Imagine a solar storm generating auroral displays across the entire sky. No, we haven’t quite seen them that strong in the current solar cycle. But, back in February 1872, people around the world reported seeing brilliant northern and southern lights. The culprit? A medium-sized sunspot group that unleased a torrent of charged particles in a coronal mass ejection directed toward Earth. As with strong space weather storms today, the long-ago event not only sent aurorae dancing across most of Earth’s skies, but it disrupted technology. It affected telegraph communications on the submarine cable ..read more

On August 23, ISRO’s Vikram lander detached from its propulsion module and made a soft landing near the Moon’s south pole region. The lander then deployed its Pragyan rover, and for two weeks the endearing little solar-powered rover performed marvelously, detecting water ice and characterizing the makeup of the lunar regolith before succumbing to the darkness and cold of the lunar night. But since the rover mission ended, the propulsion module that brought it to the Moon has made a detour, performing a series of complex maneuvers that took it from a tight lunar orbit back to Earth orbit. This ..read more

We’re about to learn a lot more about exoplanets. The ESA has just approved the construction of its Ariel mission, which will give us our first large survey of exoplanet atmospheres. The space telescope will help us answer fundamental questions about how planets form and evolve. The JWST has proven the value of infrared telescopes that can examine exoplanet atmospheres. It made headlines when it detected carbon dioxide and active chemistry in one exoplanet’s atmosphere. Now, the ESA has approved the construction of its Ariel space telescope, which is entirely focused on exoplanet atmospheres ..read more

Private and military organizations are tracking some of the 170 million pieces of space junk orbiting the planet, but they’re limited to how small an object they can detect. Only chunks larger than a softball can be tracked with radar or optical systems, and that only accounts for less than 1% of the junk out there. But a new technique is being developed to resolve space junk to pieces smaller than one millimeter in diameter. Called Space Debris Identification and Tracking (SINTRA), the project will test out a new technique that uses the state-of-the-art sensors to detect plasma waves created ..read more

Astronomers know of about 60 rocky exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars. When they try to determine how habitable these planets might be, detecting water in their atmospheres plays a huge role. But what if there was another way of measuring the water content in these worlds? Researchers are developing a way of modelling these worlds to determine how much water they have. Habitability likely requires surface water, as far as we can tell. But detecting surface water is next to impossible. The next best thing is to use the tools we have—like the James Webb Space Telescope—to ..read more

Famous Halley’s Comet reaches a distant milestone this coming weekend. It’s lonely out there in the frozen outer solar system. On Saturday, December 9th, that most famous of all comets 1P/Halley reaches a hallmark point on its 75-year journey through the solar system, reaching aphelion or its most distant point from the Sun. The orbit of Halley’s Comet. NASA/JPL The Comet Now You could say that December 2023 represents a midpoint between the last 1986 and the next 2061 apparition for the comet. No one has seen Halley’s Comet since the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope imaged ..read more

If nothing else catches your attention in the title then surely ‘hypernebula’ does! There are some amazing processes scattered around the cosmos, of particular interest are the fast radio bursts (FRB). These brief flashes of radiation happen without warning…until now. A team in the Netherlands have identified a second FRB as coming from within a hyper nebula – a dense and highly magnetised cloud of plasma that is illuminated by a powerful but unknown source! FRBs are short outbursts of radio waves which last only a fraction of a second. They seem to originate from distant galaxies and one of t ..read more

Scientists love outliers. Outliers are nature’s way of telling us what its boundaries are and where its limits lie. Rather than being upset when an outlier disrupts their understanding, scientists feed on the curiosity that outliers inspire. It’s true in the case of a new discovery of a massive planet orbiting a small star. That goes against our understanding of how planets form, meaning our planet-formation model needs an update. In a paper published in Science, researchers announced the discovery of a Neptune-mass exoplanet orbiting a low-mass star. The star is LHS 3154, an M-dwarf, or red d ..read more

Planet Earth is full of some truly awe-inspiring spectacles, but few are as intriguing as a sprite, which are officially known as a Transient Luminous Event (TLE) and consist of large-scale electric discharges that shoot upwards while occurring above the cloud tops in the Earth’s mesosphere at approximate altitudes of 50-90 km (31-56 mi). In October 2023, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, Dr. Andreas Mogensen, who is currently onboard the International Space Station (ISS) as Commander of the Expedition 70 mission, took an incredible image of a red sprite with the Davis camera as part of t ..read more

Decades of research aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and other spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) have shown that long-duration stays in microgravity will take a toll on human physiology. Among the most notable effects are muscle atrophy and bone density loss and effects on eyesight, blood flow, and cardiovascular health. However, as research like NASA’s Twin Study showed, the effects extend to organ function, psychological effects, and gene expression. Mitigating these effects is vital for future missions to the Moon, Mars, and other deep-space destinations. To reduce the impact ..read more