Space News & Blog Articles

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll feel a little cooler after reading about today’s topic: sunspots!

Over the past 32 years, Hubble has made about 1.4 million observations of our Universe. Physicist Casey Handmer was curious how much of the sky has been imaged by Hubble, and so has now mapped out all of Hubble’s observations into one big picture of the sky.

Of the thousands of exoplanets we’ve discovered, most of them closely orbit red dwarf stars. Part of this is because planets with short orbital periods are easier to find, but part of this is that red dwarf stars make up about 75% of the stars in our galaxy. This propensity of close orbiting planets has some pretty big implications for “potentially habitable” worlds, not the least of which is that most of these planets are likely tidally locked to their star. Or so we’ve thought.

How dating an ancient text revealed one of the oldest observations of aurora known.

Within Jupiter’s massive system of satellites, four large moons really stand out. They’re known as the “Galilean Moons” in honor of Galileo Galilee, who made the first recorded observations of them in 1610. The innermost of these moons is the rocky moon Io, which is slightly larger than Earth’s Moon and slightly denser. With more than 400 active volcanoes on its surface, it is the most geologically active body in the Solar System.

Imagine standing on Mars, and seeing this with your own eyes.

In 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the fabled “Ninth Planet” (or “Planet X”) while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The existence of this body had been predicted previously based on perturbations in the orbit of Uranus and Neptune. After receiving more than 1,000 suggestions from around the world, and a debate among the Observatory’s staff, this newfound object was named Pluto – which was proposed by a young schoolgirl from Oxford (Venetia Burney).

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll be the biggest thing in town after today’s topic: galaxy clusters!

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll be off to a good start with today’s topic: the big bang theory!

There are several ways we can measure the progress of human civilization. Population growth, the rise and fall of empires, our technological ability to reach for the stars. But one simple measure is to calculate the amount of energy humans use at any given time. As humanity has spread and advanced, our ability to harness energy is one of our most useful skills. If one assumes civilizations on other planets might possess similar skills, the energy consumption of a species is a good rough measure of its technological prowess. This is the idea behind the Kardashev Scale.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll see a glimmer of light with today’s topic: Zodiacal Light!

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) has been having some problems getting tested since it rolled out onto launch pad 39B last month. These tests, called wet dress rehearsals, are used to find any problems with loading the propellant and verify that all of the rocket’s systems are able to handle it being exposed to cryogenics.

The South Pole-Aitken Basin on the Moon formed from a gigantic impact about 4.3 billion years ago. But that impact may have changed everything about the Moon, and explain why the lunar farside looks so different from the nearside, the side we see from Earth.

On February 14th, 2020, the SETI Insitute and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) announced a new partnership, which they appropriately named the Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (COSMIC SETI). This partnership will allow the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to participate in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for the first time in its history.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll feel small but mighty with today’s topic: white dwarf!

The night sky is a great lever, something that people from all walks of life have been able to look upon and draw inspiration. Unfortunately, the ability to observe the planets and stars and study the mysteries of the Universe is something that is still not open to everyone. When it comes to astronomy, there is still a problem of access, which mirrors disparities in development, education, and health outcomes worldwide.

At the center of the more-massive galaxies in the Universe lie the intensely powerful and energetic phenomena known as supermassive black holes (SMBHs). This includes the SMBH at the center of the Milky Way, the mysterious radio source known as Sagittarius A*. The presence of these black holes causes the nuclei of these galaxies to become particularly energetic – aka., an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN), or a Quasar – and causes them to outshine all of the other stars in the galactic disk combined.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll have to carefully navigate around today’s topic: the Van Allen Belts!

On an outcrop of exposed volcanic and sedimentary rock on the eastern shores of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec, researchers have discovered what may be the earliest fossilized lifeforms ever discovered. These microbial ancestors lived between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years ago, only 300 million years after the Earth itself formed – a blink of an eye in geologic timescales. If life developed this rapidly on Earth, it suggests that abiogenesis – the process by which non-living matter becomes a living organism – is potentially ‘easy’ to achieve, and life in the Universe may be more common than we thought.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll be far from home in today’s topic: trans-Neptunian objects!