Space News & Blog Articles

Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange "little red dots" (LRDs) in its infrared images. There are hundreds of these compact blobs at very high redshifts at distances of about 12 billion light-years. Astronomers think they began forming some 600 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them players in the infancy of the cosmos. They appear red in optical light and blue in the ultraviolet. So, what are these strange objects?

The venerable Hubble Space Telescope has taken some truly stellar (no pun!) images over its many years of dedicated service. A new image recently released by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows the spiral galaxy NGC 3137 in all its glittering glory. Located about 53 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Antlia, NGC 3137 offers astronomers an excellent opportunity to study the life cycle of stars in a galaxy similar to our own.

There’s a specific sequence in the anime Dragonball Z that for some reason has stuck in my head for over two decades. Goku, the main character of the show, travels to King Kai’s planet and can barely stand up when he arrives because the planet’s gravity is 10 times stronger than Earth’s. Over time, he trains in this gravity, and his body begins to adapt to it. Eventually, after leaving the planet, he’s stronger, faster, and more agile than he ever was before. But would that really happen if you were exposed to 10G over a long period of time? Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) decided to test that idea and report their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But instead of using anime characters, they used fruit flies as their test subjects.

They are known as "buckyballs," ball-shaped molecules that resemble a hollow sphere, and are found in space. These strange customers were first observed by Professor Jan Cami and a team from Western University in 2010 using the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST). And now, more than 15 years later, Cami and his colleagues have detected buckyballs again using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The rich data they retrieved from Webb's observations have pointed to the origin of these strange cosmic molecules.

You’re a long-necked Titanosaurs grazing the plains and chomping away on tree leaves about 100 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous in what would eventually become a future Starbucks location. You look up at the night sky and notice a bright dot that seems slightly larger and brighter than usual since you’ve seen it a bunch. You grunt at your cousin (official dinosaur language) asking if he notices it, too. Your cousin grunts back that it does seem bigger and brighter and wonders what’s up.

Welcome back to A Brief-ish History of SETI, where we examine the major milestones and foundational principles that have defined the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In part I, we examined the purpose and motivations behind this field of study, as well as how Fermi's big question ("Where is everybody?") helped define the challenges it entails. We also looked at some of the earliest experiments and how they reflected a growing sense of curiosity about the cosmos and our place in it.

I once got a drill bit jammed in concrete and the language that followed was, let's say, colourful…and that was with the offending masonry right in front of me. That, in essence, is what happened to NASA's Curiosity rover on the 25th of April this year and the solution required some impressive problem solving from 300 million kilometres away. At least I could give mine a firm wobble and a stern look of disappointment. Curiosity's team had to think rather harder than that.

Scientists are puzzling over another oddball on the edge of the solar system: This time, it's an icy object less than a quarter of Pluto's size with a thin atmosphere – a layer of gas that's not typically found around objects so small.

The Department of Defense has released a fresh batch of images and transcripts relating to reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs, including pictures and descriptions from NASA's Apollo missions to the moon.