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New Types of Hidden Stars Seen for the First Time In the early days of telescopic astronomy, you could only focus on one small region of the sky at a time. Careful observations had to be done by hand, and so much of the breakthrough work centered around a particular object in the sky. A nebula or galaxy, quasar or pulsar. But over the years we’ve been able to build telescopes capable of capturing a wide patch of sky all at once, and with automation, we can now map the entire sky. Early sky surveys took years to complete, but many modern sky surveys canRead More →

The Improbable Origins of Life on Earth We do not yet know how, where, or why life first appeared on our planet. Part of the difficulty is that “life” has no strict, universally agreed-upon definition. Normally this is not an issue, as the vast majority of life is most definitely alive, and only biologists interested in the extreme edges – viruses, prions, and the like – need to worry about precise classifications. But to study the origins of life we must, by necessity, examine a process that takes non-living matter and fundamentally changes it. Presumably this process happened in stages, with fits and starts alongRead More →

New Webb Image of a Massive Star Forming Complex The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaborative effort between NASA, the ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), has revealed some stunning new images of the Universe. These images have not only been the clearest and most details views of the cosmos; they’ve also led to new insight into cosmological phenomena. The latest image, acquired by Webb‘s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), is of the star-forming nebula N79, located about 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The image features a bright young star and the nebula’s glowing clouds of dust and gas from which newRead More →

The Galactic Habitable Zone Our planet sits in the Habitable Zone of our Sun, the special place where water can be liquid on the surface of a world. But that’s not the only thing special about us: we also sit in the Galactic Habitable Zone, the region within the Milky Way where the rate of star formation is just right. The Earth was born with all the ingredients necessary for life – something that most other planets lack. Water as a solvent. Carbon, with its ability to form long chains and bind to many other atoms, a scaffold. Oxygen, easily radicalized and transformable from elementRead More →

Nancy Grace Roman Could Find the First Stars in the Universe In the beginning, the Universe was so hot and so dense that light could not travel far. Photons were emitted, scattered, and absorbed as quickly as the photons in the heart of the brightest stars. But in time the cosmos expanded and cooled to the point that it became transparent, and the birthglow of the Big Bang could traverse space and time for billions of years. We still see it as the microwave cosmic background. As the Universe expanded it grew dark, filled only with warm clouds of hydrogen and helium. In time thoseRead More →

Watch a House-Sized Space Habitat (Intentionally) Burst We live in an age of renewed space exploration, colloquially known as Space Age 2.0. Unlike the previous one, this new space age is characterized by inter-agency cooperation and collaboration between space agencies and the commercial space industry (aka. NewSpace). In addition to sending crews back to the Moon and onto Mars, a major objective of the current space age is the commercialization of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). That means large constellations of satellites, debris mitigation, and plenty of commercial space stations. To accommodate this commercial presence in LEO, Sierra Space has developed the Large Integrated Flexible EnvironmentRead More →

The Moon is Still Shrinking, Explaining Why it Still Has Landslides Although our Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago, it’s still evolving. The interior continues to cool and its orbit is slowly changing. As a result, the Moon has lost 150 feet of its circumference. That shrinkage contributes to near-constant moonquakes, and those trigger landslides and other surface changes. The Moon is currently uninhabited, but all that activity threatens future Artemis landing sites and missions at the South Pole. In a recent paper, planetary scientists point out that the potential of strong seismic events from active thrust faults should be a top consideration when NASARead More →

How Rare Are Total Solar Eclipses… Really? As April’s ‘Great North American Eclipse’ nears, here’s a look at eclipses in time and space. It comes around every total solar eclipse, and I fully expect to hear it trotted out once again this year, leading up to the Great North American eclipse on April 8th, 2024. It’s often repeated (usually around the time leading up to a total solar eclipse) that the syzygy of the Earth, Moon and Sun is special, allowing totality to occur. To be sure, eclipses are extraordinary and spectacular events, and standing in the shadow of the Moon during totality is aRead More →

Early Life Was Radically Different Than Today All modern life shares a robust, hardy, efficient system of intertwined chemicals that propagate themselves. This system must have emerged from a simpler, less efficient, more delicate one. But what was that system, and why did it appear on, of all places, planet Earth? This is the central question of abiogenesis, the generation of life from not-life. We do not yet have an answer to that question, but we do have a collection of curious clues and brilliant hypotheses that might lead us in the right direction. First, the chemistry. All proteins on Earth are made from justRead More →

Ingenuity Suffers Rotor Damage, Ending the Mission There have been numerous robotic space missions reach the end of their operating life over the years and for a multitude of reasons. Be they catastrophic failure or a scheduled end but I must say one that has recently made me a little sad is the demise of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. It sustained damage after its recent flight and can now no longer fly. In a mission that was supposed to complete five flights in 30 days, the plucky little helicopter completed 72 flights over three years!  The Ingenuity helicopter’s historic journey began on 18 FebruaryRead More →

Another Asteroid Discovered Hours Before it Impacts the Earth What were you doing last Saturday? As it turns out, I was doing something rather unexciting… Trying to fix my washing machine (I did – in case you are interested). At the same time, Hungarian geography teacher by day and asteroid hunter by night Krisztián Sárneczky was out observing and detected a small asteroid which it transpired was on a collision course with Earth!  Spotting asteroids is a tricky business. Not least because they are typically dark in colour against a very black sky but the sky is quite a big place and spotting a tinyRead More →

Japan’s Moon Lander Is Lying On Its Side After Hitting Its Target Now we know why Japan’s lunar lander wasn’t able to recharge its batteries after touching down on the moon last week: The spacecraft appears to have tumbled onto its side, with its solar cells facing away from the sun. The good news is that the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, achieved its primary mission of setting down within 100 meters (330 feet) of its target point — and that the mission’s two mini-probes, which were ejected during SLIM’s descent, are working as intended. Scores of images were taken before and afterRead More →