Space Exploration News – Latest Headlines

A pair of lonely planet-like objects born like stars

Astronomers discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting around each other from a very large distance. Although these objects look like giant exoplanets, they formed in the same way as stars, proving that the mechanisms driving star formation can produce rogue worlds in unusual systems deprived of a Sun.

December 16, 2020 Read more

Researchers identify where giant jets from black holes discharge their energy

New study determines that black holes discharge the energy in their plasma jets much farther away from the black hole's center than previously thought, resolving long-standing debate and offering clues to jet formation and structure.

December 15, 2020 Read more

Fertilizer made from urine could enable space agriculture

Researchers report a cheap and efficient method to make liquid fertilizer (ammonia) from simplified artificial urine, serving an ideal dual purpose of growing food and treating waste.

December 15, 2020 Read more

The farthest galaxy in the universe

Chemical signatures give away the distance to the most distant galaxy.

December 15, 2020 Read more

No longer 'faster than permitted by our galaxy'...

Physicists have resolved a long-lasting discrepancy between the measured velocities of interstellar oxygen atoms and other elements in our galaxy: a difference of 380 km/s, which astrophysical measurements of X-ray absorption by oxygen atoms gave, had given astrophysicists a headache.

December 14, 2020 Read more

Can pizza help address the dark matter mystery?

Researchers developed a novel multiple-cell cavity design, dubbed 'pizza cavity'. Just like pizzas are cut into several slices, multiple partitions vertically divide the cavity volume into identical pieces (cells). With almost no volume to be lost, this multiple-cell haloscope enables the meaningful output of high-frequency region scanning.

December 11, 2020 Read more

Hubble identifies strange exoplanet that behaves like the long-sought 'Planet Nine'

The 11-Jupiter-mass exoplanet called HD106906 b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed 'Planet Nine'.

December 10, 2020 Read more

A huge hourglas structure in the Milky Way

The first all-sky survey performed by the eROSITA X-ray telescope on-board the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma observatory has revealed a large hourglass-shaped structure in the Milky Way. These 'eROSITA bubbles' show a striking similarity to the Fermi bubbles, detected a decade ago at even higher energies.

December 10, 2020 Read more

Space weather discovery puts 'habitable planets' at risk

Stellar flares with a chance of radio bursts: that's the weather from Proxima Centauri. New research suggests exoplanets around red dwarf M-type stars will likely be exposed to coronal mass ejections, making the likelihood of finding life as we know it pretty slim.

December 10, 2020 Read more

A technique to sift out the universe's first gravitational waves

Identifying primordial ripples would be key to understanding the conditions of the early universe.

December 9, 2020 Read more

Researchers discover a new superhighway system in the Solar System

Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than was previously possible. Such routes could be used to send spacecraft to the far reaches of our planetary system relatively fast, and to monitor and understand near-Earth objects that might collide with our planet.

December 9, 2020 Read more

Leaving so soon? Unusual planetary nebula fades mere decades after it arrived

When a previously typical star's behavior rapidly changes in a few decades, astronomers take note and get to work.

December 4, 2020 Read more

Supernova surprise creates elemental mystery

Researchers have discovered that one of the most important reactions in the universe can get a huge and unexpected boost inside exploding stars known as supernovae.

December 4, 2020 Read more

Astronomers to release most accurate data ever for nearly two billion stars

An international team of astronomers announces the most detailed ever catalogue of the stars in a huge swathe of our Milky Way galaxy. The measurements of stellar positions, movement, brightness and colours are in the third early data release from the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory and will be publicly available.

December 3, 2020 Read more

Voyager spacecraft detect new type of solar electron burst

Astronomers report the first detection of bursts of cosmic ray electrons accelerated by shock waves originating from major eruptions on the sun.

December 3, 2020 Read more

A hint of new physics in polarized radiation from the early Universe

Astrophysicists have developed a new method to calibrate detectors to the light from dust in our Galaxy, thereby describing a new physics, with 99.2 percent accuracy, that may show parity symmetry breaking.

December 2, 2020 Read more

New research shows how ghost-like neutrinos helped shape the Universe

Computer simulations have struggled to capture the impact of elusive particles called neutrinos on the formation and growth of the large-scale structure of the Universe. But now, a research team from Japan has developed a method that overcomes this hurdle.

December 1, 2020 Read more

Earth faster, closer to black hole in new map of galaxy

Earth just got 7 km/s faster and about 2000 light-years closer to the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

November 30, 2020 Read more