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When it comes to the search for life elsewhere in the universe, methane and other chemical compounds are seen as signs of biology because they are often produced by living microbes. However, scientists can be misled because certain geological processes can produce chemical signatures identical to those of living organisms.
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Like a shelf in an old house, the Earth collects a lot of dust from its surroundings. This “space dust” is mostly made up of micrometeorites that survive atmospheric entry and provides researchers with a cheap and easy way to obtain samples to study our cosmic neighbors. However, it can be difficult to determine which […]
Researchers working with data from the South Pole Telescope have released a major catalog of galaxy clusters, giving scientists a powerful new tool for studying how the universe grew and changed over billions of years. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.
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NASA and China’s national space agency plan to send crewed missions to Mars in the coming decades. Per NASA’s Moon to Mars mission architecture, this will involve using infrastructure established through the Artemis Program to send crews to the red planet sometime in the 2030s or 2040s. Similar to Artemis, these missions will culminate in […]
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified what may be the most distant barred spiral galaxy ever discovered, dating to a time less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. The paper outlining its properties was posted to the arXiv preprint server on June 23.
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Where does the solar system end and interstellar space begin? That’s a question scientists have been working to answer using spacecraft traveling beyond the sun’s influence. A team of researchers from the Southwest Research Institute, led by Heather Elliott, is using the Solar Wind Around Pluto (SWAP) instrument aboard New Horizons to track the solar […]
Astronomers using computer simulations have investigated whether a class of star clusters nicknamed “cosmic wallflowers” could be the long-sought ancestors of the globular clusters we see orbiting galaxies today. Their paper, posted to the arXiv preprint server on June 25, suggests that where a cluster is born and how fast it spins may determine its […]
Are we alone in the universe? Consider mysterious “extraterrestrial” radio signals. Unexplained gases on other planets. Things mistaken for UFOs.
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Last year, an interstellar traveler entered our solar system. Some speculated that it was an alien spacecraft, but it turned out to be a comet, 3I/Atlas, and it provoked interest from astronomers and astrophysicists eager for insights into galaxies far, far away. Detailed observations from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shot down the […]
We’ve reported on all kinds of wacky ideas for capturing and deorbiting space debris safely. From electric tethers to lasers, engineers and scientists have been trying everything they can think of to deal with the ever-increasing orbital debris problem. But one simple design keeps popping up over and over again—a net. A new paper from […]
With new technologies come new opportunities. And that is especially true in astronomy—with every new advanced telescope, we have the potential to see (or in some cases, listen) farther and more clearly than ever before. That is certainly the case for the new Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which is currently undergoing a multiyear rollout phase. […]
The Canadian astronaut who was part of the historic Artemis II crew that successfully voyaged around the moon earlier this year is retiring from the nation’s space agency, officials said Monday.
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Scale in the universe is hard to understand from a purely human perspective. Many times, the math just doesn’t sit well with our brains, which evolved to capture and process data about the world around us rather than grok the complexities of stellar dynamics and galaxy mergers. But every once in a while, astronomers find […]
A new Southwest Research Institute-led study compared eight AI-generated lunar crater catalogs, discovering that many of their published performance metrics drop sharply when the databases are evaluated using the same scientific standards humans are held to. Crater catalogs provide a comprehensive record of impact craters on planetary surfaces. They log the precise location, dimensions and […]
Rare images taken by a Japanese space probe during a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid have revealed that the space rock resembled a snowman, scientists said Monday.
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