Space News & Blog Articles

Searching for technosignatures - signs of technology on a planet that we can see from afr - remains a difficult task. There are so many different factors to consider, and we only have the technological capabilities to detect a relatively small collection of them. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv but also accepted for publication into The Astrophysical Journal Letters, from Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and his co-authors explores some of those capabilities by using a framework they developed known as Project Janus that estimates what technology will look like on Earth 1,000 years from now in the hopes that we can test whether or not we can detect it on another planet.

What can an exoplanet leaking helium teach astronomers about the formation and evolution of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recent study published in *Nature Astronomy* hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated atmospheric escape on a puffy exoplanet. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of gas giant planets, specifically with many gas giant planets observed orbiting extremely close to their stars.

Sometime in 2029, the European Space Agency is scheduled to launch its Comet Interceptor Mission. The Interceptor will wait for a long-period comet to arrive in the inner Solar System then set off on a trajectory to rendezvous with it. These objects are ancient and primordial, carrying material largely unaltered by time that holds clues to how the Solar System formed.

Whenever a new telescope is about to begin observations, scientists say they're looking forward to finding answers to some outstanding questions. After all, each new telescope is deliberately designed to address some of these questions. But they also remark that new telescopes inevitably reveal new surprises, and how excited they are to confront those surprises. When it comes to the JWST, both of these expectations have come true.

If you ever feel like you are constantly on the move, that's because you are. And not only in your daily life. You spin around the world once a day, the Earth dances with the Moon around the Sun, and the Sun and everything else in the solar system bob around the Milky Way. Even our galaxy moves through the cosmos, and it might be moving faster than we thought.

Galaxies like our Milky Way grew through cascading mergers of smaller galaxies that began billions of years ago. The ancient progenitors of galaxies like ours were small galaxies similar to modern-day dwarf galaxies like the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Research shows that both dwarf galaxies and ancient galaxies are less massive, have lower metallicity, and have lots of star-forming gas but relatively few stars. Astronomers try to understand ancient galaxies and how they grew to become so massive by studying dwarf galaxies that are interacting with each other and beginning to merge.