Space News & Blog Articles

Impulse Space, the California-based venture founded by veteran SpaceX engineer Tom Mueller, today unveiled its proposed architecture for delivering medium-sized payloads to the moon by as early as 2028.

Black holes are the remains of dead supermassive stars. When a star reaches the end of its life, one of two things will happen, either the thermonuclear pressure from fusion will cause the star’s outer layers to expand or gravity wins and the star collapses. In this latter case, what gets left behind is often a black hole, an object whose conditions are so extreme that even light cannot escape.

The corona of the Sun is an extraordinary place, with temperatures exceeding one million degrees Celsius, far hotter than the Sun's visible surface below. During solar flares, violent releases of magnetic energy, plasma can cool dramatically and condense into dense blobs that plummet back toward the Sun's photosphere, its visible surface. These falling streams of cooler material create the phenomenon of coronal rain. However, existing solar models couldn't explain the speed at which this cooling happens.

Most white dwarf binaries, where two stellar remnants orbit each other, have spent millions of years cooling down to surface temperatures around 4,000 degrees Kelvin. These ancient objects sit quietly in space, slowly radiating away their residual heat. But astronomers have discovered a peculiar class of these binary systems that seems to defy all expectations. These white dwarfs orbit each other faster than once per hour, and instead of being cool and compact, they're far hotter than expected, reaching surface temperatures between 10,000 and 30,000 degrees Kelvin, and twice the size theory predicts they should be.

Between 4.1 and 3 billion years ago, Mars was volcanically active. Massive eruptions existed across the planet's surface, throwing material and gases high into the thin Martian atmosphere. A new study uses climate modelling to explore whether these events could have transported water ice to unexpected regions of the red planet. The team, led by Saira Hamid from Arizona State University simulated the ancient volcanic eruptions to see what happened to water vapour during each event. The results from their study were quite surprising.

Use cases for smart materials in space exploration keep cropping up everywhere. They are used in everything from antenna deployments on satellites to rover deformation and reformation. One of the latest ideas is to use them to transform the solar sails that could primarily be used as a propulsion system for a mission into a heat shield when that mission reaches its final destination. A new paper from Joseph Ivarson and Davide Guzzetti, both of Auburn’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, and published in Acta Astronautica, describes how the idea might work and lists some potential applications exploring various parts of the solar system.

It is an established scientific fact that most galaxies in the Universe have a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at their center, leading to what is known as an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN). Also known as "quasars," AGNs are notable for how they emit so much light and radiation that they temporarily outshine all of the stars in their disk. In 2019, scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the very first image of an SMBH, which resides at the center of the M87 galaxy. However, about a century before this historic accomplishment was made, an astronomer detected a powerful jet coming from the center of this very same galaxy.

Mars is not the most hostile place in our Solar System to life but isn’t somewhere to put on your holiday itinerary just yet. Any organism attempting to survive there would face meteorite impacts, extreme temperature changes, ionising radiation cutting through the thin atmosphere, and highly oxidising salts in the Martian soil that destabilise the molecular bonds holding proteins and cells together. It's a combination of factors that, when taken together would seem insurmountable for most terrestrial life to get a foothold.

An interstellar comet is as its name suggests, a comet that originated outside our Solar System and travels through interstellar space before entering our neighbourhood. Unlike comets that orbit the Sun and formed within our Solar System, these rare visitors come from other star systems, traveling for millions or even billions of years across interstellar space. When they pass through our Solar System, their trajectories are hyperbolic rather than elliptical, meaning they're just passing through rather than remaining bound by the Sun's gravity. The most famous example is 2I/Borisov, discovered in 2019, which became the first confirmed interstellar comet observed.

A new study finds possible references to two classic supernovae in ancient texts.

Modularity is taking off in more ways than one in space exploration. The design of the upcoming “Lunar Gateway” space station is supposed to be modular, with different modules being supplied by different organizations. In an effort to extend that thinking down to rovers on the ground, a new paper from researchers at Germany’s space agency (DLR), developed an architecture where a single, modular rover could be responsible for both exploration and carrying payloads around the Moon or Mars.

Radio astronomy opens a window onto the invisible universe. While our eyes can detect visible light, countless objects in space emit radiation at much longer wavelengths, in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Where visible light gets blocked by interstellar dust, radio waves pass through unrestricted revealing objects that remain completely invisible to traditional telescopes. Radio telescopes detect these waves, revealing phenomena that optical telescopes simply cannot see. Radio waves also penetrate Earth's atmosphere far more easily than many other wavelengths, making ground-based radio observatories incredibly effective tools for exploring the universe.

The Great Oxidation Event, which occurred between 2.1 and 2.4 billion years ago, fundamentally transformed Earth's atmosphere and made complex life possible. Before this period, oxygen producing cyanobacteria had evolved hundreds of millions of years earlier, yet atmospheric oxygen levels remained low for an extended period. Scientists have long wondered over this delay, exploring various explanations from volcanic gases to microbial activity. A recent study from Okayama University in Japan offers a fresh view on this ancient mystery by examining two unlikely culprits, nickel and urea.

Ground-based telescopes have a fundamental problem that no amount of engineering can fix. They're trying to observe the universe through Earth's atmosphere, a constantly moving blanket of air that distorts and blurs incoming light. It's a little like trying to take a photograph of the bottom of a stream where the water is gently flowing! Space telescopes like Hubble easily sidestep this issue by operating above the atmosphere, but they can only photograph tiny slivers of sky. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a clever mathematical solution that could give ground based telescopes near space quality vision whilst retaining their ability to survey vast swathes of space!

SpaceX closed out a dramatic chapter in the development of its super-heavy-lift Starship launch system with a successful flight test that mostly followed the script for the previous flight test.

When galaxies collide, it's not a gentle affair but it does take millions of years. Over this time the two massive star systems slowly merge together, their gravitational pull drawing them closer. At the heart of each galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, an object containing millions or even billions of times the mass of our Sun. After the galaxies merge, these two black holes should eventually find each other, settling into orbit around their shared centre of gravity. The result is one of the universe's most extreme phenomena, a supermassive black hole binary. But to date, none have been found.

Centuries before the Roswell UFO Incident, Native Americans had their own stories to tell about alien visitations — for example, about the “Sky People” who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and have a special bond with the Cherokee Nation.

Avoiding, or at least limiting the damage from, geomagnetic storms is one of the most compelling arguments for why we should pay attention to space. Strong solar storms can have an impact on everything from air traffic to farming, and we ignore them at our own peril and cost. Despite that threat, the tools that we have applied to tracking and analyzing them have been relatively primitive. Both simulations and the physical hardware devoted to it require an upgrade if we are to accurately assess the threat a solar storm poses. As a first step, a new paper from a group led by researchers at the University of Michigan created a much more detailed simulation that shows how important it is that we also have the appropriate sensing hardware in place to detect these storms as they happen.

The gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon has led to one hemisphere of the Moon being locked facing away from Earth. Don’t be misled though, the Moon does rotate, it just takes as long to rotate once on its axis as it takes to complete an orbit of Earth. This is known as synchronous rotation and on the far side there is a massive crater called the South Pole-Aitken basin. Spanning over 1,930 km from north to south and 1,600 km east to west. This ancient impact crater formed roughly 4.3 billion years ago when a giant asteroid delivered a glancing blow to the young Moon. A new study from the University of Arizona reveals that this colossal crater holds secrets about the Moon's formation and early evolution.

Hunting for something completely invisible sounds impossible, yet astronomers do this regularly to probe the nature of dark matter. Dark matter is a mysterious material that makes up about 85% of all the matter in the universe, yet it remains invisible to our telescopes and detectors. Unlike ordinary matter, dark matter doesn't emit, absorb, or reflect light, which is why we can't see it directly. We know it exists because of its gravitational effects on visible matter, galaxies rotate too fast and galaxy clusters hold together too tightly to be explained by the matter we can see alone. Despite decades of research, we still don’t know exactly what it is.

Terraforming is the theoretical process of transforming a planet or moon to make it habitable for humans and other Earth like life. The concept involves altering an alien world's atmosphere, temperature, and surface conditions to resemble Earth's environment, such as adding oxygen to the air, creating liquid water on the surface, and establishing a stable climate. Mars is the most commonly discussed candidate for terraforming, with proposals ranging from releasing greenhouse gases to warm the planet, to introducing microorganisms that could gradually produce oxygen over thousands of years.