Space News & Blog Articles

The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has been something of a mystery ever since it graced our Solar System. From all outward appearances, the object appears to be a comet that originated in another star system and was ejected by gravitational perturbations. This was evident from the way it has been actively releasing water vapor as it draws closer to the Sun, forming a coma and a tail. Nevertheless, it has exhibited some anomalous behavior, fueling speculation that it may be an interstellar visitor of another kind.

Betelgeuse, the brilliant red star marking Orion's shoulder, has long been suspected of harbouring a secret. I have to confess, Betelgeuse holds a special place in my heart as the first star I ever looked at through a telescope as a child, so learning that astronomers theorised this massive supergiant wasn't alone made it even more intriguing. Proving it, however, required catching a fleeting alignment and deploying some of our most powerful space telescopes in a race against time. Now, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have finally confirmed what many suspected, Betelgeuse does indeed have a companion star, though not quite the type anyone expected.

Phosphine has caused quite a stir in the astronomical world lately. That was largely due to its (still hotly debated) detection in the atmosphere of Venus. While the only known way for phosphine to be created on terrestrial worlds, like Venus, is through some sort of biological origin, it is relatively common among larger gas giants and even “brown dwarfs” - failed stars larger than Jupiter but not quite large enough to start their own hydrogen fusion process. Previously, we hadn’t yet seen phosphine in the atmosphere of brown dwarf in other solar systems, but a new paper from a diverse group of researchers, available in pre-print form on arXiv, used data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find it for the first time. They also realized the mechanism that made it so hard to spot in the first place - the object’s metallicity.

When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, they brought with them samples of lunar soil (regolith) and rock. The analysis of these samples forever changed our perceptions of how the Earth-Moon system formed and evolved. Similarly, the samples returned by China's Chang'e program are also leading to breakthroughs in our understanding of Earth's only satellite, especially its so-called "dark side." As a tidally-locked body, the Moon's near side is constantly facing towards Earth while its far (or "dark") side faces outward to space.

An asteroid recently made the second closest pass to Earth ever observed on October 1st. And astronomers only found it after it had already completed its closest approach. That offers another lesson in how difficult it is to find small objects coming close to our planet in the vast dark ocean of space.

What if our understanding of Uranus and Neptune’s compositions have been wrong, specifically regarding their classifications as “ice giants”? This is what a recent study accepted for publication in *Astronomy & Astrophysics* hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Zurich investigated the interior structures of Uranus and Neptune. This study has the potential to help scientists not only better understand the formation and evolution of Uranus and Neptune but could also provide key insights into Jupiter and Saturn, and gaseous exoplanets, too.

Today, it's a scientific consensus that Mars was once a very different place, with a warmer, denser atmosphere and liquid water on its surface. This is evidenced by flow channels, delta fans, lakebeds, and many other features that form in the presence of flowing water here on Earth. Based on the way many of these channels feed into the Northern Lowlands on Mars, scientists speculate that this region was once home to an ocean that covered the northern hemisphere. According to new research from the University of Arkansas, there is a strong case for the existence of this ancient ocean.

The Big Bang essentially created two elements: hydrogen and helium. It also produced tiny traces of lithium and a few other light isotopes, but in the beginning there was hydrogen and helium. All the other, heavier elements formed later, either in the cores of stars, through stellar collisions, or other astrophysical processes. Even now hydrogen and helium make up so much of the material world that astronomers refer to all other elements as metals. Dust in the wind, you might say.

Duplicating expensive resources is expensive and wasteful, and most people would agree it's unnecessary. However, the planned increase in major satellite constellations is currently causing a massive duplication of resources as individual companies and even countries try to set up their own infrastructure in space. What’s more, there is a relatively limited amount of space in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), where many of these satellites are supposed to go - any more than that and a single collision could cause Kessler Syndrome, where many of the ones already in orbit would be destroyed and we wouldn’t be able to launch any more for a long time. A new paper from researchers at the National University of Defense Technology in China suggests an alternative to these multiple megaconstellations - a single, modular system similar to how cloud computing works on the current internet.

A6 Lemmon joins the dusk comet parade, in a brief apparition finale.

The China National Space Administration's (CNSA) Tianwen-2 probe is currently at a distance of about 43 million km (26.7 million mi) from Earth. This places it in a stable geosynchronous orbit (GSO) and almost halfway between its first destination, the Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) 469219 Kamo'oalewa, which is still 45 million km (~28 million mi) away. As is customary for interplanetary missions, its controllers are using the flight phase to test the spacecraft's instruments and make sure they are in working order.

Peering back into the early years of the universe requires scientists to make a lot of assumptions. But sometimes, we get better instruments that then allow them to either confirm or replace those assumptions. That happened recently when it came to our study of J0529, a supermassive black hole that is currently the brightest known quasar in the universe. A new paper from a massive team of researchers used the GRAVITY+ instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT) Interferometer to map this unique object’s Broad Line Region (BLR), and thereby calculated a new, updated mass that is 10 times smaller than previous estimates.

Periodically, the European Space Agency (ESA) releases images that provide breathtaking views of the cosmos, courtesy of its premier missions. This includes a relative newcomer to party with the ESA/Webb Picture of the Month, which showcases the high-resolution and ultra-sensitive capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This month's feature: eight stunning images of gravitationally-lensed galaxies observed by Webb during its Cycle 1 General Observation (GO) surveys. The study of these lensed galaxies are providing insight into the early Universe and how galaxies have evolved with time.

Interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS has been constantly changing as it makes its way through our solar system. That’s to be expected, as, for the first time in potentially billions of years, it's getting close to the energy put out by a star. Scientists have been keeping a close watch on those changes, both to ensure there’s nothing unexplainable by our current understanding, but also to compare 3I/ATLAS to both previous interstellar visitors as well as comets in our own solar system. A recent paper from European researchers describes how the changes in a particular material ratio in 3I/ATLAS’ coma fit with our current understanding of cometary geology.

Making a black hole is easy. Just squeeze a bunch of stuff into a small enough volume. It doesn't even matter what you use. You can collapse stars, planets, old car tires, Labubus, or missing left socks. The resulting black hole will only depend on the mass, rotation, and electric charge of the original material.

The Copernican Principle, named in honor of Nicolaus Copernicus (who proposed the heliocentric model of the Universe), states that Earth and humans do not occupy a special or privileged place in the Universe. In cosmological terms, this essentially means that Earth is representative of the norm, and life is likely to exist throughout the cosmos. While our efforts to find extraterrestrial life, a field of study known as astrobiology, have yielded no results so far, these efforts have been limited in scope. As a result, scientists are forced to speculate based on the only planet known to support life—i.e., Earth.

Rogue planets, also known as free-floating planets (FFP) or isolated planetary-mass objects (iPMO), have become a major focus for astronomers. The first such objects were detected in 2000 by teams at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) and the Keck Observatory, though earlier detections were made that were unconfirmed at the time. Since then, research has shown that these planets may actually be more common than planets that orbit stars, with some estimates placing the population as high as 4 trillion in our galaxy alone.

In principle, discovering new exoplanets is pretty easy. Simply measure the brightness of a star over time, and when a planet passes in front of the star, the brightness will dim slightly. The more the brightness dips, the larger the planet in relation to the star. This transit method is so effective it is how we have found the majority of exoplanets. But astronomers want to do much more than simply discover planets, and for that you need to dive into the details.

For more than twenty years, the Mars Express orbiter has studied the Red Planet and remains the European Space Agency's (ESA) only operational mission. In that time, it has provided the most complete map of the Martian atmosphere and its chemical composition. It has also studied Mars' innermost moon (Phobos) in stunning detail, and traced the flow channels, delta fans, and chaos terrain that demonstrate that liquid water once flowed on the planet's surface. In addition, the images taken by the orbiter have been used to create detailed mosaics that have breathtaking 3D views of the landscape.

Watch Jupiter and its major moons undergo a complex series of events in October.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the James Webb Space Telescope is the way it has allowed scientists to examine galaxies that existed when the Universe was very young. This is one of the major objectives that informed Webb's design, which was to provide high-resolution images of the earliest galaxies, allowing astronomers and cosmologists to gain a better understanding of how they have evolved over time. Intrinsic to this is the study of early massive black holes that have since evolved into the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that reside at the centers of galaxies today.