Space News & Blog Articles

Interference from human activity has always been a sticking point in astronomical observations. Radio astronomy is notoriously sensitive to unintentional interference - hence why there are “radio silent” zones near telescopes where cell phones are banned. But gravitational wave astronomy is affected to an even worse degree than radio astronomy, according to a new paper pre-published on arXiv by Reed Essick of the University of Toronto, and it’s not clear there’s much we can do about it.

The heliosphere is a giant bubble created by the Sun, extending far beyond Neptune's orbit and out into interstellar space. Voyager 1 crossed the boundary of the heliosphere (known as the heliopause) in August 2012 and Voyager 2 followed later in November 2018. They were 119 astronomical units from the Sun at the time, that’s 119 times further from the Sun than Earth. It protects us from dangerous levels of radiation and without it, life on Earth would be unlikely to have evolved.

Mysteries abound in the Solar System. Though it can sometimes seem like we've learned a lot, you can pick any object in the Solar System and quickly come up with unanswered questions. That's certainly true of tiny Mercury.

What can exoplanets orbiting M-dwarf stars teach scientists about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recent study submitted to the American Astronomical Society journals hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the possibility of exo-Titans, exoplanets with atmospheres comprised of nitrogen and methane like Saturn’s moon Titan, orbiting M-dwarf stars, which are smaller and cooler than our Sun. this study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets orbiting M-dwarf stars and whether they could possess life as we know it.

Thanks to missions that have been exploring the Red Planet since the 1970s, it has been established that Mars was once a much different place than what we see there today. Instead of an extremely cold, extremely dry, and irradiated planet with a very thin atmosphere, Mars once has a warmer, denser atmosphere and flowing water on its surface. Between 4.2 and 3.7 billion years ago, the planet began to undergo a transition whereby its atmosphere was slowly tripped by solar wind, causing its water to escape into space, collect in the polar ice caps, and retreat underground.

What is the meaning of life? Even the best of us couldn’t hope to answer that question in a universe today article. But there are those who would try to “constrain” it, at least in terms of physics. A new paper from Pankaj Mehta of Boston University of Jané Kondev of Brandeis that was recently pre-published on arXiv looks at how the fundamental constants of physics might be applied to life as we know it - and even life as we don’t know it yet. Their idea doesn't necessarily give the answer to the ultimate question, but it does tie two seemingly disparate fields nicely together.

One of the JWST's most startling discoveries was that black holes were extremely massive in the early Universe, less than one billion years after the Big Bang. The discovery defied explanation, since astrophysicists thought that it would take much more time for black holes to accrete so much mass. An explanation for this discrepancy may lie in a massive black hole observed with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.