This is the View From Juno During its Flyby of Ganymede and Jupiter Visualizations shape how we perceive space exploration. Whether it’s the Pale Blue Dot, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, Earthrise, or any other myriad images captured as part of this great endeavor, they all help inspire the next generation of explorers. Now, with […]
Blue Origin Successfully Launches the Oldest and Youngest Person to Ever go to Space (oh, and Jeff Bezos too) On the anniversary of the first Moon landing, Blue Origin became the second commercial space company in just nine days to send people just past the edge of space. During the seemingly flawless 10 minute and […]
Good News! NASA Announces that they have Fixed Hubble! Update: Hubble took its first picture since it went into safe mode on June 13th! More info here. On Sunday, June 13th, the Hubble Space Telescope gave the astronomical community a fright when its payload computer suddenly stopped working. This prompted the main computer to put […]
Volcanic Activity on Venus Could Explain Phosphine Ever since the announcement last September that astronomers found evidence of phosphine in the clouds of Venus, the planet has been getting a lot of attention. It’s not surprising. Phosphine is a potential biosignature: On Earth, it is produced by microbial life. Might a similar biological process be […]
Where can we find a fifth force of nature? We know of four fundamental forces of nature, with no signs of a fifth. But dark matter and dark energy make up over 90% of all the contents of the universe. So the question remains: could there be a fifth force hiding in the “dark sector” […]
We Need to Fix Space Junk Before It’s Too Late As of 2020, there were over 19,000 pieces of individually tracked space junk in orbit above the Earth. Of those, a mere 2,200 were operational satellites. As more and more satellites go up, the risk of collisions increases. And what are governments doing to stop […]
Fantastic Visualization Shows What Would Happen if you Dropped a Ball Across the Solar System Summertime means it’s time to play ball! But what would it be like to play ball on various locations across our Solar System? Planetary scientist Dr. James O’Donoghue has put together a fun animation of how quickly an object falls […]
New Images of Mars From China’s Rover On May 14th, 2021, the China National Space Agency (CNSA) achieved another major milestone when the Tianwen-1 lander successfully soft-landed on Mars, making China the second nation in the world to land a mission on Mars and establish communications from the surface. Shortly thereafter, China National Space Agency […]
WIMPS vs. Axions: What is dark matter? Dark matter rules every galaxy. But what exactly is it? Astronomers believe it to be some kind of new, exotic particle. You may have heard some terms tossed around, like WIMPs or axions. Let’s explore what those terms actually mean. First off, there’s a few things that we […]
Is the Universe a Fractal? We find examples of fractals everywhere in nature. Tree branches, snowflakes, river deltas, cloud formations, and more. So it’s natural to ask the ultimate question: is the entire universe one giant fractal? The answer is…no, but sorta yes. Benoit Mandelbrot, who pretty much everyone agrees introduced the modern concept of […]
Ingenuity is now Mapping the Terrain Around Perseverance Having eyes in the sky is useful for a variety of activities. Everything from farming to military operations has benefited from the boom in drone usage, as the small aircraft track the progress of crop disease, enemy movements, or how awesome a professor skier looks going down […]
Don’t Be Surprised if EmDrive Experiments Never Work Every few years the “EmDrive”, a proposed method of generating rocket thrust without any exhaust, hits the news. Each time, everyone asks: could this be it? Could this be the technological leap to revolutionize spaceflight? Don’t hold your breath. Here’s the basic idea behind the EmDrive. You […]
Shanghai is About to Open the World’s Largest Astronomy Museum China has certainly been making its growing power and influence felt in recent years, especially when it comes to the realm of space exploration and science. In the past ten years alone, China has deployed the three space stations with their Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) program, […]
Here’s SpaceX’s new Drone Ship: “A Shortfall of Gravitas” At this point, SpaceX could claim to be both a rocket company and also a maritime shipping company. The company owns a fleet of drone ships for the purposes of providing their rockets with a safe place to retrograde land in the ocean without having to […]
How did Supermassive Black Holes Form? Collapsing Dark Matter Halos can Explain Them We don’t quite understand how the first supermassive black holes formed so quickly in the young universe. So a team of physicists are proposing a radical idea. Instead of forming black holes through the usual death-of-a-massive-start route, instead giant dark matter halos […]
From the way These Stars Look, a Supernova is Inevitable Sometimes loud explosions are easier to deal with when you know they’re coming. They are also easier to watch out for. So when astronomers from the University of Warwick found a rare tear-drop shaped star, known as HD265435, they knew they were looking at a […]
According to Elon, Starship Could Chomp up Space Junk At their South Texas Launch Facility, just outside of the village of Boca Chica, SpaceX is gearing up to test the Super Heavy, the booster element of their Starship launch system. This massive reusable first stage rocket will be responsible for sending the Starship orbital vehicle […]
Exploding Material From a Gamma-ray Burst Scrambled Nearby Magnetic Fields A team of astronomers has found that giant, organized magnetic fields can help drive some of the most powerful explosions in the universe. But when all is said and done, the shock wave from that blast scrambles any magnetic fields in a matter of minutes. […]
Report Suggests That Astronauts Shouldn’t get More Than 600 Millisieverts of Radiation Exposure During Their Career. We get 2-3 a Year Down Here on Earth Space may be pretty, but it’s dangerous. Astronauts face a much higher dose of ionizing radiation than us Earth-bound folks, and a new report says that NASA’s current guidelines and […]
The Sun Hammered Earth With Megaflares in its Youth Planetary formation theory has been undergoing a lot of changes recently, with an ever expanding litany of events that can potentially impact it. Everything from gravity to magnetic fields seems to impact this complex process. Now scientists want to add another confounding factor – massive solar […]
