Space News & Blog Articles

I've been fortunate enough to witness the aurora on several occasions over the years, and each sighting leaves an impression that never quite fades. There's something about watching the sky transform from gentle curtains of light into something far more dramatic that stays with you. Within minutes, the aurora can erupt into intense waves of green and red that ripple and dance across the sky. These spectacular events, called magnetospheric substorms, represent some of Earth's most powerful displays of atmospheric electricity and they're exactly the kind of experience that burns itself into memory.

Long before Earth existed, before the Sun ignited, the materials that would eventually become our Solar System drifted through the darkness between stars. These interstellar clouds, vast expanses of ice, gas, and dust stretching across light years, held within them the chemical seeds of everything that would follow; rocky planets, gas giants, and perhaps even life itself. Understanding exactly how those primordial materials transformed into worlds remains one of astronomy's most long standing mysteries.

A “House of Cards” is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It’s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.

(This is Part 4 of a series exploring the mythic side of the Big Bang. Check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3!)

The Sun is far more than a steadily glowing sphere as our ancestors once thought. Across its surface and atmosphere, countless tiny features flicker in and out of existence, magnetic loops hundreds of times larger than Earth, and plasma flows in ways that still puzzle scientists. Understanding this complexity requires more than just looking harder, it requires looking from multiple angles at once.

Omega Centauri dominates the southern sky as the Milky Way's largest and brightest globular cluster, a dense sphere containing roughly ten million stars. Earlier this year, astronomers found evidence that an intermediate mass black hole hides within the cluster's core, revealed by seven stars moving far too quickly to remain bound unless something massive holds them gravitationally. Now researchers have searched for the black hole itself using radio telescopes, and their discovery is what they didn't find.

The giant planets weren't always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to their current positions. Exactly what triggered this chaos remains uncertain, but researchers at the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux and the Planetary Science Institute now propose a close encounter with a wandering substellar object during the Sun's youth.

The universe is getting bigger, and there's a problem. Two different ways of measuring its expansion rate give two different answers, and nobody knows why. Now researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated a completely independent method that adds compelling evidence this discrepancy represents something real, not just measurement error.

Since it commenced science operations in mid-2022, the James Webb Space Telescope has made significant strides in detecting atmospheres around exoplanets. These included providing the first clear evidence of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet atmosphere (WASP-39b), atmospheric water vapor (WASP-96 b), and even heavier elements like oxygen and carbon (HD149026b). According to the latest release, researchers announced that they have detected the strongest evidence to date for an atmosphere around a rocky planet.