Space News & Blog Articles

All (or at least most) astronomical eyes are on 3I/ATLAS, our most recent interstellar visitor that was discovered in early July. Given its relatively short observational window in our solar system, and especially its impending perihelion in October, a lot of observational power has been directed towards it. That includes the most powerful space telescope of them all - and a recent paper pre-printed on arXiv describes what the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discovered in the comet’s coma. It wasn’t like any other it had seen before.

The recent discovery of the third known interstellar object (ISO), 3I/ATLAS, has brought about another round of debate on whether these objects could potentially be technological in origin. Everything from random YouTube channels to tenured Harvard professors have thoughts about whether ISOs might actually be spaceships, but the general consensus of the scientific community is that they aren’t. Overturning that consensus would require a lot of “extraordinary evidence”, and a new paper led by James Davenport at the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington lays out some of the ways that astronomers could collect that evidence for either the current ISO or any new ones we might find.

What processes are responsible for our Sun’s solar wind, heat, and energy? This is what a recent study published in Physical Review X hopes to address as a team of researchers presented evidence for a newly discovered type of barrier that the Sun exhibits that could help explain the transfer of energy to heat within the Sun’s outer atmosphere. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the underlying mechanisms for what drives our Sun and what this could mean for learning about other suns throughout the cosmos.

What can binary star systems teach astronomers about the formation and evolution of planets orbiting them? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated past studies that claimed a specific binary star system could host a planet demonstrating a retrograde orbit, meaning it orbits in the opposite direction of the star’s rotation. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand binary and multiple star systems, specifically the formation and evolution of their planets and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.

Scientists from the University of Minnesota have discovered something extraordinary in Jupiter's polar regions that has never been seen before, a completely new type of plasma wave that creates aurora unlike anything we observe on Earth.

For astrobiologists, the search for life beyond our Solar System could be likened to where one would look in a vast desert where there's water. The most intriguing targets are planets called sub-Neptunes, which get their name because they're larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. What makes them fascinating is that their size and mass suggest they're packed with water but not the kind of water we know.

On August 8, 2024, the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii achieved a historic milestone by capturing the sharpest images ever taken of a solar flare. The unprecedented observations revealed coronal loops in stunning detail. The arches of superheated plasma following the Sun's magnetic field lines were captured at such resolution that it’s possible to see individual structures as narrow as 21 kilometres across.

The ESA's JUpiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is on its way to conduct detailed studies of Jupiter and its three icy moons, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. To pick up speed and reach Jupiter by July 2031, the probe will conduct a gravity-assist maneuver with Venus on Sunday, August 31st. According to the ESA, the mission suffered an anomaly with its communications system, which temporarily severed its connection with Earth. Fortunately, a coordinated response by teams at the ESA's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) and Airbus (JUICE's manufacturer) restored communications in time for the probe's flyby.

Astronomers have observed the distant active galaxy OJ 287 for many years. It's a BL Lac object, a type of active galactic nuclei known for their extreme variability. They display rapid and pronounced variability in their brightness across multiple wavelengths.

What can the Galactic Habitable Zone (GHZ), which is a galaxy’s region where complex life is hypothesized to be able to evolve, teach scientists about finding the correct stars that could have habitable planets? This is what a recent study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated a connection between the migration of stars, commonly called stellar migration, and what this could mean for finding habitable planets within our galaxy. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the astrophysical parameters for finding habitable worlds beyond Earth and even life as we know it.

In space, the one thing more important than ensuring access to food, water, and waste disposal (combined!) is the need for a steady supply of breathable air. Where the International Space Station (ISS) and other missions in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) can be resupplied regularly, missions operating in deep space will need to produce their own. There are several ways to go about this. One way is to use bioregenerative life support systems (BLSSs), which utilize photosynthetic organisms (like cyanobacteria) that take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen gas and edible algae.

According to astronomers, water worlds, though admittedly not those containing Kevin Costner, are one of the most common types of planets in our solar system. This is partly due to low density estimates and the abundance of water ice past the “snow line” orbit of a star. But a new paper led by Jie Li and their colleagues at the University of MIchigan, suggests there might be an alternative type of planet that fits the density data but is made up of a completely different type of material - soot.

Hidden within meteorites that fall to Earth are tiny spheres that have puzzled scientists for decades. These mysterious droplets, called chondrules, are time capsules from the birth of our Solar System and now, a team from Japan have used them to pinpoint exactly when Jupiter formed, solving a long standing planetary mystery.

A research team have used both archival Hubble Space Telescope data and new observations to precisely measure the binary star systems NGC3603-A1. One star weighs about 93 times the mass of our Sun, while its companion tips the scales at roughly 70 solar masses. Together, they represent one of the most massive binary systems ever discovered in our Galaxy.

Check out Part 3 of the series here.

A new study by Manuel Barrientos and colleagues from the University of Oklahoma reveals that between 0.6% and 2.5% of white dwarfs in our solar neighbourhood undergo dramatic cooling delays that could extend habitable zones for billions of additional years. The secret lies in an element known as neon-22, which after carbon and oxygen, is the most abundant element inside white dwarfs.

One of the advantages of having so many telescopes watching large parts of the sky is that, if astronomers find something interesting, there are probably images of it from before it was officially discovered sitting in the data archives of other satellites that noone thought to look at. That has certainly been the case for our newest interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, which, though discovered in early July, had been visible on other telescopes as early as May. We previously reported on Vera Rubin’s detection of 3I/ATLAS well before it was officially found, and now a new paper has found the interstellar object in TESS’s data going back to early May - and it looks like it may have been “active” around that time.

For nearly a century, cosmologists have relied on a simplified model of the universe that treats matter as uniform particles that don't interact with each other. While this approach helped scientists understand the Big Bang and the expansion of space, it ignores a fundamental reality, that our universe is anything but uniform. Stars cluster into galaxies, matter collapses into black holes, and vast empty voids stretch across space, all constantly interacting through gravity and other forces.

How exactly did the universe start and how did these processes determine its formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in Physical Review Research hopes to address as a team of researchers from Spain and Italy proposed a new model for the events that transpired immediately after the birth of the universe. This study has the potential to challenge longstanding theories regarding the exact processes that occurred at the beginning of the universe, along with how these processes have governed the formation and evolution of the universe.

Check out Part 2 of the series here.

The ambitious mission to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu and return them to Earth is paying off. Just as scientists had hoped, the asteroid is revealing details about the early days in our Solar System. More than just a simple space rock, research is revealing that Bennu contains not only material from the Solar System, but material from beyond our system.