Space News & Blog Articles

Neutrinos are one of the most enigmatic particles in the standard model. The main reason is that they’re so hard to detect. Despite the fact that 400 trillion of them created in the Sun are passing through a person’s body every second, they rarely interact with normal matter, making understanding anything about them difficult. To help solve their mysteries, a new neutrino detector in China recently started collecting data, and hopes to provide insight on between forty and sixty neutrinos a day for the next ten years.

The story begins in 2024 when NASA's Perseverance rover became the first to photograph a visible light aurora from Martian surface. Now, Dr. Elise Wright Knutsen and her team from the University of Oslo has revealed a second successful image and, more importantly, the method her team developed to forecast when these Martian northern lights will appear.

White dwarfs are the dense, hot cores left behind when Sun like stars die. Imagine squeezing the entire mass of our Sun into something the size of Earth, that’s a white dwarf and our Sun will become one in the distant future. These stellar corpses are incredibly dense, with just a teaspoon weighing as much as a large car.

The search for habitable planets in other star systems has progressed considerably in the past few decades. As of the writing of this article, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 5,989 planets in over 4,500 planetary systems, with over 15,000 candidates yet to be confirmed. At the same time, next-generation observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have made amazing breakthroughs in exoplanet characterization. Unfortunately, scientists are still not at the point where they can characterize smaller planets located closer to their suns, where Earth-like planets are likely to reside.

Binary star systems are not rare. Neither are systems where one star is a remnant like a white dwarf or neutron star, and its companion is on the main sequence. In those systems, the dense remnant can draw material away from the main sequence star. This can create violent Type 1a supernovae in the case of a white dwarf, and the emission of extremely powerful x-rays in the case of a neutron star.

In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made a discovery. It found towering geysers of water erupting from fractures called "tiger stripes" near Enceladus's south pole. This water comes from a vast ocean hidden beneath the moon's icy crust, kept liquid by the powerful gravitational forces from Saturn that constantly squeeze and stretch the interior of Enceladus.

The Sun's magnetic cycle works much like planetary seasons, but on a vastly different timescale. During solar “summer,” otherwise known as solar maximum, our star becomes dramatically more active, sprouting dark sunspots across its surface and hurling massive flares into space. These solar storms send charged particles racing across the Solar System, creating the spectacular aurora displays. We’re currently experiencing this peak activity phase, with Solar Cycle 25 having possibly reached its maximum in 2024.

Has it finally happened? Has NASA finally found biosignatures from ancient Martian life? It's too early to reach that conclusion, but the Perseverance Rover did find chemical compounds that microbes could've used as an energy-rich food. They also found minerals that could've been created by biological reactions.

TRAPPIST-1 is a red dwarf star located about 40 light years away that hosts seven Earth sized rocky planets, with at least three orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water could potentially exist. This makes it one of the most Solar System like exoplanet systems discovered, with TRAPPIST-1e considered among the best potentially habitable exoplanets. The system's proximity and multiple potentially habitable worlds make it an ideal target for searching for technological civilisations.