Space News & Blog Articles

How can we successfully collect and return samples from Mercury and Venus to Earth? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) discussed how future missions could successfully conduct sample return missions from the two innermost planets in our solar system. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners better understand new methods for conducting sample returns throughout the solar system, and specifically from hard-to-reach destinations.

NGC 1514 is a planetary nebula about 1500 light years away. William Herschel discovered it in 1790, and its discovery made him rethink the nature of nebulae. It's been imaged many times by modern telescopes, and each time a more capable one revisits it, astronomers learn more about it. The JWST is the latest to observe the curious nebula, and its observations help explain the unusual object.

Our Sun, like all stars, is made mostly of hydrogen and helium. They are by far the most abundant elements, formed in the early moments of the Universe. But our star is also rich in other elements astronomers call "metals." Carbon, nitrogen, iron, gold, and more. These elements were created through astrophysical processes, such as supernovae and neutron star collisions. The dust of long-dead stars that gathered together into molecular clouds and formed new, younger stars such as the Sun. Stars rich in metals. But there are still stars out there that are not metal rich. These extremely metal-poor stars, or EMPs, hold clues to the origin of stars in the cosmos.

When JWST launched, it found the most distant known galaxy: JADES-GS-z14-0, with a redshift of 14.32, and seen about 290 million years after the Big Bang. Now, a team of astronomers has gone even deeper, searching for galaxies in the redshift 15-30 range, which would be galaxies from 270 to 100 million years after the beginning of the Universe. They've found a few candidates in the 15-20 range, but these could be closer, low-mass dusty galaxies.

It’s no surprise that the future of humanity and even Earth’s biodiversity hangs in the balance and so the race to preserve life on our planet has never been more urgent. Species and ecosystems are vanishing at alarming rate so teams of scientists are turning to cutting-edge solutions to safeguard the natural world for future generations. A new paper explores cryopreservation as one solution, a technology that allows living cells to be frozen and stored for centuries, preserving genetic material and even entire organisms. This approach comes with its own challenges but as we explore this innovative frontier, it becomes clear that reimagining how and where we protect life is essential to securing the planet’s biological legacy.

Jupiter’s moon Europa is a fascinating target for study. Data from the Galileo spacecraft’s Solid State Imager showed that Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, has a geologically young and varied surface featuring formations like pits, spots, and cryolava domes. A new study has revealed more about the composition of the cryovolcanoes and their domes but also and more excitingly perhaps that they may even provide some form of habitation as we explore the Solar System!

The search for life involves the most sophisticated observational machines known to humanity. They peer out across the light-years, looking for some proof - any proof - that other life exists, out there. What if, despite all our efforts, those observations turn up NO evidence of life elsewhere in our Milky Way Galaxy?

Titan is Saturn's largest moon, with a thick atmosphere and liquid methane lakes, making it the only place besides Earth with stable liquid on its surface. A new paper reveals how a team of researchers have compared real craters on Titan with computer-simulated ones to determine the thickness of its icy shell. This information is important for understanding Titan's interior structure, how it evolved thermally, and its potential to produce organic molecules, making it significant for astrobiological research.

We've long known that black holes can produce powerful jets of ionized gas. These jets stream away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light. Jets produced by supermassive black holes are so powerful they are seen as quasars from billions of light-years away. But when you think about it, jets are a bit counterintuitive. Black holes trap and consume material through their tremendous gravity, so how can they push streams of material away? A recent study in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan shows how it works.

Whether your views on climate change are informed by politics or science, it's getting harder to ignore it's effects on our lives down here on Earth. But a surprising study reports that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere could also be affecting the problem of space junk. As the heat energy stored in our atmosphere increases, its ability to scrub debris from Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) decreases, increasing the risk of satellite collisions and making it more likely that humanity could lose access to space entirely.

To the uninitiated, astronomers' interest in ancient black holes might seem like an obsession. Why spend so much time, energy, and resources looking back billions of years just to detect the nearly undetectable? They do it because ancient black holes hold unique clues to understanding the modern Universe.

One of the challenges of searching for life in the Universe is that there is no single universal biosignature that could reveal its presence. Even if we could tell the difference between chemicals produced by living organisms and those from non-living sources like volcanoes, we're still making the assumption that alien life would resemble life on Earth. A new paper proposes that missions search for “energy-ordered resource stratification” which only happens when both self-replication and ecological competition are present.

Japan's Next Sample-Return Mission Could be to a Comet

The human perception of stars is that they are largely unchanging although of course in reality stars and their host galaxies do change over time, just very VERY slowly. When galaxies deplete their star forming materials, they traditionally become redder as short lived stars die while long lived dwarf stars persist for trillions of years. However, recent research challenges this understanding.

Random flashes of radiation in the sky are not all that unusual. A few years ago, once such flash was detected coming from a star that at the time, was believed to be from a star consuming a planet! The exact mechanism was unsure though for example; was it the star bloating up as a red giant and engulfing the planet or did the planet spiral in toward the star? The answer was until now, a little elusive. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope showed the environment around the star didn’t match a red giant so it must have been the planet crashing into the star!

Promoting Substainable Lunar Bases With Bio-Concrete

The two most prominent satellite galaxies of the Milky Way are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. A team of astronomers have recently tracked the movements of 7,000 stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and found that many of them are being pulled away towards the Large Magellanic Cloud! It seems the SMC is being pulled apart, perhaps leading to its eventual destruction as the tidal forces strip away its stars!

One of the things about astronomy that captivates me is that for every question we answer, we open up a whole bunch of other questions. Dark matter and dark energy are one such phenomenon that rather continues to confound us. There’s also the mystery of missing infrared light too but a team of astronomers think they may have found it! The team examined a region of sky using the Herschel Space Telescope and, by staking 141 images, found where individual dust-rich galaxies appeared blended together. The galaxies are absorbing starlight and re-emitting infrared radiation, and is this that may well account for the missing light.

Exploring the Moon with Biologically-Inspired Subsurface Robots

What can exozodiacal dust, also called exozodi, teach astronomers about identifying Earth-like exoplanets? This is what a recently submitted NASA white paper—which highlights key findings from the annual Architecture Concept Review—hopes to address as a team of researchers discussed how exozodi orbiting within a star’s habitable zone (HZ) could interfere with detecting Earth-like exoplanets. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand observational constraints of observing Earth-like exoplanets and what improvements could be made for future telescopes and instruments to overcome these constraints.

The widespread use of low Earth orbit (LEO), especially by thousands of CubeSats, has opened up many opportunities in research and business applications. One particular field that has benefited from the data that CubeSats provide is farming. Precision agriculture (PA) is a technique that uses advanced sensors, including the remote ones on CubeSats, to determine the health and productivity of a farm. A recent review paper from Lamia Rahali and her co-authors at the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria's Department of Agriculture looks at how CubeSats have been changing the practice of precision agriculture - and how they may continue to do so.