Space News & Blog Articles

Last month, astronomers reported that a discarded upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, launched 7 years ago, was on a collision course with the Moon. The rocket in question carried NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, where the still-operating observatory provides advance warning on solar wind activities. The leftover rocket stage, meanwhile, became a floating piece of space junk orbiting the Sun. Its ultimate fate was unknown, until last month, when astronomer Bill Gray predicted that it was bound for an impact with the Moon sometime on March 4th, 2022.

Are there civilizations somewhere else in the Universe? Somewhere else in the Milky Way? That’s one of our overarching questions, and an answer in the affirmative would be profound.

When our Sun dies, the Earth will die with it. As a star of middling mass, the Sun will end its life by swelling into a red giant star. After a last cosmic moment of brilliance, the remnant core of the Sun will collapse into a white dwarf. This won’t occur for billions of years, but the mass and composition of the Sun means a white dwarf is its inevitable fate.

Where did Earth’s water come from? That’s one of the most compelling questions in the ongoing effort to understand life’s emergence. Earth’s inner solar system location was too hot for water to condense onto the primordial Earth. The prevailing view is that asteroids and comets brought water to Earth from regions of the Solar System beyond the frost line.

In 1929 astronomer Edwin Hubble made a remarkable measurement. Earlier in that decade, he had discovered that the Andromeda Nebula was not a nebula at all, but an entirely different galaxy completely separated from the Milky Way by millions of light-years of cold, hard nothing. He then expanded that initial discovery and began compiling a catalog of galaxies and their distances from us.

SpaceX’s entire business model is based on the reusability of its rockets.  That business model has proven viable time and time again as boosters continue to land safely only to be reused later.  But as the rockets they’re using get bigger and bigger, the harder and harder it will get for them to land directly on the ground, as models they’ve completed so far have.  So for its SuperHeavy Booster, designed to launch its Starship craft into orbit, SpaceX has to develop a new way of capturing the rockets without damaging them. Its head, Elon Musk, has shared a Twitter video showing how it will do just that.

If you want a handy definition of what’s “inside” the solar system, then the heliosphere is your best bet. This is a region dominated by particles constantly emanating from the Sun, and the Sun’s own magnetic field. This region extends out to millions of kilometers, well past the orbit of Pluto.

Scientists from the James Webb Space Telescope shared the first images from space taken by the new telescope. Since the 18-segment mirror is in the early stages of being aligned, the first image is understandably blurry and a bit jumbled. But its exactly what the team wanted to see.

In August of 2016, astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced that they had discovered an exoplanet orbiting in neighboring Proxima Centauri. Based on Radial Velocity measurements (aka. Doppler Photometry), the discovery team estimated that the planet was roughly the same size and mass as Earth and orbited with Proxima Centauri’s Circumsolar Habitable Zone (HZ). In 2020, this planet was confirmed by follow-up observations.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity tells us that matter and energy bend and warp the fabric of spacetime. Indeed, this bending and warping is exactly what we experience as the force of gravity, since the deformations in spacetime instruct matter how to move. This bending doesn’t just apply to matter, but also to light.

Mars is a parched planet ruled by global dust storms. It’s also a frigid world, where night-time winter temperatures fall to -140 C (-220 F) at the poles. But it wasn’t always a dry, barren, freezing, inhospitable wasteland. It used to be a warm, wet, almost inviting place, where liquid water flowed across the surface, filling up lakes, carving channels, and leaving sediment deltas.

The number of planets discovered beyond our Solar System has grown exponentially in the past twenty years, with 4,919 confirmed exoplanets (and another 8,493 awaiting confirmation)! Combined with improved instruments and data analysis, the field of study is entering into an exciting new phase. In short, the focus is shifting from discovery to characterization, where astronomers can place greater constraints on potential habitability.

The United Arab Emirates Space Agency releases a unique comprehensive Mars Atlas of the Red Planet.

The neutrino is perhaps one of the most annoying kinds of particles in all of physics. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli first proposed the existence of the neutrino to explain why the nuclear beta decay reaction appeared to violate conservation of energy and momentum. He thought that a tiny, invisible particle may carry off the extra energy and momentum.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk delivered a long-awaited, live-streamed update on his plans for launching the world’s most powerful rocket, with the spotlighted backdrop of a freshly stacked Starship and Super Heavy booster standing on the launch pad at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas.

A renewed era of space exploration is upon us, and many exciting missions will be headed to space in the coming years. These include crewed missions to the Moon and the creation of permanent bases there. Beyond the Earth-Moon system, there are multiple proposals for crewed missions to Mars and beyond. This presents significant challenges since a one-way transit to Mars can take six to nine months. Even with new propulsion technologies like nuclear rockets, it could still take more than three months to get to Mars.

The Parker Solar Probe’s mission is to study the Sun. But the spacecraft’s instruments have nabbed some pretty impressive data on Venus, as it uses the planet for gravity assists in its ever-shrinking solar orbit.

In the winter of 1609 Galileo Galilei pointed his newly built astronomical telescope at the planet Jupiter, and saw that the mighty planet was joined by smaller points of light. Over the course of the next few months he watched as four points of lights danced around the planet.

Trying to piece together the appearance of life on Earth is a little like looking through a kaleidoscope. There are competing theories for where Earth’s water came from, and there’s incomplete evidence for how the Moon formed and what role it played in life’s emergence. There are a thousand other questions, each with competing answers. Sometimes, contradictory research is published within days of each other.

An event horizon is the ultimate wall. It’s a boundary that separates one region of the universe from another. This separation is so complete that with event horizons it becomes utterly impossible for events on one side of the boundary to ever interact with or influence anything on the other side.

While black holes might always be black, they do occasionally emit some intense bursts of light from just outside their event horizon.  Previously, what exactly caused these flares had been a mystery to science.  That mystery was solved recently by a team of researchers that used a series of supercomputers to model the details of black holes’ magnetic fields in far more detail than any previous effort.  The simulations point to the breaking and remaking of super-strong magnetic fields as the source of the super-bright flares.