Space News & Blog Articles

Something arrived in our Solar System last summer that had been travelling for longer than the Earth has existed. It came from somewhere out there in the dark between the stars, possibly from a planetary system that formed billions of years before our own Sun even ignited. We don't know exactly where it came from. We may never know. But for a brief, extraordinary window of time, this ancient wanderer passed close enough to study, and the world's astronomers dropped almost everything to watch.

In the summer of 2023, something happened that engineers had talked about for decades but few genuinely expected to see in their lifetimes. SpaceX's Starship, a stainless steel tower taller than a thirty storey building lit its thirty three engines simultaneously and lifted off from the Texas coast. It did not go entirely to plan. But it went. And when the Super Heavy booster returned in flight test five to be caught, mid air, by the enormous mechanical arms of its own launch tower, it was clear that the rules of spaceflight had fundamentally changed.

In the future, farmers on the Moon and Mars will have a big challenge: how to grow healthy food in two extremely unhealthy environments. That's because the soil on both worlds isn't at all hospitable to plants and animals. Neither are other conditions. Both are irradiated worlds, Mars has a thin atmosphere and the Moon has none at all. So, how will future colonists on either world grow their food?

It's been about 8 months since the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) saw first light. Now the telescope is scanning the night sky to detect transient changes and sending alerts to astronomers and observatories around the world so they can perform follow-up observations. This alert system is one of the last milestones before the VRO starts its primary endeavour: the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

Imagine trying to study the foundations of an ancient city while it's still being built. The noise is deafening, the dust is everywhere, and the whole place is barely visible through the haze. That is almost exactly the challenge astronomers face when trying to understand how vast cities of hundreds of galaxies first came into being. A new discovery has just given them their best look yet.

Imagine trying to reconstruct the history of a city by studying only its oldest surviving buildings. You can't watch it being built, you can't interview the architects, all you have are the structures themselves, their materials, their arrangement, the subtle clues locked into their very fabric. That is essentially what astronomers do when they study the formation of our Galaxy, and a new study has just given them their biggest collection of clues yet.

Here's a thought experiment that keeps planetary scientists awake at night. Strip every living thing from our planet, every bacterium, every blade of grass, every creature that has ever drawn breath and ask a simple but profound question: would Earth still be a world capable of supporting life?