Space News & Blog Articles

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll feel a little odd after today’s topic: irregular galaxies!

The dream of building a permanent settlement on the Moon: a place where humans from all walks of life can come together and give rise to a new culture and identity. A place where vital scientific research and experiments can be conducted, lunar industries created, and people can go for a little “adventure tourism.” It’s been the stuff of science fiction and speculative literature for over a century. But in the coming years, it could very well become a reality.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll finally get away with today’s topic: escape velocity!

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll be a source of inspiration from today’s topic: giant molecular clouds!

What causes an otherwise unremarkable star to become over 100 times brighter? That’s a question astronomers have been pondering since 1936, when a star in Orion brightened from 16th magnitude to 8th magnitude in a single year.

Thanks to the explosion in discoveries made in the last decade, the study of extrasolar planets have entered a new phase. With 4,884 confirmed discoveries in 3,659 systems (and another 7,958 candidates awaiting confirmation), scientists are shifting their focus from discovery to characterization. This means examining known exoplanets more closely to determine if they possess the necessary conditions for life, as well as “biomarkers” that could indicate the presence of life.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll feel mysterious about today’s topic: dark matter!

December 17 is an historic day for flying machines, so it wouldn’t be surprising if we hear the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter makes an attempt at its 18th flight sometime today. In case you need a little reminder, on this day in 1903, the Wright Brothers had their first successful flight, flying their plane for exactly 120 feet over 12 seconds.

Outer space is a great place to go if you want to study the Earth. Although outward-looking spacecraft like Hubble and the highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope garner most of the attention from the public – understandably, given their spectacular imagery of distant astronomical phenomena – the large majority of satellite infrastructure in orbit is actually focused back on our home planet. The unparalleled view of the planet from space offers unique advantages to scientists hoping to measure changes and patterns here on Earth that just aren’t possible from the ground. In 2022, NASA will launch four new Earth science missions, each offering something unique, and adding a new way to understand, and protect, our home.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll do a little dance about today’s topic: cosmic strings!

For the first time ever, a spacecraft has flown through the Sun’s outer atmosphere. The Parker Solar Probe passed through the out portion of the Sun’s corona in April of 2021, passing directly through streamers of solar plasma.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll have to be careful around today’s topic: cosmic rays!

For literally being black in the truest sense of the word, black holes are surprisingly easy to spot.  Astronomers have spent decades at this point purposely searching for them and have found thousands already, with potentially 100 billion existing in our part of the universe.  We are still finding new types and configurations of black holes consistently.  Now, new research led by Dr. Karina Voggel of the Strasbourg Observatory found a pair of black holes that hold the new records of being both the closest supermassive black hole pair to Earth and the closest together pair ever seen.

In the search for “potentially-habitable” extrasolar planets, one of the main things scientists look at is stellar activity. Whereas stars like our own, a G-type (G2V) yellow dwarf, are considered stable over time, other classes are variable and prone to flare-ups – particularly M-type red dwarf stars. Even if a star has multiple planets orbiting within its habitable zone (HZ), the tendency to periodically flare could render these planets completely uninhabitable.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll get a good look at today’s topic: chromosphere!

During the night of December 10, 2021, severe weather tore through several US states, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee. At least 70 tornado-like events were reported, and one storm cell was tracked on radar for approximately four hours as it traveled for more than 400 km (250 miles.)

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll be dazzled by today’s topic: albedo!

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You’ll surely measure the awesomeness of today’s topic: absolute magnitude!

More than a hundred years have passed since Einstein formalized his theory of General Relativity (GR), the geometric theory of gravitation that revolutionized our understanding of the Universe. And yet, astronomers are still subjecting it to rigorous tests, hoping to find deviations from this established theory. The reason is simple: any indication of physics beyond GR would open new windows onto the Universe and help resolve some of the deepest mysteries about the cosmos.

Most exoplanets are found using a technique known as the transit method, where the exoplanet passes in front of its star, causing the star to dim slightly. It takes several transits to confirm an exoplanet, so it’s not surprising that most known exoplanets have a fairly short orbital period. Months or days rather than years. There’s also an observational bias in that most known stars are red dwarfs, so it’s usually not surprising that we’ve found yet another exoplanet closely orbiting a red dwarf star. But sometimes what we find is so extreme, it really is surprising.