Space News & Blog Articles

Modeling something like geysers on a far-away moon seems like it should be easy. How much complexity could there possibly be when a geyser is simply a hole in some ice shooting superheated water through it? The answer is pretty complex, to be honest - enough that accurate models require a supercomputer to run on. Luckily, the supercomputing cluster at the University of Texas, known as the Texas Advanced Computing Center, gave some time to researcher modeling Enceladus’ ice plumes, and their recent paper in JGR Planets discusses the results, which show there might not be as much water and ice getting blown into orbit as originally thought.

Interest in icy moons has been growing steadily as they become more and more interesting to astrobiologists. Some take the majority of the attention, like Enceladus with its spectacular geysers. But there are interesting ones that might be hiding amongst even thicker ice shells in the Uranian system. A new paper published in Icarus from researchers at the Planetary Science Institute, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of North Dakota, looks at what Ariel, the fourth biggest moon in the Uranian system, might look like under its icy surface.

Enceladus’ ice continues to get more and more intriguing as researchers continue to unlock more secrets taken from a probe over ten years ago. When Cassini crashed into Saturn in 2017, it ended a 13 year sojourn that is still producing new research papers today. A recent one in Nature Astronomy from the researchers at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Stuttgart found hints of organic molecules discovered for the first time on the icy moon, some of which could serve as precursors to even more advanced biomolecules.

There are plenty of exoplanets scattered throughout the galaxy, so it would stand to reason there are also plenty of stars that are in the process of forming new exoplanets. Tracking down stars that are in different stages of that process can shed light on the exoplanet formation process, and potentially even on how planets in our own solar system developed. But determining what star systems are going through that process, let alone where they are in the process itself, can be tricky. A new paper in Nature Astronomy from Tomohiro Yoshida and his co-authors at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and several other Japanese and American research institutions, seems to have found one that finally answers a mystery that has stood in planetary formation theory for decades - how do gas giant exoplanets form so far away from their stars?

One dedicated amateur shows what can be done with remote telescope access, knowledge and a little patience.

Reanalyzing old data with our modern understanding seems to be in vogue lately. However, the implications of that reanalysis for some topics are more impactful than others. One of the most hotly debated topics of late in the astrobiological community has been whether or not life can exist on Venus - specifically in its cloud layers, some of which have some of the most Earth-like conditions anywhere in the solar system, at least in terms of pressure and temperature. A new paper from a team of American researchers have just added fuel to that debate by reanalyzing data from the Pioneer mission to Venus NASA launched in the 70s - and finding that the Venus’ clouds are primarily made out of water.

Dark matter is hidden from our view making it difficult to study. Despite making up roughly 80 percent of all matter, we can't see it, touch it, or directly detect it with any of our instruments. It doesn't emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it completely invisible, and we only know it exists because of its gravitational effects on visible matter. The idea was first proposed by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 whilst studying the Coma Cluster. He noticed that the galaxies in this group were moving far too quickly to be held together by gravity alone.

Gamma ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe, briefly outshining entire galaxies in a violent flash of high energy radiation. These - excuse the pun - astronomical detonations release more energy in a few seconds than our Sun will produce over its entire ten billion year lifetime, sending jets of gamma rays racing through space. Despite their incredible brightness, gamma ray bursts are fleeting events, lasting anywhere from milliseconds to several minutes before fading away.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a data scale problem. There are just too many places to look for an interstellar signal, and even if you’re looking in the right place you could be looking at the wrong frequency or at the wrong time. Several strategies have come up to deal narrow the search given this overabundance of data, and a new paper pre-print in arXiv from Naoki Seto of the Kyoto University falls nicely into that category - by using the Brightest Of All TIme (BOAT) Gamma Ray Burst, with some help from our own galaxy.

Planetary formation has, by and large, been well understood and it involves flat discs of dust and gas slowly coalescing into new alien worlds. New research has just been published which seems to give that familiar process a bit of a twist. The international team of researchers behind the study and led by Dr Andrew Winter from Queen Mary University of London, have discovered compelling evidence that many protoplanetary discs are in fact subtly warped.

Einstein Crosses are the effect of the universe’s natural telescopes. They occur when light from a distant galaxy passes by a massive foreground object, like a cluster of galaxies, that bends the very fabric of space. The gravity from these intervening objects acts like a gargantuan lens, warping the path that light follows and creating multiple images of the background source. Despite the name, Einstein didn’t specifically predict a cross, instead he proposed the concept known as gravitational lensing. His concept was published in his theory of General Relativity in 1915 but was later confirmed during the solar eclipse of 1919.

For decades, scientists engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have probed the galaxy for signs of artificial radio transmissions. Beginning with Project Ozma in 1960, astronomers have used radio antennas to listen for possible transmissions from other star systems or galaxies. These efforts culminated in January 2016 with the launch of Breakthrough Listen, the most comprehensive SETI effort to date. This project combines radio wave observations from the Green Bank and Parkes Observatory, as well as visible light observations from the Automated Planet Finder (APF),

What type of lander could touch down on Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io? This is what a recent paper presented at the AIAA 2025 Regional Student Conference hopes to address as a team of student engineers from Spartan Space Systems at San Jose State University investigated a novel concept for landing a spacecraft in Io, which is the most volcanically active planetary body in the solar system. This study has the potential to help scientists and engineers develop new mission concepts from all levels of academia and industry.

Launched in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope revolutionized astronomy by discovering thousands of exoplanets in over 150,000 star systems. Kepler was specifically designed to detect Earth-sized planets by monitoring stars for periodic dips in brightness, which may result from planets passing in front of their star relative to the observer. Known as the Transit Method (or Transit Photometry), this technique has allowed astronomers to identify the majority of the more than 6,000 exoplanets in the current census. However, the method is not perfect and produces some false positives (initially as high as 5%–10%), which can sometimes be caused by other celestial objects.

Most people are familiar with the fact that the Earth spins on its axis once every day. The spin however, isn’t as steady as you might think. Like a spinning top slowing down, Earth’s axis wobbles, scribing out a circle on the night sky that currently points very close to the Pole Star in the northern hemisphere. The wobble occurs because Earth isn't a perfect sphere but bulges slightly at the equator. When the Sun and Moon pull on this bulge with their gravity, they create a force that tries to tilt Earth's axis. However, because Earth is already spinning, this tilting force doesn't simply tip the planet over. Instead, it causes the axis to trace out a slow circular wobble in the sky, much like a spinning top wobbles as it slows down. This wobble takes approximately 26,000 years to complete one full cycle.

Planets and moons are inseparable companions and while astronomers are unravelling the complexity of planet formation, moon formation remains mysterious. Our Solar System is fully formed, so to observe exoplanet and exomoon formation, we have to look to other stars. But while we're getting better at detecting exoplanets, detecting exomoons is much more challenging. Their small sizes relative to the exoplanets they orbit renders them practically invisible.

The KM3NeT Collaboration, a network of neutrino detectors based in the Mediterranean, announced in February that they had found the highest-energy neutrino detected to date. In a recent study, researchers from MIT proposed that this "ghost particle" could be the product of energetic Hawking Radiation emitted by a Primordial Black Holes (PBH) after it decayed outside our Solar System. If true, these findings could be the first evidence of the theoretical radiation Hawking proposed in 1974 by combining quantum field theory and General Relativity.

How will NASA’s upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) mission differentiate Earth-sized exoplanets from other exoplanets, specifically Earth-sized exoplanets within the habitable zone, also called exoEarths? This is what a recent study accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the potential future capabilities of HWO and what shortcomings need to be addressed for it to conduct groundbreaking science, specifically with discovering exoEarths.

Black holes are regions of space where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape their grasp. They come in dramatically different sizes. Stellar mass black holes are the remnants of massive stars that have collapsed under their own gravity, typically weighing between three and a few dozen times the mass of our Sun and compressed into a region just kilometres across. Supermassive black holes, by contrast, are the giants lurking at the centres of galaxies, weighing millions to billions of solar masses. These beasts didn't form from a single collapsing star but grew over billions of years through gas accretion and mergers with other black holes.

The asteroid belt is found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and is a vast collection of rocks that is thought to be a planet that never formed. When our Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, the material in this region should have coalesced into a planet, however, Jupiter's gravitational influence prevented this from happening, stirring up the region so that collisions became destructive rather than constructive. What remains today contains only about 3% of the Moon's mass scattered across millions of kilometres.

Black hole mergers are some of the most violent events in the universe. Just how violent is becoming more clear in part due to a new paper published in Nature Astronomy. For the first time, it tracks the “recoil” that the newly formed black hole gets from asymmetric gravitational waves that are released during the merger. Turns out they are strong enough to “kick” the new, supermassive combined black hole into motion at a speed of thousands of kilometers a second.