Space News & Blog Articles

Launched in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy by discovering thousands of exoplanets in over 150,000 star systems. Kepler was specifically designed to detect Earth-sized planets by monitoring stars for periodic dips in brightness, which may result from planets passing in front of their star relative to the observer. Known as the Transit Method (or Transit Photometry), this technique has allowed astronomers to identify the majority of the more than 6,000 exoplanets in the current census. However, the method is not perfect and produces some false positives (initially as high as 5%–10%), which can sometimes be caused by other celestial objects.

Most people are familiar with the fact that the Earth spins on its axis once every day. The spin however, isn’t as steady as you might think. Like a spinning top slowing down, Earth’s axis wobbles, scribing out a circle on the night sky that currently points very close to the Pole Star in the northern hemisphere. The wobble occurs because Earth isn't a perfect sphere but bulges slightly at the equator. When the Sun and Moon pull on this bulge with their gravity, they create a force that tries to tilt Earth's axis. However, because Earth is already spinning, this tilting force doesn't simply tip the planet over. Instead, it causes the axis to trace out a slow circular wobble in the sky, much like a spinning top wobbles as it slows down. This wobble takes approximately 26,000 years to complete one full cycle.

Planets and moons are inseparable companions and while astronomers are unravelling the complexity of planet formation, moon formation remains mysterious. Our Solar System is fully formed, so to observe exoplanet and exomoon formation, we have to look to other stars. But while we're getting better at detecting exoplanets, detecting exomoons is much more challenging. Their small sizes relative to the exoplanets they orbit renders them practically invisible.

The KM3NeT Collaboration, a network of neutrino detectors based in the Mediterranean, announced in February that they had found the highest-energy neutrino detected to date. In a recent study, researchers from MIT proposed that this "ghost particle" could be the product of energetic Hawking Radiation emitted by a Primordial Black Holes (PBH) after it decayed outside our Solar System. If true, these findings could be the first evidence of the theoretical radiation Hawking proposed in 1974 by combining quantum field theory and General Relativity.

How will NASA’s upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) mission differentiate Earth-sized exoplanets from other exoplanets, specifically Earth-sized exoplanets within the habitable zone, also called exoEarths? This is what a recent study accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the potential future capabilities of HWO and what shortcomings need to be addressed for it to conduct groundbreaking science, specifically with discovering exoEarths.

Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape their grasp. They come in dramatically different sizes. Stellar mass black holes are the remnants of massive stars that have collapsed under their own gravity, typically weighing between three and a few dozen times the mass of our Sun and compressed into a region just kilometres across. Supermassive black holes, by contrast, are the giants lurking at the centres of galaxies, weighing millions to billions of solar masses. These beasts didn't form from a single collapsing star but grew over billions of years through gas accretion and mergers with other black holes.

The asteroid belt is found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and is a vast collection of rocks that is thought to be a planet that never formed. When our Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, the material in this region should have coalesced into a planet, however, Jupiter's gravitational influence prevented this from happening, stirring up the region so that collisions became destructive rather than constructive. What remains today contains only about 3% of the Moon's mass scattered across millions of kilometres.

Black hole mergers are some of the most violent events in the universe. Just how violent is becoming more clear in part due to a new paper published in Nature Astronomy. For the first time, it tracks the “recoil” that the newly formed black hole gets from asymmetric gravitational waves that are released during the merger. Turns out they are strong enough to “kick” the new, supermassive combined black hole into motion at a speed of thousands of kilometers a second.

Venus is often called Earth's "sister planet" because of their similarities in size, mass, and composition. Both are rocky worlds that formed around the same time in the inner Solar System however, despite these similarities, Venus evolved into a world vastly different from Earth, with surface temperatures around 465°C, crushing atmospheric pressure 90 times greater than Earth’s and thick clouds containing sulphuric acid circling the planet. These dramatic differences between two such similar planets make Venus a fascinating subject for planetary scientists to study.

What new methods can be employed to help astronomers distinguish the light from an exoplanet and its host star so the former’s atmosphere can be better explored? This is what a recent study accepted to Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated how a novel and proposed telescopic instrument that could be capable of characterizing exoplanet atmospheres in new and exciting ways. This study has the potential to help scientists develop novel tools for examining exoplanets and whether they could possess life as we know it, or even as we don’t know it.

Type 1a supernovae are used as standard candles in the cosmic distance ladder. These energetic explosions occur when a white dwarf, an extremely dense stellar remnant, is in a binary pair with another star. The companion could be anything from a main sequence star like our Sun, to a red giant, even another white dwarf.

NASA is preparing to send crewed missions to the Moon for the first time since the end of the Apollo Era over fifty years ago. With the success of Artemis I, which sent an uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a circumlunar flight and set a new distance record for a crew-capable spacecraft, NASA is gearing up for Artemis II. This mission, which NASA is now targeting for no sooner than February 5th, 2026 (and no later than April), will transport a four-person crew around the Moon without landing and return them home ten days later. The announcement was made during a news conference on September 23rd at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC).

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has provided stunning views using its sophisticated suite of infrared instruments and spectrometers. The latest images reveal numerous impressive features in the Sagittarius B2 molecular cloud, the most massive and active star-forming region in the Milky Way. By combining data from its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Webb captured Sgr B2 in multiple wavelengths, providing a contrasting view that showcases its massive stars and glowing cosmic dust in unprecedented detail.

What can auroras on a rogue planet teach astronomers about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the atmospheric composition of a nearby rogue planet, including its atmospheric temperature and auroras. This study has the potential to help astronomers better understand rogue planets, along with additional planetary atmospheric formation and evolutionary traits.

Mars, often called the Red Planet due to its rusty iron oxide covered surface, is Earth's smaller, colder neighbour. Orbiting the Sun at an average distance of 228 million kilometres, Mars shares remarkable similarities with Earth; a 24.6 hour day, polar ice caps, seasons driven by a 25.2 degree axial tilt, and evidence of ancient rivers and lakes that once flowed across its surface. Yet Mars today is a harsh world with a thin atmosphere just 1% the density of Earth's, average temperatures of -63°C, and no liquid water on its surface. It has an incredibly thin atmosphere composed primarily of carbon dioxide (95%) which is so tenuous that liquid water cannot exist on the surface, yet it’s still thick enough to generate global dust storms.

The search for extraterrestrial life may soon get a revolutionary new tool which is no bigger than a soft drink can. A team of Dutch scientists are developing the (Origin of) Life Marker Chip (LMCOOL), a device that could detect signs of life on distant worlds. The LMCOOL is best described as a tiny yet complete laboratory in the form of a computer chip. This device is being developed by a Dutch consortium led by TU Delft, with researcher Jurriaan Huskens and his team working to make the optical sensor particularly sensitive for the required biomarkers.

Tumbleweeds offer iconic visual depictions of desolate landscapes. Though typically associated with the American West, the most common type of tumbleweed actually originated in Europe, and is known scientifically as salsola targus, or more commonly as Russian thistle. So its only fitting that a team led by European scientists has some up with an idea based on the tumbleweed’s unique properties that could one day have groups of them exploring Mars.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed some amazing things about the Universe. From the earliest galaxies and planet-forming disks to characterizing exoplanet atmospheres, there is virtually no corner of the cosmos that Webb has not observed in extremely high resolution. This includes the Solar System, where Webb has used its sophisticated infrared instruments and spectrometers to provide the most detailed images ever taken of Jupiter, Saturn, the ice giants, and smaller objects like Dimorphos and the latest cosmic interloper detected, 3I/ATLAS.

Radio astronomy began in the 1930s when Karl Jansky, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, accidentally discovered radio waves coming from the Milky Way. He was investigating sources of interference in transatlantic radio communications, no-one expected this to be the birth of radio astronomy. The finding opened an entirely new window on the universe, one that could peer through clouds, dust and observe phenomena invisible to optical telescopes. The field really took off after World War II when surplus military radar equipment became available to scientists with major discoveries following rapidly from pulsars to quasars, the cosmic microwave background radiation and the detailed structure of galaxies. Today's radio telescopes, from giant single dishes like the 500 metre FAST telescope in China to vast interferometer arrays like the Square Kilometre Array, continue to revolutionise our understanding of the universe.

Rocket propulsion technology has evolved from ancient Chinese gunpowder filled bamboo tubes that shot off into opposing armies to the powerful engines of Saturn V and more recently the Space Launch Vehicle and Falcon 9. The journey progressed through centuries of experimentation by pioneers like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth who laid the foundations for modern rocketry. The space race dramatically accelerated development of new technology, producing the liquid fuelled engines that launched Sputnik, sent humans to the Moon, and built the International Space Station.

Star formation is a fundamental physical process in our Universe. Stars light up the cosmos, and give rise to planets, some of which may support life. While humans have no doubt wondered about stars since prehistoric times, new technological tools like the Milky Way have taken our natural curiosity to a whole new level. Now we can peer inside obscured regions and detect young stars in their dusty cocoons.