Space News & Blog Articles

For decades, science fiction writers have tried their best to prepare us for eventual contact with aliens. Their efforts are dominated by several recurrent tropes. There's the invasion by a warlike species, there's the highly-evolved species trying to communicate with our primitive species, there's the benevolent aliens come to save us from ourselves, and there's the mischievous anal-probers and medical experimenters.

The cosmos is populated with many puzzling, gigantic, and awe-inspiring objects. Supermassive black holes billions of times more massive than the Sun reside in the center of massive galaxies. Huge stars explode in cataclysmic collisions whose light reaches us from more than 10 billion light-years away. Enormous galaxies collide and merge, leading to tremendous bursts of star formation.

If you read enough articles about planets in binary star systems, you’ll realize almost all of them make some sort of reference to Tatooine, the fictional home of Luke Skywalker (and Darth Vader) in the Star War saga. Since that obligatory reference is now out of the way, we can talk about the new “super-Jupiter” that researchers from two separate research teams, including one at Northwestern University and one at the University of Exeter, simultaneously found in old data from the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI).

Chinese taikonauts have a new set of spacesuits that will enable future missions in orbit and beyond. The suits were recently tested (Tuesday, Dec. 9th) during a series of extravehicular activities (EVAs) aboard China's Tiangong space station. The Shenzhou-21 crew (Zhang Lu and Wu Fei) donned the newly delivered D and E spacesuits to conduct their inaugural spacewalks. The suits are essentially a second-generation version of the Feitian spacesuits ("flying into space" in Chinese) used for intravehicular activity (IVA), but specifically designed for station EVAs.

Although they are technically gas giants, Uranus and Neptune are referred to as "ice giants" due to their composition. This refers to the fact that Uranus and Neptune have more methane, water, and other volatiles than their larger counterparts (Jupiter and Saturn). Given the pressure conditions in the planets' interiors, these elements become solid, essentially becoming "ices." However, new research from the University of Zurich (UZH) and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS is challenging our understanding of these interior regions of these planets.

Every biologist knows how important the Great Oxygenation Event was. It took the first photosynthetic organisms hundreds of millions of years to enrich Earth's atmosphere with oxygen, leading to complex life like us. But before complex, multi-cellular life could appaer, oxygen had to enter the ocean first.