On July 11, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope finished its commissioning and commenced science operations. In the three years since, the powerful infrared space telescope has delivered on its promise. It's looked back in time and surprised us with the galaxies it found. It's directly-imaged exoplanets and studied the atmospheres of others. Among this and all of its other science, it's delivered a stream of stunning images.
When it is deployed in 2027, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide new insights into the cosmos. As the successor to the venerable Hubble mission, it will rely on a 2.4 m (7.9 ft) wide primary mirror and a field of view 100 times greater than its predecessor. This next-generation observatory will join the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), using its high-resolution and high-sensitivity instruments to view objects too faint, cool, or distant for other telescopes to observe. The mission is currently in the System Assembly, Integration and Test, and Launch phase of development at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
A remarkable 2.35 billion year old meteorite found in Africa in 2023 has opened a new window into the Moon's volcanic history, filling a gap in our understanding of how Earth's closest neighbour evolved over billions of years.
In our homes, dust is a nuisance. In space, it's a basic material from which stars, planets, and living things are made. Understanding where cosmic dust comes from is a ground-level question in astronomy, and researchers working with the JWST have uncovered one source: Wolf-Rayet stars.
Astronauts on future missions won't be surviving on freeze-dried meals and protein bars. Instead, they might be harvesting fresh rice from compact plants just 10 centimetres tall, engineered specifically for life beyond Earth. The revolutionary ‘Moon Rice’ project is developing the perfect crop for sustained space habitation, combining cutting edge genetics with the practical needs of deep space exploration.
Venus has always seemed like the last place you'd expect to find life. With surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and crushing atmospheric pressure, our neighboring planet appears utterly hostile. But high in its clouds, where conditions are surprisingly Earth-like, scientists have discovered something extraordinary: mysterious gases that shouldn't exist, unless something is alive up there….perhaps!
Names are a strange thing in astronomy. Sometimes scientists come up with grandiose, simple name, like the Extremely Large Telescope. Other times, they come up with unique sounding names, like quasars. And sometimes they come up with names that, while descriptive in some sense, are completely misleading in others. That is the case for Little Red Dots (LRD) - active galactic nuclei in the early universe that show up as a little red dot in the images captured by whatever telescope found them. However, they actually represent supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of times the size of our Sun. A new paper from Federica Loiacono and her colleagues at Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy describes one of these behemoths they found with the James Webb Space Telescope at a period of the early universe, about 11 billion years ago, known as the “cosmic noon”.
We live in an exciting time of technological innovation and breakthroughs in astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics. This is similarly true for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which seeks to leverage advances in instrumentation and computing to find evidence of "technosignatures" in the Universe. While the scope has expanded considerably since Cornell Professor Frank Drake and colleagues conducted the first SETI experiment over sixty years ago (Project Ozma), the vast majority have consisted of listening to space for signs of possible radio transmissions.
Was there once life on Mars? That question has been the subject of ongoing exploration and research for more than half a century, and is closely tied to questions about how and when life emerged on Earth. At present, there are six active missions exploring the Red Planet for possible evidence of past life (and possibly present), including NASA's Perseverance rover, the Curiosity rover, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the UAE's Hope orbiter, the ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), and China's Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover. In the near future, they will be joined by Tianwen-3, a sample-return mission consisting of two spacecraft.
Some exoplanets in their stars' habitable zones may be distinctly uninhabitable due to solar flaring. Red dwarfs are known for powerful flaring, and since they're dim and their habitable zones are close to the star, these flares could sterilize any planets and render them totally uninhabitable. But red dwarfs aren't the only stars that flare; most do, including our Sun.
The question of how life began has captivated humanity for millennia. Now, a team of scientists are preparing to use NASA's upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) to test different theories about life's origins by studying planets beyond our Solar System.
Imagine a space telescope with a mirror stretching 50 meters across! That’s larger than the width of a UK soccer field and nearly eight times wider than the James Webb Space Telescope. Now imagine that this enormous mirror is made not of precisely manufactured glass segments, but of liquid floating in space. This might sound like science fiction but it's the cutting edge concept behind the Fluidic Telescope (FLUTE), a joint NASA-Technion project that could revolutionise how we explore the universe.
Every time you take off from Heathrow, land at JFK, or pass through any major airport, you might be inadvertently announcing humanity's existence to alien civilizations up to 200 light years away. New research reveals that the radar systems keeping our skies safe are simultaneously broadcasting powerful signals deep into space, signals that could serve as cosmic adverts of our very existence.
We know that there are many asteroids in the Solar System that pose a potential threat. We're getting better at detecting them, and every few months we learn of another one on a potential course to strike Earth. It's obviously in our best self-preservation interest to detect these objects and to figure out how to protect the planet from them. That's what led to NASA's DART (Double-Asteroid Redirection Test).
With the recent first light milestone for the Vera Rubin observatory, it's only a matter of time before one of astronomy’s most long-awaited surveys begins. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is set to start on November 5th, and will scan the sky of billions of stars for at least ten years. One of the most important things it hopes to find is evidence (or lack thereof) of primordial black holes (PBHs), one of the primary candidates for dark matter. A new paper from researchers at Durham University and the University of New Mexico looks at the difficulties the LSST will have in finding those enigmatic objects, especially the statistical challenges, and how they might be overcome.
On Earth, water is so intertwined with life that our search for life on other worlds is essentially a search for water. When scientists find exoplanets around distant stars, a primary consideration is if they're in the stars' habitable zones where liquid water could persist on the planet's surface. The search for atmospheric biosignatures takes a backseat to the search for water.
If humanity intends to live and work beyond Earth, we need solutions for living sustainably in inhospitable environments. Even Mars, the most hospitable planet in the Solar System beyond Earth, is hostile to life as we know it. These include extreme temperature variations, a thin, unbreathable atmosphere, toxic soil, and higher-than-normal levels of solar and cosmic radiation. Given the distance between Earth and Mars and the time it takes to send missions there (6 to 9 months using conventional propulsion), these habitats must be closed-loop, self-sustaining environments that provide crews with food, water, and breathable air.
Dark matter is one of Nature's most confounding mysteries. It keeps particle physicists up at night and cosmologists glued to their supercomputer simulations. We know it's real because its mass prevents galaxies from falling apart. But we don't know what it is.
The Hubble Space Telescope is one of the most successful scientific endeavours in history, maybe the most successful. It's been observing the heavens for more than 35 years since its launch in 1990. The JWST is the most powerful and complex space telescope ever built, and has been expanding our horizons since its launch in December, 2021. When working together, they create synergy that not only benefits science, but provides stunning images of the cosmos.
We all know what it's like when Earth is on the receiving end of a solar flare. Things get spicy in the upper atmosphere, and the outbursts have the potential to disrupt technology here at home. Catastrophic flares of radiation devastate planets around other stars, too. Now it looks like scientists have found that planets orbiting close to their stars can trigger the flares that threaten to harm them.
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