Space News & Blog Articles

Baby pictures are some of a family's most cherished artifacts. The same thing can be said of the Hubble Space Telescope and the infant stars it immortalizes in its scientific portraits. But while we know how babies are conceived and how they form in great detail, the same can't be said for star formation.

When the new WEAVE spectrograph began science operations on the 4.2 meter William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in 2023, astronomers looked forward to its first five years. During this time, the telescope will be working on eight new simultaneous surveys of the sky. Before it could begin this work, the instrument went through a science verification phase. This important step demonstrates the instrument's capabilities and allows operators to refine its operations.

The US’s federally funded space program has been struggling of late. With the recent cancellation of the Mars Sample Return mission, and mass layoffs / resignations taking place at NASA, the general sense of a lack of morale at the agency is palpable, even from a distance. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire software entrepreneur and rocket enthusiast who was recently confirmed as NASA administrator during his second confirmation hearing, hopes to change that, and one of his priorities is pushing the Artemis missions for a permanent human presence on the Moon. However, at least one big technical hurdle remains before being able to do so - how to power a base during the two week long lunar night. A recent press release describes how NASA, and another branch of the federal government (the Department of Energy - DoE) hope to solve that problem - with a lunar-ready nuclear fission reactor.

We recently discussed the different types of worlds that the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is expected to find that might have noticeable biosignatures. However, no matter how good the instrumentation on board the observatory is, the data it collects will be useless if scientists don’t know how to interpret it. A paper explaining what data they need to collect before analyzing HWO data was authored by Niki Parenteau, a research biologist at NASA, and her co-authors, which is now available in pre-print on arXiv.

Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH), which reside at the center of many galaxies (ranging from dwarf to massive), are a true force of nature. Over time, dust and gas from their surroundings fall toward them, forming an accretion disk just outside the event horizon that is accelerated to near the speed of light (aka relativistic speed). This releases a tremendous amount of energy, temporarily making the core region outshine all the stars in the disk - what is known as an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN). Over time, this matter slowly accretes onto the black hole's face, also resulting in radiation across the spectrum.

The exact moment when life began on Earth may be forever hidden from us. But scientific research can explore the events leading up to that moment. Researchers have mad a lot of progress in finding the building blocks of life and in understanding how they formed.