Space News & Blog Articles

Our solar system is home to a wide diversity of planetary bodies, boasting eight planets, five officially recognized dwarf planets, and almost 1,000 confirmed moons. The eight planets consist of the four rocky (terrestrial) planets of the inner solar system and the four gas giant planets of the outer solar system. The largest planet in our solar system is Jupiter, measuring a radius and mass of 11 and 318 times of Earth, respectively. However, the discovery of exoplanets quickly altered our understanding of planetary sizes, as several have been discovered to have masses and radii several times that of Jupiter. So, how big can planet get, and are there limits to their sizes?

In the coming weeks or months, the Artemis II rocket will make its launch window and take off from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission will then carry Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, Mission Specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen on a ten-day trip around the Moon. The flight will not only validate the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft for crewed missions. It will also raise the curtain on humanity's long-awaited return to the Moon; this time, with the intention of staying.

When stars like our Sun reach the end of their main sequence, they enter their Red Giant Branch phase and expand to become several times their original size. During this time, the star will undergo chemical changes in its interior, altering the composition of its surface layer. For decades, researchers have wondered how the changing chemical composition in the interior drives changes in the upper layers. Central to this question is the stable layer that connects the core to the outer layer and serves as a barrier between the two.

Space science is interesting in its diversity. At times, it's an extremely complex, expensive and time-consuming effort to gather data. Look how challenging it was for Curiosity and Perseverance to reach the surface of Mars safely. Look at the JWST's long journey from clean room to Sun-Earth L2, and its eventual science results.

Searching for life beyond Earth has rapidly advanced in recent years. However, directly imaging an exoplanet and all their incredible features remain elusive given the literal astronomical distances from Earth. Therefore, astronomers have settled by exploring exoplanet atmospheres for signatures of life, also called biosignatures. This is currently conducted by analyzing the starlight that passes through an exoplanet’s atmosphere, known as spectroscopy, as it passes in front of its star, also called a transit. But improvements continue to be made to better explore exoplanet atmospheres, specifically cleaning up messy data.

More than sixty years ago, Dr. Frank Drake and his colleagues conducted the very first experiment dedicated to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Since then, astronomers have continued to scan space for signs of alien transmissions, predominantly in the radio spectrum. In more recent years, the search has expanded to include thermal signatures and optical flashes, and additional forms of technological activity ("technosignatures") are already being incorporated. So far, all these experiments have produced null results, prompting SETI researchers to consider what they might be missing.

Our solar system hosts almost 900 known moons, with more than 400 orbiting the eight planets while the remaining orbit dwarf planets, asteroids, and Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs). Of these, only a handful are targets for astrobiology and could potentially support life as we know it, including Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn’s moon Titan and Enceladus. While these moons orbit two of the largest planets in our solar system, what about moons orbiting giant exoplanets, also called exomoons? But, to find life on exomoons, scientists need to find exomoons to begin with.

If humans ever want to work and live in space, whether in habitats on the Moon or Mars or in stations far from Earth, a reliable source of clean drinking water is essential. This presents many challenges in space, where resources are limited, and resupply missions are costly, time-consuming, or both. For starters, humans cannot survive for more than three days without water. Water is also essential for oxygen generation, irrigating edible plants, and hygiene. Meeting these requirements requires a closed-loop system that can provide clean water for months to years without replenishment.

NASA and JPL are working hard to develop more autonomy for their Mars rovers. Both of their current rovers on Mars—MSL Curiosity and Perseverance—are partly autonomous, with Perseverance being a little more advanced. In fact, developing more autonomous navigation was an explicit part of Perseverance's mission.

More and more papers are coming out about the upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). As the telescope moves from theory to practice (and physical manifestation), various working groups are discovering, defining, and designing their way to the world’s next major exoplanet observatory. A new paper from researchers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center adds another layer of analysis - we even just reported on its immediate predecessor two weeks ago. In this one, the researchers compared the ability of the telescope to distinguish between carbon dioxide and methane/water, to come up with a specific wavelength the engineers should design for.

How do galaxies evolve? When did they start forming? Those are questions astronomers and cosmologists are working to answer. The standard evolutionary path includes early bright star-forming activity, a middle age, and then a quiescent old age where they stop making stars. That changes if the galaxy happens to collide with another one, because that spurs new bouts of starbirth. It's been this way since stars and galaxies first began forming, hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.

The odds of finding any sort of smoking gun for non-baryonic (or exotic) dark matter --- the missing matter of the universe hypothesized to be made up of exotic elementary particles such as WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles), seems to get longer with each passing year.

Nearly two years after Boeing’s botched Starliner mission to the International Space Station, NASA put the mishap in the same category as the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters — and said the spacecraft wouldn’t carry another crew until dozens of corrective actions are taken.

Theory shows that stars can collapse directly into black holes without first exploding as supernovae. In fact, this should be a relatively common occurrence. But despite that, astronomers have found scant observational evidence to support it.

Astronomers working with JWST have found a jellyfish galaxy only about 5 billion years after the Big Bang. Jellyfish galaxies are so named because they trail streams of gas that look like jellyfish tentacles. They're created when a galaxy moves rapidly through a cluster, and the intracluster medium (ICM) strips gas from them, stretching it into long streams.

The early Universe was a busy place. As the infant cosmos exanded, that epoch saw the massive first stars forming, along with protogalaxies. It turns out those extremely massive early stars were stirring up chemical changes in the first globular clusters, as well. Not only that, many of those monster stars ultimately collapsed as black holes.

Everybody knows that galaxies are large structures made of stars. That's a simple definition, and ignores the fact that galaxies also contain gas, dust, planets, moons, comets, asteroids, etc., and of course, dark matter. But one type of galaxy is mostly made of dark matter, and they're difficult to detect.

Lunar dust remains one of the biggest challenges for a long-term human presence on the Moon. Its jagged, clingy nature makes it naturally stick to everything from solar panels to the inside of human lungs. And while we have some methods of dealing with it, there is still plenty of experimentation to do here on Earth before we use any such system in the lunar environment. A new paper in Acta Astronautica from Francesco Pacelli and Alvaro Romero-Calvo of Georgia Tech and their co-authors describes two types of flexible Electrodynamic Dust Shields (EDSs) that could one day be used in such an environment.

Just a few hundred light-years from Earth, the famous variable star Mira A is huffing and puffing its outer layers to space. Its most recent mass-loss event ejected more material at higher velocity than in past events. A team of astronomers led by Theo Khouri of Chalmers University in Sweden discovered two large asymmetrical clouds of material expanding away from Mira A.

There’s been plenty in the news about 3I/ATLAS over the course of the past 8 months. Our third confirmed interstellar visitor went behind the Sun during its closest approach, but reemerged in December with plenty of eyes watching it. Papers describing what it looks like following its closest brush with the power of a star in probably billions of years are starting to come out, including a new one available in pre-print on arXiv from Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University and his co-authors, which shows how much the comet - and it is definitely a comet - has changed in the matter of only a few months.

Astronomers know that supermassive black holes (SMBH) can inhibit star formation. These behemoths, which seem to be present in the center of large galaxies like ours, inject energy into their surroundings, heating up star-forming gas. Gas needs to be cool to collapse and form stars, so active SMBH put a damper on the process.