Space News & Blog Articles

Sometimes space exploration doesn’t go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might not have succeeded, allowing them to try again. A group from MIT’s Space Enabled Research Group, part of its Media Lab, recently released a paper in Space Science Reviews that describes the design and testing results of a pair of passive sensors sent to the Moon on the ill-fated Rashid-1 rover.

When it comes to finding baby, still-forming planets around young stars, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory is astronomers' most adept tool. ALMA has delivered many images of the protoplanetary disks around young stars, with gaps and rings carved in them by young planets. In new research, a team of researchers used ALMA to image 16 disks around young class 0/1 protostars and found that planets may start forming sooner than previously thought.

Brown dwarfs are a growing area of focus for astronomers, thanks to improved instruments that have the necessary resolution to visualize them. The term describes substellar objects that are about 13 to 80 Jupiter masses, making them too small to become stars, but massive enough to experience some nuclear fusion in their cores and produce heat. Initially theorized in the 1960s, it was not until the mid-1990s that this class of stellar object was confirmed through direct observation. And thanks to next-generation telescopes and improved data-sharing techniques, there are growing opportunities to study these objects.

Is there anything more dramatic than an exploding star? More than just extraordinarily bright, energetic events that can light up the sky for months, these explosions play important roles in the cosmos. Supernova create heavy elements and spread them out into their surroundings, where they can be taken up in the next round of planet and star formation.

The cosmic voids of the universe are empty of matter. But we all know there’s more to the universe than just matter. Nothing in this universe is completely empty, and that’s because there’s always your constant companions. Me? No, not me, I only visit once a month.

Star formation has a lot of complex physics that feed into it. Classical models used something equivalent to a “collapse” of a cloud of gas by gravity, with a star being birthed in the middle. More modern understandings show a feature called a “streamer”, which funnels gas and dust to proto-stars from the surrounding disc of material. But our understanding of those streamers is still in its early stages, like the stars they are forming. So a new paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Pablo Cortes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his co-authors is a welcome addition to the literature - and it shows a unique feature of the process for the first time.

A few days ago, I wrote about non-singular black hole models, specifically one known as the Hayward model. Since its introduction in 2006, several variations of the Hayward model have been introduced, including a rotating model similar to the Kerr metric used to study the supermassive black holes we've observed directly. This raises an interesting question: what if we use a rotating Hayward model instead of the usual Kerr model? A recent study answers that question.