Space News & Blog Articles

What are the constants of nature? What do they do? What do they tell us…and what do they not tell us?

Scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered that volcanic activity on Mars between 3 and 4 billion years ago likely released unusual forms of sulphur gases that could have trapped heat and maintained liquid water on the planet's surface. This finding, published in Science Advances, offers a fresh perspective on how Mars might have supported early life.

On July 1st, 2025, astronomers at NASA's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ALERT) detected the third interstellar object (ISO) to enter our Solar System - 3I/ATLAS. Shortly thereafter, an international team led by researchers from Michigan State University (MSU) published the first scientific paper detailing the early scientific findings on this ISO. Hundreds of hours of observations have since been dedicated to measuring the astrometry, photometry, rotation period, and spectroscopy of this object to determine its trajectory, composition, and where it came from.

Deep in space, an ancient brown dwarf nicknamed "The Accident" has revealed the first-ever detection of a molecule that scientists have been searching for in planetary atmospheres for decades. This discovery not only explains why silicon remains hidden in Jupiter and Saturn's atmospheres, but also opens a window into how the chemistry of our universe has evolved over billions of years, showing us that sometimes the most unexpected finds yield the greatest scientific breakthroughs.

Science is a story of coming up with theories then doing our best to disprove them. That is especially true for theories on a grand, cosmological scale, though disproving them can be particularly hard. One of the most famous examples of a hard to disprove theory is that of dark energy and dark matter. In large parts of space we see unequivocal evidence that something is messing with general relativity. But down at the scale of our own solar system, there’s no evidence of it whatsoever, at least as far as we can see. A new paper from Slava Turyshev, a physicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discusses a way scientists might be able to deal with this discrepancy - by being very, very selective with the way we test for evidence of dark matter and energy in our solar system.

Comet 3I/ATLAS's appearance in the inner Solar System in July 2025 triggered a wave of interest. Not only in the comet itself, but in interstellar objects (ISO) in general. So far we only know of three ISOs, and it's only natural to wonder about their origins, and how common they are. But scientists, being naturally curious, have other questions, too. What would happen if an ISO was captured by a young solar system?

The period known as "Cosmic Noon," which took place roughly 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang, was characterized by the rapid formation of new stars and planetary systems. Naturally, objects dated to this period are coveted by scientists hoping to learn more about the processes that led to the formation of planets and the emergence of life itself. This includes asteroids and comets, which are known to be composed of material leftover from the formation of entire star systems and their planets. And with the detection of three interstellar objects (ISOs) in the Solar System since 2017, there could be multiple opportunities to do so.

Ten years ago, we heard the universe whisper for the first time. On September 14, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) detected ripples in space-time. The signal came from the gravitational waves that had traveled 1.3 billion years to reach Earth, carrying the story of two colliding black holes. This historic moment, predicted by Einstein a century earlier, opened an entirely new way of experiencing the universe.

Different parts of Mars have different advantages and disadvantages when it comes to their available resources, just like Earth. The polar caps are likely the most valuable in terms of their water content, which will be critical to any early stage crewed mission to the Red Planet. But to really unlock the fully potential of Mars, geologists think we’ll need to look to the volcanoes, where there is likely to be easily accessible valuable materials like nickel, titanium, and chromium, that were placed there when the volcanoes were active. Reaching those deposits on the side of some of the largest mountains in the solar system safely is a challenge, and one that is tackled in a new paper by Divij Gupta and Arkajit Aich, where they look at the necessary requirements to set up an effective mining operation on the slopes of Olympus and Elysium Mons.

Europe's upcoming Mars rover mission has received an unexpected boost in its search for signs of ancient life. The Rosalind Franklin rover, scheduled to launch in 2028, will land in Oxia Planum, a vast clay rich plain that formed in water billions of years ago. Two new studies have revealed that natural Martian processes could deliver organic rich materials directly to the rover. These new findings, presented at the joint Europlanet Science Congress and American Astronomical Society meeting in Helsinki, show how rockfalls and ancient floods could bring previously inaccessible organic materials within the rover's reach.

In summer 2022, just weeks after the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operating, astronomers noticed something unexpected rather strange, tiny red objects scattered across the sky that had never been seen before. These "little red dots" appeared extremely compact and red, emitting light primarily in the mid-infrared, at these wavelengths the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't detect them but JWST was perfectly designed for the purpose.

According to every experiment, the constants of nature appear to be constant.

While plate tectonics may not be absolutely necessary for life, they may be necessary for a technological civilization to arise. Habitability may be possible on a static world, but habitability probably won't persist long enough for a technological civilization like ours to appear. Plate tectonics regulates our planet's climate, and without it, atmospheric CO2 would rise to catastrophic levels.

Stellar black holes form from the collapse of massive stars at the end of their lives, typically weighing 3 to 50 times the mass of the Sun. When a star runs out of fuel, it explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a region so dense that nothing can escape, not even light. Primordial black holes, by contrast, are theoretical objects that could have formed less than a second after the Big Bang from extremely dense regions of the early universe. Unlike stellar black holes, they could be much lighter and are ancient relics from when the universe contained mostly hydrogen and helium.

What are the most important constants of nature? Of course physicists debate about which of the constants are the important ones, because physicists debate EVERYTHING. Some lists have 19 numbers, some have more. Some try to build categories of numbers, like really really fundamental constants, less fundamental but still important constants, and…others. Some say that the only REAL constants are the ones that don’t have any units, the ones that are just bare numbers, like the fine structure constant. Others…well, others disagree.

Protoplanets are celestial objects in the act of forming into full planets within the gas and dust disks surrounding hot, young stars. These objects, often several times the mass of Jupiter, are still embedded in their birth environments, actively feeding on surrounding material through their own circumplanetary disks. Unlike mature planets, protoplanets offer a rare glimpse into the violent, chaotic processes of planetary formation, revealing how the worlds we see today form.