Space News & Blog Articles

Star formation is a fundamental physical process in our Universe. Stars light up the cosmos, and give rise to planets, some of which may support life. While humans have no doubt wondered about stars since prehistoric times, new technological tools like the Milky Way have taken our natural curiosity to a whole new level. Now we can peer inside obscured regions and detect young stars in their dusty cocoons.

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.