Space News & Blog Articles

Mars is by far the most Earth-like planet in the solar system…but that’s not saying much.

Mars has received considerable attention in the past few decades, thanks to the many robotic missions exploring it to learn more about its past. NASA and China plan to send astronauts/taikonauts there in the coming decades, and commercial space companies like SpaceX hope to send passengers there sooner. This presents several significant challenges, one of the greatest being the lengthy transit times involved. Using conventional propulsion and low-energy trajectories, it takes 6 to 9 months for crewed spacecraft to reach Mars.

The challenge in the search for habitable worlds is clear. We need to be able to identify habitable worlds and distinguish between biotic and abiotic processes. Ideally, scientists would do this on entire populations of exoplanets rather than on a case-by-case basis. Exoplanets' natural thermostats might provide a way of doing this.

Generation starships may be the only way humans travel to other stars. These hypothetical spacecraft would travel at sub-light speed and take generations to reach their destination. Over the hundreds or even thousands of years, generations of human beings would be born, live, and then die on these ships. Even if that awkward arrangement could be made to work, how would everything else function for so long? What about the spacecraft? What about the AI?

People always want to know what will happen to Earth when the Sun eventually swells up as a red giant. For one thing, the expanding Sun will turn the inner planets into cinders. It will almost certainly spell the end of life on our planet. Mars might become more temperate and hospitable to life. In addition, it could well be a boon for the gas giant Jupiter and its moons. That's because the habitable zone of the Solar System will move outward from where it is now, to a spot encompassing the Jovian system and forcing changes on all of those worlds.

SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket got off to a great start today for its ninth flight test, but the second stage ran into a host of issues and made an uncontrolled re-entry.

The galaxy cluster Abell S1063 dominates the center of this JWST image. It's a massive cluster of galaxies about 4.5 billion light-years away. While it dominates the picture, it's not the primary target. It serves as a gravitational lens that magnifies even more distant galaxies that appear as glowing strings of light around its circular edges.

Modern ground-based telescopes rely on adaptive optics (AO) to deliver clear images. By correcting for atmospheric distortion, they give us exceptional pictures of planets, stars, and other celestial objects. Now, a team at the National Solar Observatory is using AO to examine the Sun's corona in unprecedented detail.

Binary star systems are pairs of stars held together by gravity, orbiting a common center of mass. More than half of all stars in our Galaxy are part of a binary or multiple-star system making them surprisingly common. The stars in a binary can vary widely in mass, size, and brightness, and their interactions often shape their evolution in dramatic ways. In some cases, the gravity from one star can drag material from its companion, leading to explosive events like novae or even supernovae. Studying binary systems not only helps us to understand the life cycle of stars but also helps us understand more about the behaviour of matter under extreme conditions.

NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars in the Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. The area is thought to have once been a lake bed that held water billions of years ago, making it a prime location to study the planet’s geological history. Equipped with advanced instruments, Perseverance is tasked with analyzing Martian rocks, soil, and the atmosphere of the red planet. It’s also collecting rock samples for a future collect and return mission to bring them back to Earth for analysis.

Identifying ancient Chinese astronomical events represents a fascinating aspect of modern astrophysics. Chinese astronomers maintained meticulous records of celestial events for over two millennia, documenting everything from "guest stars" (temporary bright objects) to comets, eclipses, and planetary conjunctions with remarkable precision and consistency. These records provide a wonderful archive of observations that often predate Western records by centuries. However, translating them and identifying their true nature presents significant challenges: ancient terminology must be translated, coordinate systems converted, and the nature of transient events determined from often brief descriptions. When successfully identified these observations can provide crucial data for understanding a variety of events but when unidentified can provide a head scratching mystery that lasts for decades, even centuries.

Of the roughly 6,000 exoplanets we've discovered, a significant number are in the apparent habitable zones of their stars. Most are giant planets; either gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, or ice giants like Uranus and Neptune. Could some of those have habitable exomoons?

Astronomers with the Event Horizon Telescope have developed a new way to observe the radio sky at multiple frequencies, and it means we will soon be able to capture color images of supermassive black holes.

The field of exoplanet studies has grown by leaps and bounds in the past twenty years. To date, over 5,900 planets have been confirmed in more than 4,400 planetary systems. Astronomers have even confirmed the presence of a multi-planet system around Proxima Centauri, the closest star outside the Solar System. And yet, astronomers have not confirmed the presence of any exoplanets around Alpha Centauri, the binary system located about 4.344 light-years from Earth (which forms a trinary with Proxima Centauri).

Twenty years ago, the US Congress instructed NASA to find 90% of near-Earth asteroids threatening Earth. They've made progress finding these asteroids that orbit the Sun and come to within 1.3 astronomical units of Earth. However, they may have to expand their search since astronomers are now finding asteroids co-orbiting Venus that could pose a threat.

Whenever scientists present new research showing potential biosignatures on an exoplanet, follow-up articles spread like ripples on a pond. Mainstream media usually runs with it, which shows how the issue captures people's attention. The issue of life on other worlds is a compelling one. This is what happened recently with the exoplanet K2-18b.