Space News & Blog Articles

For decades, astronomers have said that one of the most optimal places to build large telescopes is on the surface of the Moon. The Moon has several advantages over Earth- and space-based telescopes that make it worth considering as a future home for giant observatories. A new paper lists all the advantages, including how telescopes on the lunar surface wouldn’t be blocked by an atmosphere or impacted by wind, and how the low gravity would allow gigantic structures to be built that could be upgraded over time by astronauts.

“Progress on the big questions in astronomy, such as life on certain exoplanets or dark matter, will ultimately require high angular resolution, a large collecting area and access to the full optical spectrum,” write French astronomers Jean Schneider, Pierre Kervella, and Antoine Labeyrie. “All astronomy will benefit from the advantages provided by the localization on the Moon.”  

And even though it might be decades before we have a permanent presence on the Moon, the astronomers suggest we should start with small telescopes now.

Over the years, scientists and engineers have proposed various ideas for lunar observatories as part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program. Back in 2005 there was a proposal for a deep-field infrared observatory near one of the lunar poles using a rotating liquid mirror. Earlier this year, a team from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center proposed a design for a lunar Long-Baseline Optical Imaging Interferometer (LBI) for imaging at visible and ultraviolet wavelengths. Additionally, astronomers have advocated building radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon, since this “radio-quiet” zone always faces away from Earth and would provide the perfect location to study a variety of astronomical phenomena that can’t be observed in low radio frequencies from our planet, or even by Earth-orbiting space telescopes.

In their new paper, Schneider, Kervella and Labeyrie say that Moon offers a combination of three distinct advantages for astronomical observing. Its lack of atmosphere allows access to the entire spectrum, including the visible, ultraviolet, and infrared. Astronomers wouldn’t have to deal with atmospheric turbulence, and the Moon’s low gravity and absence of wind make it possible to install extremely large telescopes with very large instruments. This is impossible for satellites in orbit. Additionally, telescopes on the Moon would allow for the instruments to be upgraded and to have a very long lifetime, which is impractical for space satellites due to their limited amount of fuel.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is just over 8.8 billion km away, exploring the Kuiper Belt. This icy belt surrounds the Sun but it seems to have a surprise up its sleeve. It was expected that New Horizons would be leaving the region by now but it seems that it has detected elevated levels of dust that are thought to be from micrometeorite impacts within the belt. It suggests perhaps that the Kuiper Belt may stretch further from the Sun than we thought! 

The Kuiper Belt is found beyond the orbit of Neptune and is thought to extend out to around 8 billion km. Its existence was first proposed in the mid-20th century by Gerard Kuiper after whom the belt has been named.  It’s home to numerous icy bodies and dwarf planets and offers valuable insight into the formation and evolution of the Solar System. 

Launched by NASA in January 2006 atop an Atlas V rocket, the New Horizon’s spacecraft embarked on its mission to explore the outer Solar System. The primary objective was to perform a close flyby of Pluto, which it did 9.5 years after it launched, and continue on to explore the Kuiper Belt.

New Horizons completed its flyby of Pluto in 2015, and has been travelling through the Kuiper Belt since. As it travels through the outer reachers of the region, almost 60 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, its Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter (SDC) has been counting dust levels. The instrument was constructed by students at the Laboratory for Atmospheric Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Throughout New Horizon’s journey, SDC has been monitoring dust levels giving fabulous insight into collision rates among objects in the outer Solar System. 

The dust particle detections announced in a recent paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by lead author Alex Doner are thought to be frozen remains from collisions between larger Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). The results were a real surprise and challenged the existing models that predicted a decline in dust density and KBO population. It seems that the belt extends many billions of miles beyond the current estimates or maybe even that there is a second belt! 

Planet-forming disks are places of chaotic activity. Not only do planetesimals slam together to form larger worlds, but it now appears that the process involves the destructive recycling of water within a disk. That’s the conclusion from scientists studying JWST data from a planetary birth crèche called d203-506 in the Orion Nebula.

The data they studied suggest that an amount of water equivalent to all of Earth’s oceans is created and replenished in a relatively short period—about a month. According to study co-lead Els Peeters at Western University in Canada, it was relatively easy to discover this process in the protoplanetary disk. “This discovery was based on a tiny fraction of our spectroscopic data,” she said. “It is exciting that we have so much more data to mine and I can’t wait to see what else we can find.”

The Orion Nebula is a vast active star- and planet-forming region and the d203-506 protoplanetary disk lies within it at a distance of about 1,350 light-years away from Earth. Astronomers study the nebula to understand all aspects of star birth since there are so many newborn stars there. In addition, many are surrounded by disks of gas and dust, called protoplanetary disks (proplyds, for short). Those regions are excellent places to observe planet-formation processes, and particularly the interplay between the young stars and their disks.

The Orion Nebula is one of the most studied objects in the sky. Many of its protostars and their planetary disks likely contain water in some form. Image: NASA

We all know that water is an important ingredient for life. It certainly played a role in creating and sustaining life on our planet. As it turns out, water is a significant fraction of the materials in a proplyd. In the infant Solar System, water existed throughout our proplyd long before any of the planets formed, largely in their icy form, either as icy bodies or locked into asteroids and planetesimals. It also exists in interstellar space.

What are the atmospheric compositions of cold brown dwarf stars? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to investigate the coldest known brown dwarf star, WISE J085510.83?071442.5 (WISE 0855). This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand the compositions of brown dwarf stars, which are also known as “failed stars” since while they form like other stars, they fail to reach the necessary mass to produce nuclear fusion. So, what was the motivation behind using JWST to examine the coldest known brown dwarf star?

“The coldest brown dwarfs are brightest at infrared wavelengths and extremely faint and difficult to observe at visible wavelengths, so they are very well suited for JWST,” Dr. Kevin Luhman, who is a professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University and lead author of the study, tells Universe Today. “The target of our paper, WISE 0855, is one of the most appealing targets of any kind for JWST because it is the coldest brown dwarf and is very close to our solar system (the fourth closest system). It is such an obvious object to observe with JWST that it was selected (by multiple teams) for guaranteed time observations with all of the instruments on JWST.”

Dr. Luhman was responsible for discovering WISE 0855, which is located approximately 7.43 light-years from Earth, announcing his findings in a 2014 paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. He concluded that WISE 0855 exhibited a surface temperature of approximately 250 Kelvin (K), henceforth dubbing WISE 0855 as the coldest known brown dwarf star. For context, our Sun’s surface temperature is just under 5800 K, making WISE 0855’s surface temperature less than 5 percent of our Sun. Additionally, Dr. Luhman is responsible for discovering the third closest system, Luhman 16, which is a binary brown dwarf system located approximately 6.5 light-years from Earth.

For this study, the researchers used JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument to examine the atmospheric composition of WISE 0855, to include making new measurements of the surface temperature, which the team concluded is 285 K using several computer models for their calculations. They also attempted to detect phosphine (PH3), which they note has been identified in Y-class brown dwarf stars, along with searching for evidence of water ice clouds based on previous ground-based research. Therefore, what are the most significant results from this study?

“As discussed in our paper, the spectrum produced by NIRSpec is far superior to previous spectroscopy of WISE 0855, which allows much better characterization of its atmosphere, and better testing of theoretical models for cool, planet-like atmospheres,” Dr. Luhman tells Universe Today. “For instance, the NIRSpec data show that WISE 0855 does not have phosphine (PH3) in its atmosphere, unlike Jupiter’s atmosphere, which is difficult to explain. In addition, there has been a debate in previous studies about whether WISE 0855 shows evidence of water ice clouds (it should be just cold enough that it could have water ice in its atmosphere). We find that the data can be reproduced reasonably well with models that do not have clouds, so it remains unclear whether water ice clouds are present.”

Life on our planet appeared early in Earth’s history. Surprisingly early, since in its early youth our planet didn’t have much of the chemical ingredients necessary for life to evolve. Since prebiotic chemicals such as sugars and amino acids are known to appear in asteroids and comets, one idea is that Earth was seeded with the building blocks of life by early cometary and asteroid impacts. While this likely played a role, a new study shows that cosmic dust also seeded young Earth, and it may have made all the difference.

Although we’ve long known that cosmic dust accumulated on early Earth, it’s not been seen as a major source for early life because of how it accumulates. With comet and asteroid impacts, a great deal of prebiotic material is present at the site of the impact. Dust, on the other hand, is scattered across Earth’s surface rather than accumulating locally. However, the authors of this new work noted that cosmic dust can accumulate and be concentrated in sedimentary deposits, and wanted to see how that might play a role in the early appearance of terrestrial life.

Using estimates of the rate of cosmic dust accumulation in the early period of Earth and computer simulations of how that dust could accumulate in sediment layers over time, the team looked at how concentrated deposits might form. One of the things they noticed was that while cometary impacts could create a local spike in prebiotic material, the amount deposited by cosmic dust was much higher. They also found that the melting and freezing of glacial areas could significantly increase the concentration of chemicals from the dust. For example, for early sub-glacial lakes, the concentration of prebiotic chemistry from dust would have been much higher than that found at impact sites. This means that cosmic dust could have played a much larger role in the appearance of life than impacts.

There is still much we have to learn about early life on Earth and how life can form from prebiotic chemistry, but it is clear that life on Earth is only possible because of extraterrestrial chemistry. From dust came the building blocks of life, and so we and every living thing on Earth can trace its lineage back to the early chemistry of dust in the solar system.

Reference: Walton, Craig R., et al. “Cosmic dust fertilization of glacial prebiotic chemistry on early Earth.” Nature Astronomy (2024): 1-11.

The bad news is that Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander is tipped on its side after getting tripped up during its touchdown near the south pole of the moon. The good news? The plucky robotic spacecraft is nevertheless able to send back data.

Mission managers at the Houston-based company and at NASA, which is paying $118 million to support Odysseus’ space odyssey, are working on ways to maximize the scientific payback over the next nine or 10 days. “The vehicle is stable, near or at our intended landing site,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said today during a post-landing briefing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “We do have communications with the lander … so that’s phenomenal to begin with.”

Just by surviving the descent a day earlier, Odysseus made it into the history books as the first commercial lander to arrive safely on the moon — and the first U.S.-built spacecraft to do so since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

It wasn’t easy: Mission managers discovered during a pre-landing maneuver that a safety lock on Odysseus’s laser range-finding system hadn’t been disengaged prior to the probe’s Feb. 15 launch. That rendered the system inoperable.

Altemus said that when he told mission director Tim Crain that the spacecraft would have to land autonomously without its range-finders, “his face got absolutely white, because it was like a punch in the stomach that we were going to lose the mission.” Fortunately, Crain and other mission team members figured out a way to reprogram Odysseus to make use of an experimental laser range-finding system that was included among NASA’s payloads.

I can remember seeing images of SN1987A as it developed back in 1987. It was the explosion of a star, a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Over the decades that followed, it was closely monitored in particular the expanding debris cloud. Predictions suggested there may be a neutron star or even a black hole at the core but the resolution of the telescopes was insufficient to pick anything up. Now we have the James Webb Space Telescope and using its more powerful technology, signs of a neutron star have been detected. 

Supernova are among the most spectacular and intense explosions in the Universe that signal the end of a massive star’s life. They emit vast amounts of energy and radiation and at the moment of explosion, their light can exceed that of all the stars in the host galaxy put together.  There are the type II supernova and it is this type of phenomenon that brought 1987A to our skies. 

1987A occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud which is approximately 160,000 light years away and was first observed in February 1987.  It continued to brighten until its luminosity peaked three months later in May. It even became visible to the naked eye, the first since Kepler’s Supernova of 1604. Before the visible light signals were detected, three observatories detected short bursts of neutrinos. The bursts were attributed to the supernova and they gave insight into the events leading up to the collapse. Since the event, astronomers have been searching for its existence. 

Observations of similar objects, like the supernova remnant in Taurus, the Crab Nebula , revealed a neutron star at the core of the debris field.  In the years that followed astronomers hunted for evidence but no direct evidence had been found.

The James Webb Space Telescope was focussed onto the 1987A remnant in July 2022, making it one of the earliest objects observed by Webb. The team used the Medium Resolution Spectrograph (MRS) mode of the Mid-Infrared instrument (MIRI). It was a tool that had been partly developed by the team that were hunting for the 1987A neutron star. MIRI was a wonderful tool that could simultaneously image an object whilst it was obtaining its spectrum! This allowed observers the ability to detect spectroscopic variations across the object while analysing the Doppler shift at various points to assess velocity at each position.

On Wednesday, February 21st, at 01:40 p.m. PST (04:40 p.m. EST), an interesting package returned to Earth from space. This was the capsule from the W-1 mission, an orbital platform manufactured by California-based Varda Space Industries, which landed at the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). Even more interesting was the payload, which consisted of antiviral drugs grown in the microgravity environment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The mission is part of the company’s goal to develop the infrastructure to make LEO more accessible to commercial industries.

Founded in 2020 by former SpaceX employees and Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Varda is part of a burgeoning space industry (aka. NewSpace) that is taking advantage of the declining cost of sending payloads to space. In particular, the company’s vision is to develop pharmaceuticals and other products in space and return them to Earth via their proprietary reentry capsules. Traditionally, conducting research in microgravity was something that could only be done by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

With the growing accessibility enabled by reusable rockets and rideshare programs, the situation is rapidly changing. Many industries are looking to get in on this trend, ranging from biomedical and advanced materials research to manufacturing (to name a few). According to Varda, the processing in microgravity dramatically alters buoyancy, natural convection, sedimentation, and phase separation. This has the potential to produce high-quality drugs with more perfect crystalline structures due to the absence of gravitational stresses, leading to improved shelf life and effectiveness.

There’s also the potential that high-hypersonic flight testing has for the development of vehicle subsystems, thermal protective materials, navigation, communication, and sensors. As Varga CEO Will Bruey explained in November last year during an interview with Marketplace:

“We manufacture pharmaceuticals in space. Removing gravity allows us to make medicines you otherwise couldn’t on Earth. Gravity is kind of like a parameter. If you put a temperature knob on an oven, you create a whole world of new recipes and new food you can create. Similarly, if you can change gravity, you can also change the chemical process for drug formulations.”

The Sun is heading toward solar maximum (which is likely to be about a year away) and as it does, there will be more sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Over the last 24 hours there has been three, yes three X-class flares, the first peaking at X1.9, the second 1.7 and the final one a mighty 6.3. Flares of this magnitude caused radio blackouts, disruption to mobile phones and radio transmissions.  

The solar cycle is an 11 year recurring pattern of activity that is driven by the Sun’s magnetic field. The cycle begins with solar minimum with low levels of sunspot activity focussed mostly around the polar regions. This is followed by solar maximum with the increased sunspot activity that has migrated toward the lower latitudes. The cycle drives space weather too which is an outflow of charged particles from the Sun. Any increase or outbursts there can be an impact on satellites, radio communications and even the climate. 

Among the different manifestations of solar activity, some of the most powerful are the solar flares. They vary in size and intensity and are caused by a sudden release of magnetic energy. They are powerful emitters of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation and can produce particles energetic enough to be hazardous to astronauts, spacecraft and their systems. Teams of scientists study solar flares to help understand their nature and behaviour. Doing so may help to find ways to limit their impact on our technology and space exploration. The most powerful of the flares are the X-class flares. 

These X-class flares are classified according to their peak X-ray levels within the 1 to 8 Angstroms (1 angstrom = 10-10 metres). The scale used typically spans from X1-X9 with each letter depicting a tenfold rise in intensity.  An X2 flare for example is twice as intense as an X1 flare and an X3 flare, ten times stronger than X2 and so it goes on. On rare occasions, flares can exceed X10 but this is a rare event indeed. 

Sunspot region 3590, which is at a relatively high solar latitude, has generated to X-class events. The initial flare reached its peak at X1.9 followed a few hours later by an X1.7 flare. Both of these flares resulted in a brief radio blackout on the day time side of Earth. 

As stars in the Milky Way move through space, some of them have an unexpected effect on the Solar System. Over time, one comes closer to the Sun during its orbit in the galaxy. Some of them actually get within a light-year of our star and pass through the Oort Cloud. Such close flybys can affect the orbits of the outer planets and send cometary nuclei on a long inward rush to the Sun.

Astronomer Igor Yu Potemine at the Université Paul Sabatier in France, and his colleagues decided to look for likely “close-passing” stars and so-called “Nemesis” stars. Their tool was the SIMBAD database, which contains updated stellar parallaxes and proper motions from ESA’s Gaia satellite. They found a number of possible candidates. These stars drifted through the outer Oort Cloud and then went back out to interstellar space. Their actions set off gravitational perturbations responsible for cometary visits to the inner Solar System over the past billions of years. It’s important to note that gravitational influences from the giant planets, as well as something called the “Galactic tide” can also perturb objects in the Oort Cloud. For purposes of his study, Potemine restricted his search to nearby stars as candidates for Oort Cloud disturbances.

When we look at which stars could cause a comet swarm from the Oort Cloud region, a couple of types of stellar candidates come to mind. The first is what some researchers call a “Nemesis” star. That’s the name for a still-theoretical companion star to the Sun. It’s thought to be a dwarf star that occasionally (like every 25-30 million years) passes too close to the Sun. That action sends a swarm of comets to the inner solar system. Astronomers continue to look for candidates for this solar Nemesis, although the search hasn’t identified “the one” as yet. They also look for other stars that periodically get too close to the Solar System and even pass through the inner regions of the Oort Cloud.

A comparison of the Solar System and its Oort Cloud. 70,000 years ago, Scholz’s Star and companion passed along the outer boundaries of our Solar System (Credit: NASA, Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester)

The Oort Cloud/outer solar system region is a still-largely unknown place. It’s not one monolithic cloud but several regions with populations of icy cometary bodies. The outer edge of the region could extend out 3.2 light-years away from the Sun. Inside the Oort Cloud is the Kuiper Belt, which also contains cometary bodies and a population of small worlds such as Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and others. There’s also a sort of intermediate population of cometary objects thought to exist between the Oort cloud and the Kuiper Belt, sometimes referred to as the Hills Cloud. This region may be populated with many more cometary nuclei than the actual Oort Cloud. So, there’s plenty of material “out there” for passing stars to perturb, and it’s likely many have in the billions of years that the Solar System has existed.

Can we secure our place in the Solar System? Not in any absolute sense because nature can be very unpredictable. But we can make the effort to safeguard our civilization by cataloguing potentially dangerous asteroids. An upcoming space telescope will help.

NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) mission will launch no later than April 2025. The orbiting telescope will conduct a two-year all-sky survey in optical and infrared light. The main focus of the mission is to gather data on more than 300 million galaxies and 100 million stars in the Milky Way. But SPHEREx will also add to our knowledge of Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs).

A new paper examines SPHEREx’s capabilities and how the mission can contribute to Planetary Defense (PD.) Its title is “Planetary Defense Use of the SPHEREx Solar System Object Catalog.” It’s currently in pre-print, and the lead author is Carey Lisse from the Space Exploration Sector at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

SPHEREx “provides a unique space-based opportunity to detect, spectrally categorize, and catalogue
hundreds of thousands of solar system objects at NEOWISE sensitivities,” the authors write. NEOWISE is NASA’s successful asteroid-finding mission that just reached ten years of operation and has found over 3,000 NEOs (Near-Earth Objects). “By leveraging SPHEREx data, scientists and decision-makers can enhance our ability to track and characterize PHOs, ultimately contributing to the protection of our planet,” the authors of the new paper explain.

Among the many calamities that have struck life on Earth, asteroid impacts are the most dramatic. About 66 million years ago, an asteroid struck Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. That asteroid was about 10 km in diameter and wreaked havoc on Earth’s biosphere at the time. The odds of another asteroid strike are never zero, and less massive impactors could still alter civilization forever. It could cause unimaginable suffering and strife.

If you think about space travel and the means of escaping the confines of the Earth then most people, currently, are likely to think about the new Artemis project and the Space Launch System. That’s not the only new development though, Blue Origin have been working on their New Glenn rocket and finally we have got a glimpse of their new offering. The rocket was finally rolled onto the launch pad at Cape Canaveral for testing to commence and we may even see a launch later this year.

Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. It is American aerospace manufacturer based in Washington, USA and specialises in producing rocket engines for the Vulcan rocket and manufactures satellites, spacecraft and a variety of space based tech. Securing the deal to become the second provider of the Lunar lander for Artemis project, Blue Origin has most certainly become a major player in the space industry. 

Their latest announcement came with the incredible sight of the New Glenn vehicle rolling out onto Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral. This was the first glimpse the world got of their new advanced heavy-lift vehicle which promises to support a number of different commercial customer missions and NASA’s Artemis program to get humans back to the Moon.

Space lovers will perhaps recognise the name Glenn from the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn. It stands an impressive 98m tall (only about 12m shorter than Saturn V used by the Apollo astronauts). It has an impressive 7m payload bay which is double the volume of most commercial launch capabilities available today. I don’t know about you but I struggle to visualise what that means but to give it context, Blue Origin state that it could accommodate three school busses! 

The first stage, like the Falcon rockets, are reusable and designed to be used for at least 25 launches.  They will land on a sea-based platform almost 1,000km downrange from the launch site. As with the Falcon systems, the reusability of the first stage helps to keep costs per launch down. 

Universe Today has investigated the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, and astrobiology, and what these disciplines can teach both researchers and the public about finding life beyond Earth. Here, we will discuss the fascinating field of solar physics (also called heliophysics), including why scientists study it, the benefits and challenges of studying it, what it can teach us about finding life beyond Earth, and how upcoming students can pursue studying solar physics. So, why is it so important to study solar physics?

Prof Maria Kazachenko, who is a solar astrophysicist and assistant professor in the Astrophysical & Planetary Science Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, tells Universe Today, “Solar physics studies how our Sun works, and our Sun is a star. We should understand how our home star works for various reasons. First, stars are the building blocks of our Universe.  Even we are made of stardust. Second, our Sun provides energy for life and affects our life here on Earth (space weather, digital safety, astronauts’ safety). So, to be safe we need to understand our star. Finally, the Sun is the only star where we could obtain high-quality maps of magnetic fields, which define stellar activity. To summarize, studying the Sun is fundamental for our space safety and for understanding the Universe.”

The field of solar physics dates to 1300 BC Babylonia, where astronomers documented numerous solar eclipses, and Greek records show that Egyptians became very proficient at predicting solar eclipses. Additionally, ancient Chinese astronomers documented a total of 37 solar eclipses between 720 BC and 480 BC, along with keeping records for observing visible sunspots around 800 BC, as well. Sunspots were first observed by several international astronomers using telescopes in 1610, including Galileo Galilei, whose drawings have been kept to this day.

Presently, solar physics studies are conducted by both ground- and space-based telescopes and observatories, including the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope located in Hawai’i and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, with the latter coming within 7.26 million kilometers (4.51 million miles) of the Sun’s surface in September 2023. But with all this history and scientific instruments, what are some of the benefits and challenges of studying solar physics?

Prof. Kazachenko tells Universe Today that some of the scientific benefits of studying solar physics include “abundant observations and many science problems to work on; benefits from cross-disciplinary research (stellar physics, exoplanets communities)” with some of the scientific challenges stemming from the need to use remote sensing, sometimes resulting in data misinterpretation. Regarding the professional aspects, Prof. Kazachenko tells Universe Today that some of the benefits include “small and friendly community, large variety of research problems relying on amazing new observations and complex simulations, ability to work on different types of problems (instrumentation, space weather operation, research)” with some of the professional challenges including finding permanent employment, which she notes is “like everywhere in science”.

Astronomers have been on the hunt for a new kind of exoplanet in recent years – one especially suited for habitability. They’re called hycean worlds, and they’re characterized by vast liquid water oceans and thick hydrogen-rich atmospheres. The name was coined in 2021 by Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan, whose team got a close-up look at one possible hycean world, K2-18b, using the James Webb Space Telescope in 2023. In a newly accepted paper this January, Madhusudhan and coauthor Frances Rigby examined what the internal structure of hycean planets might look like, and what that means for the possibility of finding life within.

Hycean worlds are unlike anything we have seen in our own solar system, expanding the very definition of a habitable planet. They tend to be much bigger than Earth-like planets, earning them the moniker ‘mini-neptunes’. Their size makes them easier to detect than smaller rocky worlds, and their thick atmospheres give them a wider habitable zone.

Those same properties also make them ideal candidates for spectroscopic analysis, where measuring the chemical composition of the atmospheres might reveal biosignatures.

In order to tease out the potential characteristics of a habitable hycean world, Rigby and Madhusudhan used a modeling tool called HyRIS to map out possible planetary structures. They limited their models to only allow for habitable temperatures and pressures at the ocean’s surface, where the water meets the air.

Even with those strict conditions in place, the results showed a wide variety of possible internal structures. The ocean depths of a habitable hycean world could range from 10s of kilometers deep to 1000s of kilometers (for comparison, Earth’s ocean averages about 3.7km deep).

Intuitive Machines‘ Odysseus lander made space history today — becoming the first commercial spacecraft to survive a descent to the moon, and the first U.S.-built spacecraft to do so since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. But it wasn’t a trouble-free landing.

Ground controllers had a hard time establishing contact with the robotic lander just after the scheduled touchdown time of 6:23 p.m. ET (2323 UTC). Several minutes passed, and then Intuitive Machines mission director Tim Crain reported that there was a faint signal coming from Odysseus’ high-gain antenna.

“We’re not dead yet,” he said.

A few minutes later, the IM-1 mission team decided that the signal was evidence enough that Odysseus was still operating.

“What we can confirm without a doubt is our equipment is on the surface of the moon, and we are transmitting,” Crain said. “So, congratulations, IM team, we’ll see how much more we can get from that.”

It’s a headline straight out of the movies yet the White House has recently confirmed it believes that Russia is building space-based anti-satellite weapon! There seems to be no conclusive evidence what this might be but one option may be a nuclear bomb that would indiscriminately wipe out satellites within a huge volume of space! Not only would it devastate satellites but would cause more problems down on the surface and create a whole load of space junk. 

In a statement, the National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said that he did not believe the weapon had an ‘active capability’ yet and further went on to say he did not believe it had even been deployed. He went on to say that the White House was monitoring Russian activity and would continue to take it very seriously. 

Launching such a nuclear weapon into space would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which countries of the United Nations, including Russia, signed. It prohibits putting nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction into space, on the Moon or on any other celestial object. Such an act would likely prompt sanctions from other nations and further compound the situation faced by Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. Note that such a device wouldn’t even actually need to be used, just deploying it into space would be sufficient to violate the Treaty. 

A spokesperson from Moscow has denied the existence of such a program suggesting it was “malicious fabrication” that has been created by the American political teams. The Kremlin went on to suggest that such a fabrication might coerce the Congress to pass a $97 billion foreign aid bill which includes $60 million for Ukraine. 

Tempting though such a nuclear device might seem to any countries wishing to unleash devastation to other nations, the impacts can be far reaching. The destruction of any object in orbit will create a whole debris field with components ranging from a few millimetres to several centimetres. At the moment, there are several hundreds of millions of pieces of space debris being tracked from Earth. The high velocity items drifting around pose a threat to other satellites still in operation and even the International Space Station which has had to apply course directions to avoid collisions. 

Supermassive black holes are messy feeders, and when they’re gorging on too much material, they can hurl high-energy jets into the surrounding Universe. Astronomers have found one of the most powerful eruptions ever seen, emanating from a black hole 3.8 billion light-years away. The powerful jets are blowing out cavities in intergalactic space and triggering the formation of a huge chain of star clusters.

The black hole is part of a massive galaxy cluster, named SDSS J1531, which contains hundreds of individual galaxies, and all these galaxies have huge reservoirs of hot gas and dark matter. Using several telescopes for multiwavelength observations — including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter and submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Gemini North telescope’s Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), and the Very Large Array (VLA) — astronomers were able to discern that two of the central galaxies were engaged in a major merger. The merger activated the supermassive black hole in the center of one of the large galaxies, which produced an extremely powerful jet. As the jet moved through space, it pushed the surrounding hot gas away from the black hole, creating a gigantic cavity.

The merger and the resulting jets from the black hole created a remarkable and stunning chain of 19 young stellar superclusters wound the two galaxies like a string of beads.

In their paper, the astronomers said the dynamic environment of SDSS J1531 offers an excellent laboratory to study the interplay between mergers, and their multiwavelength studies allowed them to uncover the origin and evolution of the “beads on a string” star formation complex.

“We’ve reconstructed a likely sequence of events in this cluster that occurred over a vast range of distances and times,” said co-author Grant Tremblay, from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics CfA). “It began with the black hole a tiny fraction of a light-year across forming a cavity almost 500,000 light-years wide. This single event set in motion the formation of the young star clusters nearly 200 million years later, each a few thousand light-years across.”

The conditions for life throughout the Universe are so plentiful that it seems reasonable to presume there must be extra-terrestrial civilizations in the galaxy. But if that’s true, where are they? The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program and others have long sought to find signals from these civilizations, but so far there has been nothing conclusive. Part of the challenge is that we don’t know what the nature of an alien signal might be. It’s a bit like finding a needle in a haystack when you don’t know what the needle looks like. Fortunately, any alien civilization would still be bound by the same physical laws we are, and we can use that to consider what might be possible. One way to better our odds of finding something would be to focus not on a direct signal from a single world, but the broader echos of an interstellar network of signals.

As noted in a 2022 paper on the arXiv, one physical constraint is that there is a great deal of dust and interstellar gas in the Milky Way. Since radio light penetrates gas and dust better than visible light, the signals sent between stars are likely to be microwave radio signals. Another fact is that if you are traveling between the stars you need to know where you are and where you are going. One way to do this is to use pulsars as navigational beacons. In the paper the author argues that these can be combined as a broadband radio signal from the hub of the alien civilization that contains x-ray pulsar navigation metadata (XNAV).

One of the biggest challenges of detecting stray alien signals is that they would likely be difficult to distinguish from random noise. Even simple signals such as television broadcasts rely upon a known protocol. Without that protocol, we can’t decipher the message. This is similar to the challenge of breaking the Enigma code during World War II. One of the breakthroughs came when it was realized that most messages contained a weather report, so the message likely contained the German word for weather. Metadata in an alien signal could serve a similar role. If we know radio signals should contain XNAV metadata, then we can use this as a starting point. In game theory this is known as a Shelling Point.

The author outlines nine steps for how an interstellar civilization might construct a pulsar navigation system, and what the pattern of that network might be. By creating multiple scenarios, we might be able to recognize certain patterns as technosignatures. As the author notes, one limitation of this approach is that any metadata scenario we imagine is still based on how homo sapiens think, which might not be how an alien intelligence sees things.

All of this is speculative, but it’s worth considering. We will only recognize an alien signal if we better understand the forms they might take, and perhaps a few wild ideas like this one are exactly what we need.

Space debris is a thing.. It seems whether we explore the Earth or space we leave rubbish in our wake. Thankfully, organisations like Astroscale are trying to combat the problem of debris in space with a new commercial debris inspection demonstration satellite. Named ADRAS-J, the satellite – which is now in orbit – is hunting down an old Japanese upper stage rocket body which was launched in 2009.  It will approach to within 30 metres to study the module from every angle and work out how it can be safely de-orbited by a future mission. 

Space debris, or space junk comprises of man made objects orbiting Earth that are no longer needed.  It’s been about 70 years since the launch of Sputnik, the first human made satellite and already, debris in space is a problem and it can be anything from  spent rocket stages to defunct satellites or even fragments that are the results of collisions. Collectively these objects pose a real threat to operational spacecraft due their high speed. Left unchecked, space debris will become a major problem and could even, ultimately, cut off our access to space. 

The ADRAS-J mission marks the world’s first attempt to safely approach and survey a piece of space debris through the Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO) technique. Designed to approach a Japanese upper stage rocket body, ADRAS-J aims to showcase the technique while capturing images to assess the object’s movement and condition.

ADRAS-J was successfully launched from New Zealand on February 18 and is part of Phase 1 of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s plan to deal with space debris. Its name gives recognition to that purpose ‘Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan’. Its initial target, the Japanese H2A upper stage rocket body. 

The target object lacks any GPS data making it more tricky for the team to rendezvous but perhaps makes it a more realistic target for testing debris analysis activity. Over the next few weeks, the ADRAS-J team will continue to undertake in-orbit tests and checks before it finally, cautiously approaches the object. They will resort to using ground based observational data to approximate its position to make the approach as safe as possible. The initial approach will then be followed up with closer approachers to fully assess the object. 

For over a century, people have dreamed of the day when humanity (as a species) would venture into space. In recent decades, that dream has moved much closer to realization, thanks to the rise of the commercial space industry (NewSpace), renewed interest in space exploration, and long-term plans to establish habitats in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), on the lunar surface, and Mars. Based on the progression, it is clear that going to space exploration will not be reserved for astronauts and government space agencies for much longer.

But before the “Great Migration” can begin, there are a lot of questions that need to be addressed. Namely, how will prolonged exposure to microgravity and space radiation affect human health? These include the well-studied aspects of muscle and bone density loss and how time in space can impact our organ function and cardiovascular and psychological health. In a recent study, an international team of scientists considered an often-overlooked aspect of human health: our microbiome. In short, how will time in space affect our gut bacteria, which is crucial to our well-being?

The team consisted of biomedical researchers from the Ionizing and Non-ionizing Radiation Protection Research Center (INIRPRC) at the Shiraz University of Medical Sciences (SUMS), the Lebanese International University, the International University of Beirut, the MVLS College at The University of Glasgow, the Center for Applied Mathematics and Bioinformatics (CAMB) at Gulf University in Kuwait, the Nuclear Physics Institute (NPI) of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the Technische Universität Wien Atominstitut in Vienna. The paper that describes their findings recently appeared in Frontiers of Microbiology.

Artist’s impression of the Space Launch System (SLS) taking off. Credit: NASA

A microbiome is the collection of all microbes that live on and within our bodies, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, and their respective genes. These microbes are key to how our body interacts with the surrounding environment since they can affect how we respond to the presence of foreign bodies and substances. In particular, some microbes alter foreign bodies in ways that make them more harmful, while others act as a buffer that mitigates the effects of toxins. As they note in their study, the microbiota of astronauts will encounter elevated stress from microgravity and space radiation, including Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR).