Space News & Blog Articles

When galaxies collide, it's not a gentle affair but it does take millions of years. Over this time the two massive star systems slowly merge together, their gravitational pull drawing them closer. At the heart of each galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, an object containing millions or even billions of times the mass of our Sun. After the galaxies merge, these two black holes should eventually find each other, settling into orbit around their shared centre of gravity. The result is one of the universe's most extreme phenomena, a supermassive black hole binary. But to date, none have been found.

Betelgeuse, the brilliant red star marking Orion's shoulder, has long been suspected of harbouring a secret. I have to confess, Betelgeuse holds a special place in my heart as the first star I ever looked at through a telescope as a child, so learning that astronomers theorised this massive supergiant wasn't alone made it even more intriguing. Proving it, however, required catching a fleeting alignment and deploying some of our most powerful space telescopes in a race against time. Now, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have finally confirmed what many suspected, Betelgeuse does indeed have a companion star, though not quite the type anyone expected.

The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has been something of a mystery ever since it graced our Solar System. From all outward appearances, the object appears to be a comet that originated in another star system and was ejected by gravitational perturbations. This was evident from the way it has been actively releasing water vapor as it draws closer to the Sun, forming a coma and a tail. Nevertheless, it has exhibited some anomalous behavior, fueling speculation that it may be an interstellar visitor of another kind.

Terraforming is the theoretical process of transforming a planet or moon to make it habitable for humans and other Earth like life. The concept involves altering an alien world's atmosphere, temperature, and surface conditions to resemble Earth's environment, such as adding oxygen to the air, creating liquid water on the surface, and establishing a stable climate. Mars is the most commonly discussed candidate for terraforming, with proposals ranging from releasing greenhouse gases to warm the planet, to introducing microorganisms that could gradually produce oxygen over thousands of years.

Hunting for something completely invisible sounds impossible, yet astronomers do this regularly to probe the nature of dark matter. Dark matter is a mysterious material that makes up about 85% of all the matter in the universe, yet it remains invisible to our telescopes and detectors. Unlike ordinary matter, dark matter doesn't emit, absorb, or reflect light, which is why we can't see it directly. We know it exists because of its gravitational effects on visible matter, galaxies rotate too fast and galaxy clusters hold together too tightly to be explained by the matter we can see alone. Despite decades of research, we still don’t know exactly what it is.