Space News & Blog Articles

When a massive star reaches the end of its life, it collapses. The cessation of the outward pushing force from fusion means gravity finally wins and the collapse begins. If it's heavy enough, nothing can stop that collapse, not pressure, not heat, not any force in nature. The result is a black hole, a point of infinite density wrapped in a boundary from which not even light escapes. It's one of the most dramatic endings in the universe. But for the biggest black holes, that story turns out to be wrong. Or at least incomplete.

In our own Solar System, the gas giants sit far from the Sun; Jupiter is five times further out than Earth, Saturn nearly ten. For a long time, astronomers assumed that was simply how planetary systems worked. Then we started finding planets around other stars, and some of them broke every rule. Hot Jupiters are gas giants similar in size to Jupiter but orbiting their stars at a fraction of the distance, some completing a full orbit in just a few days. Temperatures on their surfaces can reach thousands of degrees. They are exotic, extreme, and until recently, deeply puzzling.

Every now and then, a star dies in the most spectacular way imaginable. It detonates and in a matter of seconds, it outshines its entire host galaxy before fading back into darkness over the following weeks. These explosions, known as Type Ia supernovae, are some of the most violent events in the universe. They're also one of astronomy's most powerful measuring tools.

Welcome back to a Brief-ish History of SETI! In our previous installments, we examined the earliest attempts to find extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) beyond Earth, as well as one of the most important philosophical underpinnings (Fermi's Paradox). We also looked at the first true example of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) experiment (Project Ozma) and the Drake Equation, followed by the first proposed searches for megastructures (Dyson Spheres) and classification schemes for ETIs (the Kardashev Scale).

Earth, the only life-hosting world we know of, contains signs of that life in its atmosphere. Oxygen/ozone is most convincing, because without being replenished by life, it would disappear quickly. Methane is another one, because it's produces by methanogens. Nitrous oxide is another, because it's produced by microbes and has no known significant source of abiotic production.

The JWST has shown us that even very ancient galaxies have supermassive black holes in their centers, a finding that clashes with our understanding of the early Universe and how galaxies and black holes grow. Though not all of the ancient galaxies the telescope has observed appear to have SMBH, most do. This suggests a clear link between SMBH and galaxy evolution, but the exact nature of that link has so far eluded astrophysicists.

Brown dwarfs are notoriously difficult to find. These “failed stars” aren’t big enough to sustain nuclear fusion, and therefore aren’t as bright as more traditional main sequence stars. In fact, they’re nearly invisible in optical light, and faintly visible in infrared. But thanks to dozens of citizen scientists combing through archival infrared datasets from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and a paper published in the Astronomical Journal detailing their work, we now have an additional set of over 3,000 candidate new brown dwarfs in our stellar neighborhood, more than doubling the total number found so far.

A close flyby past the Red Planet on Friday will send NASA’s Psyche mission on its way towards its final destination.