Space News & Blog Articles

There is a fundamental tension in space exploration that has created ongoing debates for decades. By creating the infrastructure we need to explore other worlds, we damage them in some way, making them either less scientifically interesting or less “pristine,” which some would argue, in itself, is a bad thing. A new paper available in JGR Planets, from Francisca Paiva, a physicist at Instituto Superior Técnico, and Silvio Sinibaldi, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) planetary protection officer, argues that, in the Moon’s case at least, the problem is even worse than we originally thought.

What exists beneath the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon, Callisto? This is what a recent study accepted by *The Planetary Science Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the subsurface composition of Callisto, which is Jupiter’s outermost Galilean satellite. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the interior composition of Callisto, which is hypothesized to possess a subsurface liquid water ocean, and develop new techniques for exploring planetary subsurface environments.

Crew-11’s early return could be visible across the U.S. Wednesday night.

Galaxy clusters aren’t supposed to be scorching hot when they’re young. Like infants, they should need time to mature before developing their full characteristics. Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array have just discovered that nature doesn’t always follow the same script.

Galaxies don’t always die dramatically. Sometimes they fade away, slowly strangled by the very black holes at their hearts. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimetre Array have caught one such death in progress, revealing a surprisingly subtle method of galactic murder.

Newborn stars aren’t gentle. They blast ionised gas into space, carving luminous paths through the darkness. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has just captured fresh images of one of these stellar outbursts, showing bright ribbons of pink and green gas stretching across 32 light years of space.

NGC 1333 is a reflection nebula in the Perseus Molecular Cloud. The cloud is relatively nearby in astronomical terms, only about 1000 light-years away. The nebula is a very active star-forming region, and since it's so close, it's very well-studied. Most of the cloud is basically invisible, but NGC 1333 is one of two visible structures.

Betelgeuse is the star that everybody can't wait to see blow up, preferably sooner than later. That's because it's a red supergiant on the verge of becoming a supernova and there hasn't been one explode this close in recorded human history. It's been changing its brightness and showing strange surface behavior, which is why astronomers track its activity closely. Are these changes due to its aging process? Do they mean it's about to blow up? Probably not.