Space News & Blog Articles

The light, rare element boron, better known as the primary component of borax, a longtime household cleaner, was almost mined to exhaustion in parts of the old American West. But boron could arguably be an unsung hero in cosmic astrobiology, although it's still not listed as one of the key elements needed for the onset of life.

When the rover now named Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in early 2021, scientists already knew they had picked an interesting place to scope out. From space, they could see what looked like a bathtub ring around the crater, indicating there could once have been water there. But there was some debate about what exactly that meant, and it’s taken almost five years to settle it. A new paper from PhD student Alex Jones at Imperial College London and his co-authors has definitively settled the debate on the source of that feature - part of it was once a beach.

Photographing a black hole has presented one of the most unique challenges in astronomy, you can't simply point a telescope at one and snap a picture. Black holes are so distant and compact that capturing their details requires multiple radio telescopes scattered across the globe to work together as one gigantic instrument. The catch? They all need to observe at precisely the same moment, with their signals perfectly aligned.

It’s 2050 and you’re living on Venus. This might come as a surprise due to the planet’s crushing surface pressures (~92 times of Earth) and searing surface temperatures (~465 degrees Celsius/870 degrees Fahrenheit), which is equivalent to ~900 meters (3,000 feet) underwater and hot enough to melt lead, respectively. But you’re not living on the surface. Instead, you’re safe and sound inside a lava tube habitat scanning data from the latest orbiter images while sipping on some habitat-made espresso.

Solar flares are one of the most closely watched processes in solar physics. Partly that’s because they can prove hazardous both to life and equipment around Earth, and in extreme cases even on it. But also, it’s because of how interestingly complex they are. A new paper from Pradeep Chitta of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and his co-authors, available in the latest edition of Astronomy & Astrophysics, uses data collected by ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft to watch the formation process of a massive solar flare. They discovered the traditional model used to describe how solar flares form isn’t accurate, and they are better thought of as being caused by miniaturized “magnetic avalanches.”

"How did life begin?" That question has been pondered by philosophers, scholars, and scientists since time immemorial. In the modern age, it has been generally assumed that the building blocks of life as we know it - amino acids, DNA, and RNA - came together spontaneously to form the first proteins billions of years ago. However, all attempts to recreate this chemical reaction ("abiogenesis") in the laboratory have yielded null results. Nevertheless, it has been widely accepted that this event occurred on Earth, most likely in its early oceans.

WOH G64 has never been an ordinary star. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, this red supergiant holds multiple records as the most luminous, coolest, and dustiest of its kind in that galaxy. These stellar beasts live fast and die young, ending their brief lives in catastrophic supernova explosions that can briefly outshine entire galaxies.

Deep space is far away. Really far away, and getting there quickly with conventional chemical rockets is like trying to cross an ocean in a rowing boat, technically possible but painfully slow and severely limited in what you can carry. NASA has just taken a major step toward changing that equation entirely.