Space News & Blog Articles

What can star variability—changes in a star’s brightness over time—teach astronomers about exoplanet habitability? This is what a recent study accepted to *The Astronomical Journal* hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the interaction between a star’s activity and exoplanetary atmospheres. This study has the potential to help astronomers better understand how star variability plays a role in finding habitable exoplanets, specifically around stars that are different from our Sun.

Star formation should be a relatively straightforward process. Dense clouds of molecular hydrogen collapse under gravity, fragmenting into cores that grow into protostars. These infant stars are cold, deeply embedded in their parent clouds, and shouldn't produce ultraviolet radiation. They're not hot enough. Yet when astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope's MIRI instrument to observe five young stars in the Ophiuchus molecular cloud, 450 light years away, they found clear evidence of UV radiation affecting molecular hydrogen in outflows around these protostars.

What is the importance of studying explosive volcanism on Venus? This is what a recent study published in the *Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets* hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the potential altitudes of explosive volcanism on Venus. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the present volcanic activity on Venus, along with gaining insight about its formation and evolution and other planetary bodies throughout the solar system and beyond.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope continues its inexorable march toward launch. It recently completed another series of tests that brings it a few steps closer to a launch pad in Florida. This time, the telescope was split into two separate parts - an inner portion and an outer portion, each of which went through separate tests throughout the fall.

Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan recently accomplished something truly unprecedented. With the help of colleagues from the University of Tokyo and the Universitat de Barcelona, the team conducted the world's first Milky Way simulations that accurately represented more than 100 billion stars over 10,000 years. The simulation not only represented 100 times more individual stars than previous models, but was also produced 100 times faster.

The evolution of each individual galaxy is shaped by its surroundings, according to new research. The Deep Extragalactic Visible Legacy Survey (DEVILS), an endeavour of ICRAR and the University of Western Australia, has released its first data. It includes catalogues of morphological, redshift, photometric and spectroscopic data, as well as group environments and halo data for thousands of galaxies.

Studying the light from stars tells us their temperature, composition, age, and evolutionary state. But the red giant companion to Gaia BH2, a black hole system discovered in 2023, tells a contradictory story that doesn't make sense until you consider stellar violence!

I once filmed down a salt mine in North Yorkshire, descending into a dark matter laboratory buried deep underground where scientists wait for the rarest of collisions, dark matter particles interacting with ordinary matter. They're still waiting. But above ground, looking outward rather than inward, Professor Tomonori Totani from the University of Tokyo may have found what those underground detectors haven’t, dark matter revealing itself through light.

A first ever detection of a coronal mass ejection from a small red dwarf could have big consequences for life on any nearby planets.