Space News & Blog Articles

Identifying ancient Chinese astronomical events represents a fascinating aspect of modern astrophysics. Chinese astronomers maintained meticulous records of celestial events for over two millennia, documenting everything from "guest stars" (temporary bright objects) to comets, eclipses, and planetary conjunctions with remarkable precision and consistency. These records provide a wonderful archive of observations that often predate Western records by centuries. However, translating them and identifying their true nature presents significant challenges: ancient terminology must be translated, coordinate systems converted, and the nature of transient events determined from often brief descriptions. When successfully identified these observations can provide crucial data for understanding a variety of events but when unidentified can provide a head scratching mystery that lasts for decades, even centuries.

Binary star systems are pairs of stars held together by gravity, orbiting a common center of mass. More than half of all stars in our Galaxy are part of a binary or multiple-star system making them surprisingly common. The stars in a binary can vary widely in mass, size, and brightness, and their interactions often shape their evolution in dramatic ways. In some cases, the gravity from one star can drag material from its companion, leading to explosive events like novae or even supernovae. Studying binary systems not only helps us to understand the life cycle of stars but also helps us understand more about the behaviour of matter under extreme conditions.

Modern ground-based telescopes rely on adaptive optics (AO) to deliver clear images. By correcting for atmospheric distortion, they give us exceptional pictures of planets, stars, and other celestial objects. Now, a team at the National Solar Observatory is using AO to examine the Sun's corona in unprecedented detail.

The galaxy cluster Abell S1063 dominates the center of this JWST image. It's a massive cluster of galaxies about 4.5 billion light-years away. While it dominates the picture, it's not the primary target. It serves as a gravitational lens that magnifies even more distant galaxies that appear as glowing strings of light around its circular edges.

SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket got off to a great start today for its ninth flight test, but the second stage ran into a host of issues and made an uncontrolled re-entry.

People always want to know what will happen to Earth when the Sun eventually swells up as a red giant. For one thing, the expanding Sun will turn the inner planets into cinders. It will almost certainly spell the end of life on our planet. Mars might become more temperate and hospitable to life. In addition, it could well be a boon for the gas giant Jupiter and its moons. That's because the habitable zone of the Solar System will move outward from where it is now, to a spot encompassing the Jovian system and forcing changes on all of those worlds.

Generation starships may be the only way humans travel to other stars. These hypothetical spacecraft would travel at sub-light speed and take generations to reach their destination. Over the hundreds or even thousands of years, generations of human beings would be born, live, and then die on these ships. Even if that awkward arrangement could be made to work, how would everything else function for so long? What about the spacecraft? What about the AI?

The grainy videos from the Apollo Moon landings are treasured historical artifacts. For many of us, that footage will be lodged in our minds until our final synaptic spark sputters out. But like all technology since the space race days, video technology has advanced enormously, and the next Moon landings will be captured in high-definition video. The ESA is so focused on getting it right that they're practicing filming lunar landings in a special studio that mimics the conditions on the lunar surface.

For centuries, astronomers have sought to understand the formation and evolution of the Solar System and the dynamics that govern it. In particular, there is the long-standing question of whether or not the planets' orbits will remain stable over time. However, these studies have generally treated the Solar System as an isolated system, focusing solely on the gravitational interactions between the planets. This is in spite of the fact that astronomers have known for some time that stars in the Milky Way make close passes to each other every so often.

Lunar exploration is entering a new era. Long after the Apollo missions, a renewed international interest comes with ambitious plans for a long-term presence on the Moon. NASA’s Artemis program is leading efforts to return humans to the lunar surface, with Artemis III aiming to land astronauts near the Moon’s South Pole as early as 2026. Meanwhile, countries like China and India have successfully conducted robotic missions, including landings and sample returns, while private companies are increasingly involved through partnerships and commercial lander missions. The focus has shifted from short visits to sustainable exploration, with goals that include building lunar habitats, developing on-site resource utilisation, and establishing infrastructure to support future crewed missions to Mars.

Asteroids are the ancient remnants of our Solar System's birth, rocky fragments that never formed into planets. Most of these celestial wanderers inhabit the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where Jupiter's immense gravitational influence prevented them from assembling into a single world. Ranging from house-sized boulders to Ceres, a dwarf planet nearly 1,000 kilometres across, asteroids preserve pristine records of the early Solar System's composition and conditions.

What happens when you see something that just doesn’t make sense? Perhaps you rub your eyes and consider it an anomaly. But what if you see it in an experiment? Say, travelling electrons that make different patterns depending upon whether they were detected? Then, you might want to change your sense of reality. Now, if you can develop a theory for the observations, then maybe you can start a new field of science. It has happened. Quantum mechanics is the name given to this relatively new field and it’s the topic that Sean Carroll writes in his book, “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe – Quanta and Fields”. In his book, there’s much ado about particles, fields, groups and diagrams; all with the aim of enabling any reader to make sense of it.

Just because we can find ozone in the atmosphere of other planets doesn't mean there's life. Ozone is a sign of life on Earth, but its detection on Venus shows that it can also be produced abiotically. This indicates that there are different pathways for its creation, not only on Venus but also on other Venus-like exoplanets.

We've been gazing at the Moon for a long time, yet it's still mysterious. We've sent numerous orbiters and landers to our satellite, and even brought some of it back to our labs. Those rocks only presented more mysteries, in some ways. Lunar rocks are magnetic, yet the Moon doesn't have a magnetosphere. How did this happen?

Exoplanet science is shifting from finding any detectable exoplanets we can to searching for those in their stars' habitable zones. NASA's proposed Habitable World Observatory and other similar efforts are focused on these worlds. The problem is, habitable zones aren't static.