that allows living cells to be frozen and stored for centuries, preserving genetic material and even entire organisms. This approach comes with its own challenges but as we explore this innovative frontier, it becomes clear that reimagining how and where we protect life is essential to securing the planet’s biological legacy.

To the uninitiated, astronomers' interest in ancient black holes might seem like an obsession. Why spend so much time, energy, and resources looking back billions of years just to detect the nearly undetectable? They do it because ancient black holes hold unique clues to understanding the modern Universe.

Whether your views on climate change are informed by politics or science, it's getting harder to ignore it's effects on our lives down here on Earth. But a surprising study reports that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere could also be affecting the problem of space junk. As the heat energy stored in our atmosphere increases, its ability to scrub debris from Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) decreases, increasing the risk of satellite collisions and making it more likely that humanity could lose access to space entirely.

One of the challenges of searching for life in the Universe is that there is no single universal biosignature that could reveal its presence. Even if we could tell the difference between chemicals produced by living organisms and those from non-living sources like volcanoes, we're still making the assumption that alien life would resemble life on Earth. A new paper proposes that missions search for “energy-ordered resource stratification” which only happens when both self-replication and ecological competition are present.

Random flashes of radiation in the sky are not all that unusual. A few years ago, once such flash was detected coming from a star that at the time, was believed to be from a star consuming a planet! The exact mechanism was unsure though for example; was it the star bloating up as a red giant and engulfing the planet or did the planet spiral in toward the star? The answer was until now, a little elusive. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope showed the environment around the star didn’t match a red giant so it must have been the planet crashing into the star!

The human perception of stars is that they are largely unchanging although of course in reality stars and their host galaxies do change over time, just very VERY slowly. When galaxies deplete their star forming materials, they traditionally become redder as short lived stars die while long lived dwarf stars persist for trillions of years. However, recent research challenges this understanding.

Japan's Next Sample-Return Mission Could be to a Comet

Promoting Substainable Lunar Bases With Bio-Concrete

Exploring the Moon with Biologically-Inspired Subsurface Robots

One of the things about astronomy that captivates me is that for every question we answer, we open up a whole bunch of other questions. Dark matter and dark energy are one such phenomenon that rather continues to confound us. There’s also the mystery of missing infrared light too but a team of astronomers think they may have found it! The team examined a region of sky using the Herschel Space Telescope and, by staking 141 images, found where individual dust-rich galaxies appeared blended together. The galaxies are absorbing starlight and re-emitting infrared radiation, and is this that may well account for the missing light.

The two most prominent satellite galaxies of the Milky Way are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. A team of astronomers have recently tracked the movements of 7,000 stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and found that many of them are being pulled away towards the Large Magellanic Cloud! It seems the SMC is being pulled apart, perhaps leading to its eventual destruction as the tidal forces strip away its stars!

The widespread use of low Earth orbit (LEO), especially by thousands of CubeSats, has opened up many opportunities in research and business applications. One particular field that has benefited from the data that CubeSats provide is farming. Precision agriculture (PA) is a technique that uses advanced sensors, including the remote ones on CubeSats, to determine the health and productivity of a farm. A recent review paper from Lamia Rahali and her co-authors at the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria's Department of Agriculture looks at how CubeSats have been changing the practice of precision agriculture - and how they may continue to do so.

What can exozodiacal dust, also called exozodi, teach astronomers about identifying Earth-like exoplanets? This is what a recently submitted NASA white paper—which highlights key findings from the annual Architecture Concept Review—hopes to address as a team of researchers discussed how exozodi orbiting within a star’s habitable zone (HZ) could interfere with detecting Earth-like exoplanets. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand observational constraints of observing Earth-like exoplanets and what improvements could be made for future telescopes and instruments to overcome these constraints.

The search for life in our Solar System, however primitive, past or present has typically focussed upon Mars and a select few moons of the outer Solar System. Saturn’s moon Titan for example has all the raw materials for life scattered across its surface, rivers and lakes of methane along with rock and sand containing water ice. There’s even a sprinkling of organic compounds too but according to a new study, Titan can probably only support a few kilograms of biomass overall, that’s just one cell per litre of water across Titan’s ocean.

Astronomers are on the hunt for those in-between black holes, not the small stellar ones or the supermassive ones, but something right in the middle. Recently, a group of scientists spotted a star travelling at high velocity out of the globular cluster M15. This speedy star got kicked out about 20 million years ago and is now zooming along at an incredible 550 km/s, fast enough that it's actually escaping our entire Galaxy! The researchers think this stellar ejection might have happened because of some cosmic game of pool - basically a three-body interaction involving one of those middle-sized black holes they've been trying to find!

Newly discovered comet C/2025 F2 SWAN could put on a brief dawn display over the next few weeks. Discovered thanks to the hard work of online sleuths and amateur astronomers, the comet may brighten towards perihelion on May 1st.

We all know that black holes can devour stars. Rip them apart and consume their remnants. But that only happens if a star passes too close to a black hole. What if a star gets close enough to a star to experience strong tidal effects, but not close enough to be immediately devoured? This scenario is considered in a recent paper on the arXiv.

It’s easy to measure the rotation rate of terrestrial planet by tracking surface features but the gas and ice giants pose more of a problem. Instead, previous studies have relied upon indirect measures like measuring the rotation of their magnetic fields. Now a team of astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to refine the rotation rate of Uranus with an incredible level of accuracy. This time though, instead of studying the rotation of the magnetic field, they tracked aurora to measure one rotation!