Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

Campfires on the Sun

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft detects a surprising number of tiny and bright flares in the gas atmosphere of our star.

April 28, 2021 Read more

The discovery of new millisecond pulsars

Astronomers have discovered 8 millisecond pulsars located within dense clusters of stars, known as globular clusters. Millisecond pulsars are neutron stars, the most compact star known, that spin up to 700 times per second.

April 28, 2021 Read more

Astronomers detect first ever hydroxyl molecule signature in an exoplanet atmosphere

This is the first direct evidence of OH in the atmosphere of a planet beyond the Solar System. It shows not only that astronomers can detect this molecule in exoplanet atmospheres, but also that they can begin to understand the detailed chemistry of this planetary population.

April 27, 2021 Read more

Reading a message carried on a distant tide (w/video)

A high-energy neutrino that flung out from a star, ripped apart by a black hole, reveals something about the cosmic sources of these mysterious particles.

April 27, 2021 Read more

Star light, star bright...as explained by math

The evolving periodicity of the brightness of certain types of stars can now be described mathematically.

April 26, 2021 Read more

Hubble celebrates 31st birthday with giant star on the edge of destruction

The giant star featured in this latest Hubble Space Telescope anniversary image is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction.

April 23, 2021 Read more

MOXIE creates oxygen on Mars

A NASA mission has produced oxygen on another planet for the first time.

April 23, 2021 Read more

Using exoplanets as dark matter detectors

Astrophysicists suggest dark matter could be detected by measuring the effect it has on the temperature of exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.

April 22, 2021 Read more

Astronomers release new all-sky map of Milky Way's outer reaches

The highlight of the new chart is a wake of stars, stirred up by a small galaxy set to collide with the Milky Way. The map could also offer a new test of dark matter theories.

April 22, 2021 Read more

Black holes as magnetic jet engines

A new method may succeed in explaining the high-energy plasma outflows ejected by many black holes.

April 22, 2021 Read more

Bubble with titanium trigger titanic explosions

Scientists have found fragments of titanium blasting out of a famous supernova. This discovery could be a major step in pinpointing exactly how some giant stars explode.

April 21, 2021 Read more

Humungous flare from sun's nearest neighbor breaks records

Astronomers observed a record-setting flare from the star Proxima Centauri - a burst of energy roughly 100 times more powerful than any similar event seen from Earth's sun.

April 21, 2021 Read more

A novel optical physics method to measure the expansion of the universe

Researchers are suggesting a new way to use them to measure the expansion of the universe directly. They propose a method called intensity correlation speckles to measure the difference between the redshift - in which light stretches as it travels through an expanding universe, causing its wavelength to elongate - in two paths of light from the same quasar.

April 21, 2021 Read more

NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter succeeds in historic first flight (w/video)

NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter became the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet.

April 20, 2021 Read more

A new super-Earth detected orbiting a red dwarf star

In recent years there has been an exhaustive study of red dwarf stars to find exoplanets in orbit around them. These stars have effective surface temperatures between 2400 and 3700 K (over 2000 degrees cooler than the Sun), and masses between 0.08 and 0.45 solar masses.

April 16, 2021 Read more

Fast radio bursts shown to include lower frequency radio waves than previously detected

New clues discovered in quest to unravel astrophysical mystery.

April 16, 2021 Read more

Surprise twist suggests stars grow competitively

A survey of star formation activity in the Orion Nebula Cluster found similar mass distributions for newborn stars and dense gas cores, which may evolve into stars. Counterintuitively, this means that the amount of gas a core accretes as it develops, and not the initial mass of the core, is the key factor in deciding the final mass of the produced star.

April 16, 2021 Read more

Fast-spinning black holes narrow the search for dark matter particles

Certain ultralight bosons would be expected to put the brakes on black holes, but new results show no such slowdown.

April 14, 2021 Read more