Two new smallsat missions, named SPARCS and BlackCAT, promise to examine stellar flares and explosions in the early universe.
NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula in the Perseus Molecular Cloud. The cloud is relatively nearby in astronomical terms, only about 1000 light-years away. The nebula is a very active star-forming region, and since it's so close, it's very well-studied. Most of the cloud is basically invisible, but NGC 1333 is one of two visible structures.
'It felt really warm and welcoming. It was a lovely atmosphere the whole time.'
Betelgeuse is the star that everybody can't wait to see blow up, preferably sooner than later. That's because it's a red supergiant on the verge of becoming a supernova and there hasn't been one explode this close in recorded human history. It's been changing its brightness and showing strange surface behavior, which is why astronomers track its activity closely. Are these changes due to its aging process? Do they mean it's about to blow up? Probably not.
"It points to a slow starvation rather than a single dramatic death blow."
Bit by bit, scientists are piecing together Mars' climate history. Thanks to orbiters armed with powerful cameras and rovers carrying suites of scientific instruments, the red planet's history is becoming clearer year-by-year. In the past decade or so, evidence of Mars' ancient habitability is becoming more and more convincing.
"Microgravity pushed evolution into corners of the phage we still don't fully understand"
"This result shows that the Event Horizon Telescope is not only useful for producing spectacular images, but can also be used to understand the physics that govern black hole jets."
The Orion Nebula is the closest large star-forming region, located within the Milky Way just 1,500 light-years from Earth.
Space apparently changes your frame of mind in more ways than one.
NASA is returning four astronauts to Earth early from the International Space Station due to a medical concern with one of the Crew-11 astronauts. Here's the latest news.
New Space is a term now commonly used around the rocketry and satellite industries to indicate a new, speed focused model of development that takes its cue from the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and (hopefully don’t) break things.” Given that several of the founders of rocketry and satellite companies have a Silicon Valley background, that probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but the mindset has resulted in an exponential growth in the number of satellites in orbit, and also an exponential decrease in the cost of getting them to orbit. A new paper, recently published in pre-print form in arXiv from researchers at Schmidt Space and a variety of research institutes, lays out plans for the Lazuli Space Observatory, which hopes to apply that same mindset to flagship-level space observatory missions.
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Test how well you know the breakthroughs, pioneers, and turning points that shaped modern rocketry.
For over two centuries, we have watched the red giant R Leonis dim and brighten with regularity, but this 'heartbeat' is beginning to speed up near the end of the star's life.
Astronauts on the International Space Station were not only treated to a sight from Earth's atmosphere recently but also caught a glimpse of one of the Milky Way's nearest galactic neighbors.
In new observations, astronomers detect a moving wake of gas in the outer layers of the red supergiant Betelgeuse, offering fresh evidence for a long-suspected secondary star.
Our red neighbour Mars, seems to experience many similar phenomena to Earth. It does however seem to lack the hurricanes and typhoons that lash Earth, but don’t underestimate the Martian winds. Over millions of years, these persistent atmospheric currents have carved spectacular grooves and ridges across the landscape, carrying sand grains like microscopic chisels to sculpt the surface. ESA’s Mars Express has now captured some of the most striking examples of this erosion near the planet’s equator.
The universe’s most massive galaxies present astronomers with a puzzle. Each containing more than 100 billion stars, making our Milky Way look modest by comparison, these ultramassive systems had already reached enormous sizes less than two billion years after the Big Bang. What astronomers couldn’t easily determine was whether these ancient giants were still actively building stars or had already shut down their stellar factories and retired into quiet old age.
A California-based start-up wants to open a hotel on the moon by 2032 and is now accepting bookings for the out-of-this world travel experience.
Our Solar System, it turns out, is something of an oddball. While we have rocky planets close to the Sun and gas giants further out, most stars in the Milky Way harbour something entirely different. They are worlds between the sizes of Earth and Neptune and orbit closer to their stars than Mercury does to ours. These super Earths and sub Neptunes are the Galaxy’s most common planets, found around nearly every Sun like star ever have studied. Until now that is.
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