All posts tagged: Space News

Researchers propose a broader new way to detect life beyond Earth

Researchers propose a broader new way to detect life beyond Earth

Published by Jenni Sidey

A single alien world can be misleading. A strange gas in an atmosphere might look promising, then turn out to come from ordinary chemistry. A seemingly unusual planet might only be unusual because astronomers do not yet understand it well enough. That uncertainty has long haunted the search for life beyond Earth, where one planet at a time is often treated like a possible smoking gun. Now, a research team led by Harrison B. Smith of the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Institute of Science Tokyo and Lana Sinapayen of the National Institute for Basic Biology is arguing for a different way to look. Instead of asking whether one distant planet carries a clear sign of life, they suggest scientists may eventually spot life through broader patterns spread across many planets. Their idea is built around what they call an agnostic biosignature. In plain terms, that means a way to search for life without needing a precise definition of what life is, or what chemistry it must use. In this example, life from a planet …

Astronomers discover three distinct groups of merging black holes

Astronomers discover three distinct groups of merging black holes

Published by Jenni Sidey

Black hole collisions do not appear to come from one simple cosmic recipe. After studying more than 150 mergers detected through gravitational waves, astronomers say the growing catalog points instead to three distinct groups of merging black holes. Each group seems to carry its own signature in mass, spin, and how often the mergers happened across cosmic time. Taken together, the pattern suggests that these violent collisions are being built in more than one kind of environment. Their analysis focuses on the fourth gravitational-wave transient catalog from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, known as GWTC-4. That catalog includes more than 150 detected black hole mergers, enough for researchers to stop treating these events as a single blended population and start asking whether different families are hiding inside the data. Artist’s impression of a pair of black holes merging, involving one with unusual spin. (CREDIT: Carl Knox, OzGrav, Swinburne University of Technology) Not one family, but three One clue came from the masses. When the researchers looked across the full sample, they did not see a smooth spread. …

Scientists reveal the hidden forces shaping how gravity works across the Universe

Scientists reveal the hidden forces shaping how gravity works across the Universe

Published by Jenni Sidey

Gravity behaves predictably in your daily life. Drop a ball, and it falls. Planets loop around stars. On paper, the same rules should also govern matter spread across the universe. But the farther astronomers look, the more that certainty gets tested. That question sits at the center of a new analysis of galaxy motions on enormous cosmic scales. The work used light from the cosmic microwave background, combined with a large galaxy survey, to ask something deceptively simple: does gravity still follow the familiar inverse-square law across vast stretches of space? For now, the standard picture appears to be holding up. Researchers like Patricio A. Gallardo from the University of Pennsylvania tested how galaxy groups and clusters move toward one another over distances of tens of millions of light-years. Their results lined up well with the expectations of the standard cosmological model, known as Lambda-CDM, which combines general relativity, dark matter, and dark energy. A competing idea, modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND, did not match the data nearly as well. Patricio Gallardo and his collaborators used …

The human eyes behind Artemis II’s most memorable photos

The human eyes behind Artemis II’s most memorable photos

Published by Jenni Sidey

In early April 2026, the Artemis II mission captivated me and millions of people watching from across the world. The crew’s courage, skill and infectious wonder served as tangible proof of human persistence and technological achievement, all against the mysterious backdrop of space. People back on Earth got to witness the mission through remarkable photos of space captured by astronauts. Images created and shared by astronauts underscore how photography builds a powerful, authentic connection that goes beyond what technology alone can capture. As a photographer and the director of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, I am especially drawn to how these photographs have been at the center of the public’s collective experience of this mission. Astronaut Jeremy Hansen takes a picture through the camera shroud covering a window on the Orion spacecraft. (CREDIT: NASA) In an era when image authenticity is often questioned and with the capabilities of autonomous, AI-driven imaging, NASA’s choice to train astronauts in photography has placed meaning over convenience and prioritized their human perspectives and creativity. Capturing space from the crew’s perspective Photography …

Astronomers find compelling new evidence of the first stars formed after the Big Bang

Astronomers find compelling new evidence of the first stars formed after the Big Bang

Published by Jenni Sidey

A faint glow of helium, hanging near one of the earliest known galaxies, may be the clearest sign yet that astronomers have finally caught the universe’s first stars in action. The signal comes from a tiny object nicknamed Hebe, sitting about 3 kiloparsecs from GN-z11, a galaxy seen as it existed roughly 400 million years after the Big Bang. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers say they have now confirmed a strange helium emission first noticed earlier, and the case has only grown stronger. No metal lines turned up in the data. That absence matters. The earliest stars, often called Population III stars, are thought to have formed from almost pure hydrogen and helium, before the universe had been enriched with heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, and iron. For years, they have remained a missing piece in astronomy, predicted by theory but frustratingly hard to pin down with observations. That is why this small patch of light has drawn so much attention. Continuum-subtracted map of the HeII emission at the redshift of Hebe …

‘God of chaos’ asteroid Apophis will pass very close to Earth in 2029

‘God of chaos’ asteroid Apophis will pass very close to Earth in 2029

Published by Jenni Sidey

For a brief stretch on April 13, 2029, a giant space rock will slip closer to Earth than some of the satellites parked high above the planet. That object is Apophis, an asteroid once treated as a serious threat. Now it is viewed as one of the most unusual scientific opportunities in modern astronomy. Apophis is not headed for impact. That part is settled. But the asteroid’s close flyby is still extraordinary because of what Earth itself may do to it on the way past. The asteroid, officially known as 99942 Apophis, is expected to pass about 20,000 miles, or 32,000 kilometers, above Earth’s surface. At roughly 375 meters across on average, it is large enough to command attention and close enough to become visible to the naked eye in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia, weather permitting. In fact, space agencies say it will be the closest approach of an asteroid this size that scientists have known about in advance. That makes the 2029 event more than a sky show. It turns Earth into …

Scientists develop laser-powered graphene propulsion for next-generation space travel

Scientists develop laser-powered graphene propulsion for next-generation space travel

Published by Jenni Sidey

A laser hit the tiny black cube, and it lurched forward almost at once. That split-second jump, caught during a zero-gravity arc aboard a parabolic flight, points to a strange and promising idea for space travel. A class of ultralight graphene aerogels, when illuminated under microgravity, can turn light into motion with surprising force. In the experiment, the material accelerated so quickly that the main burst was over in about 30 milliseconds. “The reaction was fast and furious. Before you could even begin to blink, the graphene aerogels experienced large accelerations. It was all over in 30 milliseconds,” said Marco Braibanti, ESA’s project scientist for the experiment, Light-driven propulsion of graphene aerogels in microgravity. The work came out of an international team led by researchers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates. Their findings, published in Advanced Science, suggest that light-driven propulsion in graphene aerogels becomes far more effective when gravity is stripped away. Inside a vacuum chamber, a continuous laser fired at three tiny graphene …

The coldest ever hunt for dark matter has begun deep underground

The coldest ever hunt for dark matter has begun deep underground

Published by Jenni Sidey

Two kilometres underground near Sudbury, Ont., a machine has reached a temperature so low it barely seems real. Inside SNOLAB, scientists have cooled the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or SuperCDMS, to just tens of milliKelvin above absolute zero, roughly a hundred times colder than outer space. That number matters because the experiment’s detectors cannot truly come alive until they reach it. “Reaching this base temperature now allows us to turn on the detectors, make sure they are all working and start collecting data that potentially is coming from dark matter particles hitting our detectors,” says Miriam Diamond, a co-principal investigator in the international collaboration and an assistant professor in the University of Toronto’s department of physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science. For the team behind SuperCDMS, hitting base temperature marks a turning point. The project is no longer mainly about construction and installation. It is moving into commissioning and, soon after that, science operations. Scientists have reached a critical milestone in their efforts to detect dark matter – the mysterious substance that …

Our local universe’s expansion rate doesn’t add up, astronomers find

Our local universe’s expansion rate doesn’t add up, astronomers find

Published by Jenni Sidey

A difference of a few kilometers per second might not sound like much. In cosmology, it has become one of the field’s most stubborn problems. An international team of astronomers has now delivered one of the sharpest direct measurements yet of how fast the nearby Universe is expanding, and the answer again lands on the high side. Their new value for the Hubble constant, the number used to describe that expansion rate, is 73.50 ± 0.81 kilometers per second per megaparsec. That is just over 1% precision. It also keeps the long-running Hubble tension very much alive. The result, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes from the H0 Distance Network Collaboration, or H0DN. The project grew out of a March 2025 workshop at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland, where researchers from across the field worked to build a shared framework for combining local measurements of cosmic distance. This graphic represents the tension that exists between measurements of the expansion rate of the late, nearby Universe, versus what would be expected based on …

Frozen ocean world found lurking between Mars and Jupiter

Frozen ocean world found lurking between Mars and Jupiter

Published by Jenni Sidey

The scars on Ceres should have softened by now. That was the long-running problem. If the dwarf planet’s crust held a great deal of ice, many of its craters should have slowly sagged over geologic time, their sharp bowls easing into shallower shapes. Instead, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft found a world still marked by deep impacts, landslides, pits, domes and bright patches that hinted at buried ice, while also seeming to argue against too much of it. A new study now tries to resolve that contradiction. In Nature Astronomy, researchers from Purdue University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory argue that Ceres may be far icier than many scientists had come to accept, with an outer crust made not of mostly dry rock but of dirty ice, possibly reaching about 90% ice near the surface and becoming less icy with depth. That would make Ceres less like a dry leftover of the asteroid belt and more like the frozen remnant of an ancient muddy ocean world. Schematic of simulated crustal structures. (CREDIT: Nature Astronomy) A crust that …