Space News & Blog Articles

Estimating stellar age has always been a challenge for astronomers. Now, a certain class of exoplanets is making the process even more complicated. Hot Jupiters – gas giants with orbital periods smaller than that of Mercury – appear to have an anti-aging effect on their stars, according to a new study. These enormous planets inflict both magnetic and tidal interference on their host star, speeding up the star’s rotation and causing them to emit X-rays more energetically, both of which are hallmarks of stellar youth. The result calls into question some of what we previously believed about stellar age, and offers a glimpse at the ongoing interconnectivity between a star and its planets long after their formation.

Since February 2019, NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander has been making the first-ever measurements of tectonics on another planet. The key to this is InSight’s Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument (developed by seismologists and geophysicists at ETH Zurich), which has been on the surface listening for signs of “marsquakes.” The dataset it has gathered (over 1,300 seismic events) has largely confirmed what planetary scientists have long suspected: that Mars is largely quiet.

Ever since astronomers first detected ultra high energy neutrinos coming from random directions in space, they have not been able to figure out what generates them. But a new hypothesis suggests an unlikely source: the mergers of black holes.

Historical data about solar storms carved in trees, and it’s a bit worrying. Falcon Heavy’s back after 40 months of absence. There’s a meteor shower and a total lunar eclipse in the coming days. And JWST gave us yet another version of Pillars of Creation.

Tragically sometimes stars engulf their own planets. While most stars are able to quickly cover up the evidence for their crime, a new study by astronomers has revealed that in some cases the evidence can linger for up to two billion years.

In 1961 astronomers discovered a powerful x-ray source coming from the constellation Cygnus. Not knowing what it was, they named the source Cygnus X-1. It’s one of the strongest x-ray sources in the sky, and we now know it is powered by a stellar-mass black hole. Since it is only about 7,000 light-years away, it also gives astronomers an excellent view of how stellar-mass black holes behave. Even after six decades of study, it continues to teach us a few things, as a recent study in Science shows.

Humans in space have to eat. In the early days of space exploration, they got to eat paste and drink Tang (or so the legends tell us). That’s hardly a great long-term diet. Plants should be in there, too. And, astronauts aboard the ISS have been growing gardens in space for years.

Researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have detected neutrinos emanating from the energetic core of an active galaxy millions of light-years away. Neutrinos are difficult to detect, and finding them originating from the galaxy is a significant development. What does the discovery mean?

The study of extrasolar planets has led to some astounding discoveries, many of which have defied the expectations of astronomers and challenged our notions about the forms planetary systems can take. For example, the discovery of Jupiter-sized planets that orbit closely to their stars (“Hot Jupiters”) defied what astronomers suspected about gas giants. Previously, the general consensus was that gas giants form beyond the “Frost Line” – the boundary beyond which volatile elements (like water) freeze solid – and remain there for the rest of their lives.

An asteroid 1.5 km across is no joke. Even a much smaller one, about the size of a house, can explode with more power than the first nuclear weapons. When an asteroid is greater than 1 km in diameter, astronomers call them “planet-killers.” The impact energy released from a planet-killer striking Earth would be devastating, so knowing where these asteroids are and where they’re headed is critically important.

The sun is currently sleeping. Its surface and corona are relatively quiet as it prepares to ramp up for an expected phase of high activity in 2025. This past October, the ESA’s Solar Orbiter was able to sneak in a close-up peak at the Sun as it slumbers.

The November 8th total lunar eclipse spans the Pacific and is the last until 2025.

There are plenty of exciting places in the solar system to explore. But few are more interesting than Saturn’s moon Enceladus. It’s one of the only planetary bodies known to have all six necessary components of Earth-based life. It has an active ocean and most likely hydrothermal vents, similar to those on Earth, where some species exist entirely separately from any solar-powered biosphere. All of this makes it one of the most likely candidates for life in the solar system – and the center of much astrobiological attention. Now a team from a variety of European countries and the US has proposed a mission to the moon that could profoundly impact our understanding of our place in the universe – if the European Space Agency (ESA) funds it.

In-situ resource utilization is a hot topic these days in space exploration circles, and scientists and engineers have had a great advantage of getting access to new materials from bodies on the solar system that either have never been seen before, such as asteroids or haven’t been visited in decades, such as the moon. Recently, China’s Chang’e 5 brought back the first sample of lunar regolith to Earth in almost 50 years. Using part of that sample, researchers from several Chinese universities have developed an automated system to create rocket fuel and oxygen out of CO2, using the lunar regolith as a catalyst.

Solar sailing seems like a simple concept – instead of being pushed along by the wind, as in a typical sailing ship, a spacecraft can use highly reflective said to be pushed along simply by sunlight. But as with almost all engineering challenges, that technique is much easier said than done. Sunlight can head up one side of a sail more than another, causing the ship to rotate unexpectedly. Other unforeseen situations could arise that can also have catastrophic consequences for any mission using this propulsion technology. Luckily, there is a way to account for those situations, though it involves a lot of math. Control theory is common in system design, and now researchers at Beihang University have devised a control scheme that they think could help minimize the risk to solar sails.

There’s no question that light pollution is a growing problem. Thankfully many scientists and advocates are working for change. And you can be a part of that change with a simple app that you can download to catalog the street lights in your neighborhood.

Fifty years ago, NASA and the Soviet space program conducted the first sample-return missions from the Moon. This included lunar rocks brought back to Earth by the Apollo astronauts and those obtained by robotic missions that were part of the Soviet Luna Program. The analysis of these rocks revealed a great deal about the Moon’s composition, formation, and geological history. In particular, scientists concluded that the rocks were formed from volcanic eruptions more than three billion years ago.

Scientists have long suspected that Mars was once warm and wet in its ancient past. The Mars Ocean Hypothesis says that the planet was home to a large ocean around 4 billion years ago. The ocean filled the Vastitas Borealis basin in the planet’s northern hemisphere. The basin is 4–5 km (2.5–3 miles) below Mars’ mean elevation.

What’s the current state of James Webb? What were the main technical difficulties and what does the future look like? What comes after JWST and LUVOIR? Will it be possible to ever build quantum telescopes? We’ve got the answers.!

In a recent study published in Microbiome, a team of researchers led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory conducted a five-year first-of-its-kind study investigating the microbiome (environmental profile) of the International Space Station (ISS). The purpose of the study was to address “the introduction and proliferation of potentially harmful microorganisms into the microbial communities of piloted spaceflight and how this could affect human health”, according to the paper.

Distances to different orbits can be hard to understand. For example, the ISS sits around 400 kilometers from Earth, whereas some satellites, such as Starlink, orbit at about 550 km. Often that is intentional, as objects in those orbits will eventually degrade their orbit and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. However, many systems orbit a few orders of magnitude higher – such as the Galileo satellites that make up the backbone of the European Union’s satellite navigation network. At an orbit of around 23000 km, it has some advantages over lower-hanging satellites but also plenty of disadvantages too. Now, the EU was to eliminate some of those disadvantages by releasing a whole new set of lower-orbiting satnav satellites.