Space News & Blog Articles

Carl Sagan, along with co-author Edwin Salpeter, famously published a paper in the 70s about the possibility of finding life in the cloud of Jupiter. They specifically described “sinkers, floaters, and hunters” that could live floating and moving in the atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet. He also famously talked about how clouds on another of our solar system’s planets - Venus - obfuscated what was on the surface, leading to wild speculation about a lush, Jurassic Park-like world full of life, just obscured by clouds. Venus turned out to be the exact opposite of that, but both of those papers show the impact clouds can have on the Earth for life. A new paper by authors as the Carl Sagan Institute, led by Ligia Coelho of Cornell, argues that we should look at clouds as potential habitats for life - we just have to know how to look for it.

NASA is facing increasingly sharp challenges as it pursues its goal of landing astronauts on the moon again before this decade is out — and as the space agency braces for another leadership change, it’s clear that the year ahead will also bring further challenges. How will NASA fare?

The James Webb Space Telescope didn't need much time to show us how wrong we were about the early Universe. Mere weeks after it began observations, it found galaxies in the very early Universe that were far more massive than our theories showed. These confounding images required an explanation.

Quasars acting as strong gravitational lenses are among the rarest finds in astronomy. Out of nearly 300,000 quasars catalogued in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, only twelve candidates were identified, and just three confirmed. These systems are exceptionally valuable because they allow astronomers to precisely measure the mass of a quasar's host galaxy, something that is normally impossible given that the overwhelming brightness of the quasar itself drowns out its surroundings.

Nestled on a hillside in Guangdong Province near Zhaoqing City, the Jinlin crater managed to hide in plain sight until researchers identified it as an impact structure. Only about 200 confirmed impact craters exist worldwide, making each discovery scientifically valuable. But this one stands out for its exceptional size and youth.

So if the standard model of cosmology is wrong, what alternative is there?

A trio of exoplanets may challenge what we know about planetary formation.

Getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the dream of many astronomers. The most powerful space telescope currently in our arsenal, the JWST has been in operation for almost four years at this point, after a long and tumultuous development time. Now, going into its fifth year of operation, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the science and mission operations centers for the JWST has received its highest number ever of submission for observational programs. Now a team of volunteer judges and the institute's scientists just have to pick which ones will actually get telescope time.