Space News & Blog Articles

Despite the proliferation of AI based research lately, sometimes researchers need a human eye to make true discoveries. That collaboration was in evidence in a recent paper by Dr. Veselin Kostov, a research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who led a team of almost 1,800 to review a dataset from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) that led to the discovery of almost 8,000 new eclipsing binary systems.

Population III (PopIII) stars represent astronomy's ultimate prize are the first generation of stars born from the pristine hydrogen and helium created in the Big Bang. These theoretical giants, potentially hundreds of times more massive than our Sun, should have been fundamentally different from any stars we see today. They contained virtually no “metals,” astronomy’s term for elements heavier than helium, because none existed yet in the universe.

What processes during the formation of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, potentially led to it having cryovolcanism, and even an internal ocean? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the formation and evolution of Charon to ascertain whether it once possessed an internal ocean during its history and if this could have led to cryovolcanism based on images obtained by NASA’s New Horizons probe.

In the outer reaches of our Solar System, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, lies one of the most mysterious objects ever discovered, Sedna. This reddish dwarf planet follows such an extreme orbit that it takes over 11,000 years to complete a single journey around the Sun. Now, scientists are proposing a new mission to reach this distant world using a revolutionary propulsion technology.

Star formation is a hidden event, at least in its very early stages. Stellar crèches are veiled by clouds of gas and dust. Those same clouds also shield planet formation, particularly in the very beginning. So, astronomers don't always get to see the action until the dust has cleared. Although the newly forming planets are too small to see, their gravity stirs up spiral and ring patterns in the so-called protoplanetary disks around the newborn stars. So, when do those patterns begin to appear in the birth process?

What methods can be used to identify subsurface oceans on the five largest moons of Uranus: Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon, and Miranda? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) investigated potentially using radio science on the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) concept mission, which was designated as a high priority Flagship-class mission by the 2023–2032 Planetary Science Decadal Survey.

One of the most perplexing discoveries in modern astronomy has been finding supermassive black holes, some weighing billions of times more than our Sun, in galaxies that formed less than 750 million years after the Big Bang. They appear to have grown impossibly fast, challenging our understanding of how black holes form and evolve.

As humanity ventures deeper into space, one critical question looms large: how do we prevent Earth's microbes from contaminating other worlds? A groundbreaking new study by Daniel J. Brener and Charles S. Cockell suggests we may need to fundamentally rethink our approach to planetary protection by borrowing concepts from a surprising source; island biogeography.

Scientists may have found a new way to detect some of the universe's most mysterious objects, primordial black holes (PBHs), using Hawking radiation. This groundbreaking approach relies upon watching for their radiation signatures as they pass through the Solar System. This technique could finally help us to solve one of cosmology's biggest puzzles: what makes up the invisible dark matter that comprises 85% of all matter in the universe.

Calibration is a necessary, if typically invisible, step in the successful operation of any scientific telescope. Without a known value to compare its readings against, data from telescopes could suffer from biases or transients that could completely misdirect scientists analyzing it. However, those same scientists also struggle to find good sources of data to calibrate against. Enter Arcstone - a technology demonstration mission that launched earlier this week that plans to use one particular source as a calibration dataset - moonlight.

We know black hole mergers occur because we can detect the resulting gravitational waves. But when trying to piece together the history of black holes mergers in the Milky Way, astronomers need another tactic. They need to perform some forensic astronomy.

The search for life beyond our planet continues, and one of the most underappreciated tools in an astrobiologists toolkit is statistics. While it might not be as glamorous as directly imaging a planet’s atmosphere or finding a system with seven planets in it, statistics is absolutely critical if we want to be sure that what we’re seeing is real and not just an artifact of the data, or of our observational techniques themselves. A new paper by Caleb Traxler and their co-authors at the Department of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine takes on that challenge head-on by statistically analyzing a set of about 10% of the total number of exoplanets found and judging their habitability.

For generations, scientists and science fiction writers have contemplated how humans could someday live on Mars. While the idea once seemed like a far-off possibility, the many robotic missions that have travelled to Mars and successfully landed on its surface have given new life to the idea. This presents many challenges, which include the time it takes to reach Mars (6 to 9 months using conventional propulsion) and the dangers of long-term exposure to cosmic radiation and microgravity. But building long-term habitats and facilities on the Martian surface is also challenging.