Space News & Blog Articles

Avoiding, or at least limiting the damage from, geomagnetic storms is one of the most compelling arguments for why we should pay attention to space. Strong solar storms can have an impact on everything from air traffic to farming, and we ignore them at our own peril and cost. Despite that threat, the tools that we have applied to tracking and analyzing them have been relatively primitive. Both simulations and the physical hardware devoted to it require an upgrade if we are to accurately assess the threat a solar storm poses. As a first step, a new paper from a group led by researchers at the University of Michigan created a much more detailed simulation that shows how important it is that we also have the appropriate sensing hardware in place to detect these storms as they happen.

Centuries before the Roswell UFO Incident, Native Americans had their own stories to tell about alien visitations — for example, about the “Sky People” who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and have a special bond with the Cherokee Nation.

The gravitational interaction between the Earth and Moon has led to one hemisphere of the Moon being locked facing away from Earth. Don’t be misled though, the Moon does rotate, it just takes as long to rotate once on its axis as it takes to complete an orbit of Earth. This is known as synchronous rotation and on the far side there is a massive crater called the South Pole-Aitken basin. Spanning over 1,930 km from north to south and 1,600 km east to west. This ancient impact crater formed roughly 4.3 billion years ago when a giant asteroid delivered a glancing blow to the young Moon. A new study from the University of Arizona reveals that this colossal crater holds secrets about the Moon's formation and early evolution.

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.