Space News & Blog Articles

Carl Sagan famously said that “We’re all made of star-stuff”. But he didn’t elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been creative in massive supernovae explosions - hence the saying, and scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled - the isotopes created in the supernovae flew here on tiny dust grains (stardust) that eventually accreted into Earth, and later into biological systems. However, a new paper from Martin Bizzarro and his co-authors at the University of Copenhagen upends that theory by showing that much of the material created in supernovae is captured in ice as it travels the interstellar medium. It also suggests that the Earth itself formed through the Pebble Accretion model rather than massive protoplanets slamming together.

(This is Part 3 of a series exploring the mythic side of the Big Bang. Check out Part 1 and Part 2!)

For decades, scientists have recognized that large galaxies in our Universe have supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at their centers. These behemoths, which are millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun, play a vital role in star formation and the long-term evolution of galaxies. According to a recent study based on observations performed using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, it appears that most dwarf galaxies may buck this trend. This stands in stark contrast to their theory that nearly every galaxy has a massive black hole within its core.

(This is Part 2 of a series exploring the mythic side of the Big Bang. Check out Part 1!)

Tracking down resources on the Moon is a critical process if humanity decides to settle there permanently. However, some of our best resources to do that currently are orbiting satellites who use various wavelengths to scan the Moon and determine what the local environment is made out of. One potential confounding factor in those scans is “space weathering” - i.e. how the lunar surface might change based on bombardment from both the solar wind and micrometeroid impacts. A new paper from a researchers at the Southwest Research Institute adds further context to how to interpret ultra-violet data from one of the most prolific of the resource assessment satellites - the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) - and unfortunately, the conclusion they draw is that, for some resources such as titanium, their presence might be entirely obscured by the presence of “old” regolith.

Radio astronomy has a pollution problem. Satellites thousands of kilometres overhead, designed to broadcast communications or relay data, are increasingly contaminating the frequencies astronomers use to study the universe. While much attention has focused on SpaceX's Starlink and other low Earth orbit constellations, but what about the satellites much farther away?