Space News & Blog Articles

Plate tectonics is a fundamental aspect of Earth's geological activity and history. In addition to constantly rearranging the placement of continents, they also play a major role in maintaining the conditions that ensure Earth's continued habitability. However, Earth is the only terrestrial (rocky) planet in the Solar System with active plate tectonics. While this is understandable for Mercury and Mars, which are single-plate planets that are largely geologically inactive, due to rapid cooling in their interiors billions of years ago. But Venus, Earth's "Sister Planet," has remained something of a mystery.

On a summer day in 709 BCE, scribes at the Lu Duchy Court in ancient China looked up to witness something extraordinary. The Sun vanished completely from the sky, and in its place hung a ghostly halo. They recorded the event carefully, noting that during totality the eclipsed Sun appeared "completely yellow above and below." Nearly three millennia later, that ancient observation has helped modern scientists measure how fast Earth was spinning and understand what our Sun was doing at a time when Homer was composing poetry.

Your sunscreen sits in the bathroom cabinet, slowly changing. The mayonnaise in your fridge gradually separates. That prescription cream loses effectiveness over time. All these materials share something fundamental, they're soft matter, substances like gels, foams, and colloids whose internal structure reorganises slowly and mysteriously over months or years.

Searching for technosignatures - signs of technology on a planet that we can see from afr - remains a difficult task. There are so many different factors to consider, and we only have the technological capabilities to detect a relatively small collection of them. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv but also accepted for publication into The Astrophysical Journal Letters, from Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and his co-authors explores some of those capabilities by using a framework they developed known as Project Janus that estimates what technology will look like on Earth 1,000 years from now in the hopes that we can test whether or not we can detect it on another planet.

Sometime in 2029, the European Space Agency is scheduled to launch its Comet Interceptor Mission. The Interceptor will wait for a long-period comet to arrive in the inner Solar System then set off on a trajectory to rendezvous with it. These objects are ancient and primordial, carrying material largely unaltered by time that holds clues to how the Solar System formed.

What can an exoplanet leaking helium teach astronomers about the formation and evolution of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recent study published in *Nature Astronomy* hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated atmospheric escape on a puffy exoplanet. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of gas giant planets, specifically with many gas giant planets observed orbiting extremely close to their stars.

Galaxies like our Milky Way grew through cascading mergers of smaller galaxies that began billions of years ago. The ancient progenitors of galaxies like ours were small galaxies similar to modern-day dwarf galaxies like the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Research shows that both dwarf galaxies and ancient galaxies are less massive, have lower metallicity, and have lots of star-forming gas but relatively few stars. Astronomers try to understand ancient galaxies and how they grew to become so massive by studying dwarf galaxies that are interacting with each other and beginning to merge.

If you ever feel like you are constantly on the move, that's because you are. And not only in your daily life. You spin around the world once a day, the Earth dances with the Moon around the Sun, and the Sun and everything else in the solar system bob around the Milky Way. Even our galaxy moves through the cosmos, and it might be moving faster than we thought.

Whenever a new telescope is about to begin observations, scientists say they're looking forward to finding answers to some outstanding questions. After all, each new telescope is deliberately designed to address some of these questions. But they also remark that new telescopes inevitably reveal new surprises, and how excited they are to confront those surprises. When it comes to the JWST, both of these expectations have come true.

There’s been a lot of speculation recently about interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS - much of which is probably caused by low quality data given that we have to observe it from either Earth, or in some case Mars. In either case it’s much further away that what would be the ideal. But that might not be the case for a future interstellar object. The European Space Agency (ESA) is planning a mission that could potentially visit a new interstellar visitor, or a comet that is making its first pass into the inner solar system. But, given the constraints of the mission, any such potential target object would have to meet a string of conditions. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by lead author Professor Colin Snodgrass of the University of Edinburgh of his colleagues, discusses what those conditions are, and assesses the likelihood that we’ll find a good candidate within a reasonable time of the mission's launch.

So first the Big Bang happens. Everything is incredibly hot and dense; there are photons flying everywhere, but they keep colliding with electrons and ionized nuclei. Then, finally after about 380,000 years the cosmos is becomes cool enough for atoms to stabilize. The Universe becomes optically transparent, and all those photons are able to roam free for billions of years, allowing us to see them as the cosmic microwave background.

The complex molecules required for life on Earth might never have formed if it wasn’t for cosmic dust.

Suppose you slammed together two neutrons at near-luminous speed. The resulting collision would create a cascade of particles from protons, electrons, and neutrinos to more exotic fare. We can't predict the exact number or type of particles produced, but we do know one thing: the total charge of all the particles would be zero. This is because charge is a conserved quantity, and since the neutrons have zero total charge, their resulting particles must have the same.

The Butterfly Nebula is one of those cosmic objects that demands our attention, and even our fascination. It's also known as NGC 6302 or the Bug Nebula, but whatever name we use, the stunning spectacle of ionized gases draws our human eyes in. In fact, Butterfly and its nebulae brethren may be more responsible for generating public enthusiasm in astronomy than any other type of object.

Remember back in 2018 when there was a discovery of a briny “lake” underground near the Martian south pole? Pepperidge Farm probably does, and anyone that works there that’s interested in space exploration will be disappointed to hear that, whatever might be causing the radar signal that finding was based on, it’s most likely not a lake. At least according to new data collected by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and published recently in Geophysical Research Letters by lead author Gareth Morgan of the Planetary Science Institute and his colleagues.

A first ever detection of a coronal mass ejection from a small red dwarf could have big consequences for life on any nearby planets.

I once filmed down a salt mine in North Yorkshire, descending into a dark matter laboratory buried deep underground where scientists wait for the rarest of collisions, dark matter particles interacting with ordinary matter. They're still waiting. But above ground, looking outward rather than inward, Professor Tomonori Totani from the University of Tokyo may have found what those underground detectors haven’t, dark matter revealing itself through light.

Studying the light from stars tells us their temperature, composition, age, and evolutionary state. But the red giant companion to Gaia BH2, a black hole system discovered in 2023, tells a contradictory story that doesn't make sense until you consider stellar violence!

The evolution of each individual galaxy is shaped by its surroundings, according to new research. The Deep Extragalactic Visible Legacy Survey (DEVILS), an endeavour of ICRAR and the University of Western Australia, has released its first data. It includes catalogues of morphological, redshift, photometric and spectroscopic data, as well as group environments and halo data for thousands of galaxies.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan recently accomplished something truly unprecedented. With the help of colleagues from the University of Tokyo and the Universitat de Barcelona, the team conducted the world's first Milky Way simulations that accurately represented more than 100 billion stars over 10,000 years. The simulation not only represented 100 times more individual stars than previous models, but was also produced 100 times faster.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope continues its inexorable march toward launch. It recently completed another series of tests that brings it a few steps closer to a launch pad in Florida. This time, the telescope was split into two separate parts - an inner portion and an outer portion, each of which went through separate tests throughout the fall.