Space News & Blog Articles

Newly discovered comet C/2025 F2 SWAN could put on a brief dawn display over the next few weeks. Discovered thanks to the hard work of online sleuths and amateur astronomers, the comet may brighten towards perihelion on May 1st.

Astronomers are on the hunt for those in-between black holes, not the small stellar ones or the supermassive ones, but something right in the middle. Recently, a group of scientists spotted a star travelling at high velocity out of the globular cluster M15. This speedy star got kicked out about 20 million years ago and is now zooming along at an incredible 550 km/s, fast enough that it's actually escaping our entire Galaxy! The researchers think this stellar ejection might have happened because of some cosmic game of pool - basically a three-body interaction involving one of those middle-sized black holes they've been trying to find!

The search for life in our Solar System, however primitive, past or present has typically focussed upon Mars and a select few moons of the outer Solar System. Saturn’s moon Titan for example has all the raw materials for life scattered across its surface, rivers and lakes of methane along with rock and sand containing water ice. There’s even a sprinkling of organic compounds too but according to a new study, Titan can probably only support a few kilograms of biomass overall, that’s just one cell per litre of water across Titan’s ocean.

What kind of mission would be best suited to sample the plumes of Saturn’s ocean world, Enceladus, to determine if this intriguing world has the ingredients to harbor life? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the pros and cons of an orbiter or flyby mission to sample Enceladus’ plumes. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and mission planners design and develop the most scientifically effective mission to Enceladus with the goal of determining its potential habitability.

In the great tug-of-war between the Sun and its planets, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus are much more susceptible to solar activities than scientists thought. Jupiter itself has an interesting reaction as it gets pummeled several times a month by solar wind bursts. They compress its magnetosphere and create a huge "hot spot" with temperatures over 500C.

Up until recently, astronomy was reliant entirely on electromagnetic waves. While that changed with the confirmation of gravitational waves in 2016, astronomers had developed fundamental frameworks in the electromagnetic spectrum by that point. One critical framework broke the spectrum into three categories based on their wavelength - infrared, optical, and ultraviolet. To astronomers, each of these categories was created by a different physical phenomenon, and monitoring each gave its insight into what that phenomenon was doing, no matter what the other spectra said. This was especially prevalent when researching galaxies, as infrared and optical wavelengths were used to analyze different aspects of galaxy formation and behavior. However, Christian Kragh Jespersen of Princeton's Department of Astrophysics and his colleagues think they have found a secret that breaks the entire electromagnetic framework - the optical and infrared are connected.

It’s easy to measure the rotation rate of terrestrial planet by tracking surface features but the gas and ice giants pose more of a problem. Instead, previous studies have relied upon indirect measures like measuring the rotation of their magnetic fields. Now a team of astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to refine the rotation rate of Uranus with an incredible level of accuracy. This time though, instead of studying the rotation of the magnetic field, they tracked aurora to measure one rotation!

We all know that black holes can devour stars. Rip them apart and consume their remnants. But that only happens if a star passes too close to a black hole. What if a star gets close enough to a star to experience strong tidal effects, but not close enough to be immediately devoured? This scenario is considered in a recent paper on the arXiv.

In 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a report detailing recently-declassified information on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Since then, the Department of Defense has released annual reports on UAP through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO). Nevertheless, there is still a lack of publicly available scientific data on the subject. To address this, a new study led by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Galileo Project proposes an All-Sky Infrared Camera to search for potential indications of extraterrestrial spacecraft.

Familiar Saturn currently provides dawn observers with a bizarre, ‘ring-less’ view.

NGC346 is a young star cluster in the Small Magellanic Clouds with an estimated 2,500 stars. It’s about 200,000 light years away and this image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope reveals a beautiful region of star formation. The bright blue stars are many times more massive than the Sun and will live short lives ending in spectacular supernova explosions. The image helps us to understand the stellar formation process in a galaxy that has fewer metals than our own Galaxy.

Astronomers have discovered a remarkable star system just 150 light-years from Earth that's destined for a spectacular cosmic display. The system contains a white dwarf star drawing material from its companion star, with the pair orbiting at just 1/60th of the Earth-Sun distance. With their combined mass reaching 1.56 times that of our Sun, these stars are gradually spiralling toward each other, setting the stage for a spectacular explosion. Fortunately, scientists estimate this cataclysmic event won't occur for roughly 23 billion years, long after our own Sun will have reached the end of its life cycle.

Although astronomers have ruled out a smash-up between Earth and an asteroid known as 2024 YR4 in the year 2032, the building-sized space rock still has a chance of hitting the moon. In fact, the chances — slight as they are — have doubled in the past month.

Despite their name, black holes can sometimes emit radiation. A team of astronomers has recently detected a flicker of X-ray radiation from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Andromeda Galaxy. This flicker was identified using 15 years of data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, revealing two distinct flashes in 2006 and 2013. Interestingly, these flashes coincided with bursts of neutrinos detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, offering exciting new insights into the extreme conditions surrounding the black hole.

Terraforming Mars has been the long-term dream of colonization enthusiasts for decades. But when you start to grapple with the actual physics of what would be necessary to do so, the effort seems further and further out of reach. Depictions like those of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy are just wildly unrealistic regarding the sheer amount of material that must be moved to the Red Planet to achieve anything remotely resembling Earth-like conditions. That is the conclusion of an abstract presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Leszek Czechowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

In 1986, the Voyager 2 spacecraft made a flyby of Uranus. It gave us the first detailed images of the distant world. What was once only seen as a featureless pale blue orb was revealed to be...well, a mostly featureless pale blue orb. The flyby gave astronomers plenty of data, but the images Voyager 2 returned were uninspiring. That's because Voyager only viewed Uranus for a moment in time. Things change slowly on the ice giant world, and to study them you need to take a longer view.

Mars exploration technology has seen a lot of recent successes. MOXIE successfully made oxygen from the atmosphere, while Ingenuity soared above the red planet 72 times. However, to date, no one has ever achieved one thing that will be absolutely critical to any long-term presence on Mars - making drinkable water. There have been plenty of ideas on how to do that. Still, NASA recently started funding a Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) graduate student named Lydia Ellen Tonani-Penha to look into the problem under their Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) funding program. Her Project Tethys will examine ways to purify the frozen or liquid brine that Mars is infused with.

NASA's Perseverance was scanning the rim of Jezero Crater when it spotted a Martian dust devil overtake and consume another smaller one. The rover was about a kilometer away from the larger dust devil, which was about 65 meters wide. The smaller one was about 5 meters wide. This isn't Perseverance's first encounter with dust devils. It's seen clusters dancing around it and even captured audio of a dust devil on Mars for the first time.

Tardigrades are some of the most durable animals ever found. They can handle temperature ranges from -271°C to over 150°C, pressures above 1,200 atmospheric levels, extreme drying, and intense ionizing radiation. Researchers have been studying some of the adaptations that can keep tardigrades alive in extreme environments and consider how they could apply to human space exploration, as well as insights into extraterrestrial life.

In a recent paper, an international team of scientists identified how the Orion spacecraft's European Service Module (ESM) could be reused. Rather than letting them burn up in Earth's atmosphere, as planned, they recommend that the ESMs use their power and propulsion capability to conduct valuable scientific research.

Any advanced civilisation needs power. Don’t know about you but I’ve been camping lots, even wild camping but the experience is a whole lot easier if you have power! It’s the same for a long-term presence on the Moon (not that I’m likening my camping to a trip to the Moon!) but instead of launching a bunch of solar panels, a new paper suggests we can get power from the lunar regolith! Researchers suggest that the fine dusty material on the surface of the Moon could be melted to provide a type of crystals that can produce solar electricity! This would allow solar panels to be built on the Moon with only 1% of components sent from Earth!