Space News & Blog Articles

For decades, Mercury has carried the reputation of being a dead, dry planet whose geological story ended long ago. Its cratered surface, baked by the Sun and seemingly frozen in time, appeared to tell a tale of ancient violence followed by billions of years of silence. That story just got considerably more interesting.

The Lambda Cold Dark Matter (Lambda CDM) model is the current cosmological model and explains much of what we see in the cosmos. One of Lambda CDM's core features is the prediction that structure grows hierarchically from the bottom up. It begins with dark matter density fluctuations, then dwarf galaxies form, then those dwarfs merge to form more massive galaxies, which merge into still larger galaxies. Eventually, there are galaxy clusters.

BepiColombo is slowly uncovering more and more fun facts about Mercury as it continues its preliminary mission. One of the more interesting things found so far is a magnetic “chorus” that appears similar to a phenomenon found in Earth’s much larger magnetic field. A new paper in Nature Communications from the researchers responsible for the probe’s Mio instrument that is studying Mercury’s magnetic field describes what could be thought of as a form of magnetic birdsong.

How can microorganism communities known as biofilms, and have been hypothesized to be responsible for early life on Earth, be used for space exploration? This is what a recent study published in *npj Biofilms and Microbiomes* hopes to address as an international collaboration of researchers investigated the pros and cons of using biofilms in spaceflight. This study has the potential for scientists to better understand the role of biofilms in spaceflight while mitigating health risks of astronauts.

Astronomers have puzzled over Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) since the Lorimer Burst (the first confirmed FRB) was detected in 2007. These rapid bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies last between milliseconds and a few seconds and release as much energy as the Sun produces in days. Whereas most FRBs are one-off events, astronomers have found some rare cases where FRBs were repeating in nature. For years, scientists have speculated as to what causes these events, with theories ranging from neutron stars and black holes to extraterrestrial communications.

When astronomers look out into the cosmos, they see supermassive black holes (SMBH) in two different states. In one state, they're dormant. They're actively accreting only a tiny amount of matter and emit only faint, weak radiation. In the other, they're more actively accreting matter and emitting extremely powerful radiation. These are normally called active galactic nuclei (AGN).

Deep in the frozen heart of Antarctica, the South Pole Telescope has been watching one of the most extreme neighbourhoods in our Galaxy, and it's just caught something extraordinary happening there. Astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. These aren't your average stellar flares, we're talking about energy releases so intense they make our Sun's most dramatic outbursts look like flickering candles.