Space News & Blog Articles

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 has completed its brief lunar mission. The lander spent two weeks conducting operations on the surface of the Moon before witnessing its final sunset as the Sun dipped below the horizon. This sunset marked the end of the mission, as Blue Ghost lacks the capability to maintain warmth during the freezing cold lunar night. Despite its short operational period, the lander accomplished its objectives, successfully testing all ten NASA payloads, gathering valuable data, and transmitting the findings back to Earth.

It’s ok, Darth Vader hasn’t got our humble planet in his sights! No this Death Star is a binary system where both stars are locked into an orbit which will lead to their collision, unleashing a powerful gamma-ray burst when they do. The object, WR104 is otherwise known as the ‘Pinwheel Star’ due to the presence of a spiral of dust engulfing the system. Recent observations have accurately measured the orientation of the stars and thankfully they’re not pointed at the Earth. When they do eventually collide, it’ll be someone else’s problem.

It’s looking more and more as if dark energy, the mysterious factor that scientists say is behind the accelerating expansion of the universe, isn’t as constant as they once thought. The latest findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, don’t quite yet come up to the level of a confirmed discovery, but they’re leading scientists to rethink their views on the evolution of the universe — and how it might end.

Somehow, we all know how a warp drive works. You're in your spaceship and you need to get to another star. So you press a button or flip a switch or pull a lever and your ship just goes fast. Like really fast. Faster than the speed of light. Fast enough that you can get to your next destination by the end of the next commercial break.

Welcome back to our five-part examination of Webb's Cycle 4 General Observations program. In the first and second installments, we examined how some of Webb's 8,500 hours of prime observing time this cycle will be dedicated to exoplanet characterization, the study of galaxies at "Cosmic Dawn," and the period known as "Cosmic Noon." Today, we'll look at programs that will leverage Webb's unique abilities to study stellar populations and the interstellar medium in galaxies.

The surfaces of the Moon, Mercury, and Mars are easily visible and are littered with crater impacts. Earth has been subjected to the same bombardment, but geological activity and weathering have eliminated most of the craters. The ones that remain are mostly only faint outlines or remnants. However, researchers in Australia have succeeded in finding what they think is the oldest impact crater on Earth.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in northern Chile, will give us a better view of the Milky Way than any ground-based telescope before it. It's difficult to overstate how transformative it will be. The ELT's primary mirror array will have an effective diameter of 39 meters. It will gather more light than previous telescopes by an order of magnitude, and it will give us images 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. It's scheduled to come online in 2028, and the results could start flooding in literally overnight, as a recent study shows.

One of the Holy Grails in cosmology is a look back at the earliest epochs of cosmic history. Unfortunately, the Universe's first few hundred thousand years are shrouded in an impenetrable fog. So far, nobody's been able to see past it to the Big Bang. As it turns out, astronomers are chipping away at that cosmic fog by using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile.

As civilisations become more and more advanced, their power needs also increase. It’s likely that an advanced civilisation might need so much power that they enclose their host star in solar energy collecting satellites. These Dyson Swarms will trap heat so any planets within the sphere are likely to experience a temperature increase. A new paper explores this and concludes that a complete Dyson swarm outside the orbit of the Earth would raise our temperature by 140 K!

We know that regular supernovae pose no existential threat to life on Earth in the near-term. But there are other varieties of supernova that are a little bit harder to predict, and little bit harder to spot.

Dark Energy is a mystery so daunting that it stretches and strains our most robust theories. The Universe is expanding, driven by the unknown force that we've named Dark Energy. Dark Energy is also accelerating the rate of expansion. If scientists could figure out why, it would open up a whole new avenue of understanding.

The ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has already wowed us with some fantastic images. After launching in July 2023, the telescope delivered some stunning first images of the Perseus Cluster, the Horsehead Nebula, and other astronomical objects. Now, the telescope has released its first images of its three Deep Fields.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has achieved groundbreaking discoveries in the field of exoplanet studies. In particular, it has made strides in the analysis of their atmospheres by studying light from the parent star as it travels through the gas surrounding the planets. JWST has recently bucked the trend and observed a some gas giant planets in the system HR 8799 and detected the presence of carbon dioxide in their atmospheres, suggesting there are similarities between the formation of this system and our own.