Space News & Blog Articles

When the James Webb Space Telescope provided astronomers with a glimpse of the earliest galaxies in the Universe, there was some understandable confusion. Given that these galaxies existed during “Cosmic Dawn,” less than one billion years after the Big Bang, they seemed “impossibly large” for their age. According to the most widely accepted cosmological model—the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model—the first galaxies in the Universe did not have enough time to become so massive and should have been more modestly sized.

The merging of black holes and neutron stars are among the most energetic events in the universe. Not only do they emit colossal amounts of energy, they can also be detected through gravitational waves. Observatories like LIGO/Virgo (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) and KAGRA (The Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) have detected their gravitational waves but new gravitational wave observatories are now thought to be able to detect the collapse of a massive rapidly spinning star before it becomes a black hole. According to new research, collapsing stars within 50 million light years should be detectable. 

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has fascinated us for decades. Now a team of researchers have used the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia to scan great swathes of sky for alien signals. Unusually for a SETI project, this one focussed attention on 2,800 galaxies instead of stars within our own. They have been on the lookout for advanced civilisations that are broadcasting their existence using the power of an entire star. Alas they weren’t successful but its an exciting new way to search for alien intelligence. 

Solar sails are an exciting way to travel through the Solar System because they get their propulsion from the Sun. NASA has developed several solar sails, and their newest, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (or ACS3), launched a few months ago into low-Earth orbit. After testing, NASA reported today that they extended the booms, deploying its 80-square-meter (860 square feet) solar sail. They’ll now use the sail to raise and lower the spacecraft’s orbit, learning more about solar sailing.

Rogue Planets, or free-floating planetary-mass objects (FFPMOs), are planet-sized objects that either formed in interstellar space or were part of a planetary system before gravitational perturbations kicked them out. Since they were first observed in 2000, astronomers have detected hundreds of candidates that are untethered to any particular star and float through the interstellar medium (ISM) of our galaxy. In fact, some scientists estimate that there could be as many as 2 trillion rogue planets (or more!) wandering through the Milky Way alone.

Scientists have discovered that Earth has a third field. We all know about the Earth’s magnetic field. And we all know about Earth’s gravity field, though we usually just call it gravity.

Digging in the ground is so commonplace on Earth that we hardly ever think of it as hard. But doing so in space is an entirely different proposition. On some larger worlds, like the Moon or Mars, it would be broadly similar to how digging is done on Earth. But their “milligravity” would make the digging experience quite different on the millions of asteroids in our solar system. Given the potential economic impact of asteroid mining, there have been plenty of suggested methods on how to dig on an asteroid, and a team from the University of Arizona recently published the latest in a series of papers about using a customized bucket wheel to do so.

After about 10 years of construction, the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is scheduled to see its first light in January 2025. Once it’s up and running, it will begin its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a decade-long effort to photograph the entire visible sky every few nights. It’ll study dark energy and dark matter, map the Milky Way, and detect transient astronomical events and small Solar System objects like Near Earth Objects (NEOs).