Hera And Europa Clipper Will Pass Through 3I/ATLAS' Tail

By Andy Tomaswick - October 21, 2025 11:04 AM UTC | Missions
All sorts of crazy things have been suggested regarding 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object that we’ve discovered. Some are simply conspiracy theories about it being an alien spacecraft, while others have been well-thought out suggestions, like using Martian-based probes to observe the comet as it streaked past the red planet. A new paper pre-published on arXiv and accepted for publication by the Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society by Samuel Grand and Geraint Jones, of the Finnish Meteorological Institute and ESA respectively, falls into the latter category, and suggests utilizing two spacecraft already en route to their separate destinations to potentially detect ions from the object’s spectacular tail that has formed as it approaches the Sun.
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What Do We Do If SETI Is Successful?

By Andy Tomaswick - October 20, 2025 11:08 AM UTC | Space Policy
The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is evolving. We’ve moved on from the limited thinking of monitoring radio waves to checking for interstellar pushing lasers or even budding Dyson swarms around stars. To match our increased understanding of the ways we might find intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) is working through an update to its protocols for what researchers should do after a confirmed detection of intelligence outside of Earth. Their new suggestions are available in a pre-print paper on arXiv, but were also voted on at the 2025 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney, with potential full adoption early next year.
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Constraints On Solar Power Satellites Are More Ground-Based Than Space-Based

By Andy Tomaswick - October 19, 2025 11:44 PM UTC | Space Exploration
Space-based solar power has been gaining more and more traction recently. The recent success of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project, which demonstrated the feasibility of transmitting power from space to the ground, has been matched by a number of pilot projects throughout the world, all of which are hoping to tap into some of the almost unlimited and constant solar energy that is accessible up in geostationary orbit (GEO). But, according to a new paper from a group of Italian and German researchers, there are plenty of constraints on getting that power down here to Earth - and most of them are more logistical than technical.
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Signs of Late-Stage Cryovolcanism in Pluto’s Hayabusa Terra

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - October 19, 2025 05:59 AM UTC | Planetary Science
What can cryovolcanism on Pluto teach scientists about the dwarf planet’s current geological activity? This is what a recent study published in The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated potential cryovolcanic sites within specific regions on Pluto. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the current geological activity, including how it can be active while orbiting so far from the Sun.
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Within Mars’ Craters, Ice Deposits Have Recorded the History of the Planet

By Matthew Williams - October 18, 2025 10:18 PM UTC
Mars has experienced multiple ice ages, with each one leaving less ice than the last. By studying craters that serve as “ice archives,” researchers traced how the red planet stored and lost its water over hundreds of millions of years. These frozen records not only reveal Mars’ long-term climate history but also identify hidden resources beneath the surface that could provide drinking water, oxygen, and even rocket fuel for future astronauts.
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Starship Could Cut The Travel Time To Uranus In Half

By Andy Tomaswick - October 18, 2025 12:56 AM UTC | Space Exploration
The ice giants remain some of the most interesting places to explore in the solar system. Uranus in particular has drawn a lot of interest lately, especially after the 2022 Decadal Survey from the National Academies named it as the highest priority destination. But as of now, we still don’t have a fully fleshed out and planned mission ready to go for the multiple launch windows in the 2030s. That might actually be an advantage, though, as a new system coming online might change the overall mission design fundamentally. Starship recently continued its recent string of successful tests, and a new paper presented at the IEEE Aerospace Conference by researchers at MIT looked at how this new, much more capable launch system, could impact the development of the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) that the Decadal Survey suggested.
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ESA’s Swarm Constellation Sees Growth in the Magnetic Field’s 'Weak Spot'

By David Dickinson - October 17, 2025 01:38 PM UTC | Missions
Earth is a dynamic place, both on its surface and down to its very core. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently released findings from its Swarm constellation of Earth-observing satellites highlighting this fact, documenting activity in the planet’s magnetic field during its decade plus of extended operations. One key finding shows the well-known Southern Atlantic Anomaly is expanding in size.
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Microbes Or Their DNA Could Survive In Martian Ice And A Future Rover Could Dig For It

By Evan Gough - October 16, 2025 07:52 PM UTC | Astrobiology
Frozen in time, ancient microbes or their remains could be found in Martian ice deposits during future missions to the red planet. By recreating Mars-like conditions in the lab, a team of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Penn State demonstrated that fragments of the molecules that make up proteins in E. coli bacteria, if present in Mars' permafrost and ice caps, could remain intact for over 50 million years, despite harsh and continuous exposure to cosmic radiation.
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Foldable Solar Sails Could Help With Aerobraking and Atmospheric Reentry

By Andy Tomaswick - October 15, 2025 02:58 PM UTC | Space Exploration
Use cases for smart materials in space exploration keep cropping up everywhere. They are used in everything from antenna deployments on satellites to rover deformation and reformation. One of the latest ideas is to use them to transform the solar sails that could primarily be used as a propulsion system for a mission into a heat shield when that mission reaches its final destination. A new paper from Joseph Ivarson and Davide Guzzetti, both of Auburn’s Department of Aerospace Engineering, and published in Acta Astronautica, describes how the idea might work and lists some potential applications exploring various parts of the solar system.
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Humble Yeast Has Planetary Survival Skills

By Mark Thompson - October 15, 2025 11:49 AM UTC | Planetary Science
Rather randomly I’ve just returned from a theatre tour where my science show featured yeast in one of the experiments, so when research about yeast surviving Martian conditions crossed my desk, it immediately piqued my interest. These microscopic fungi that help our bread rise and our beer ferment might just have what it takes to endure one of the Solar System's harshest environments.
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When Fire Brought Ice to Mars

By Mark Thompson - October 15, 2025 11:37 AM UTC | Planetary Science
Mars is a planet of mystery! Its surface today is cold and dry, yet evidence suggests it was once home to flowing water. Most of the planet's remaining ice sits locked away at the poles, but recent observations have detected signals of hydrogen in equatorial regions that could indicate buried ice deposits where the environment should be too warm for ice to survive. How did frozen water end up at Mars's equator? It seems we might find the answer in Martian volcanoes.
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When Tides Turn White Dwarfs Hot

By Mark Thompson - October 15, 2025 11:26 AM UTC | Stars
White dwarfs are stellar corpses, the slowly cooling remnants of stars that ran out of fuel billions of years ago. Our Sun will eventually share this fate, collapsing into a compact object so dense that the heavier it becomes, the smaller it shrinks. This rather strange property is just one of the aspects of white dwarfs that makes them utterly fascinating and occasionally, utterly baffling. Sometimes we find white dwarfs as part of binary systems and they are usually cool and gently radiating their energy out into space. A team of astronomers have recently discovered a peculiar class of these binary systems that defies expectations. The pair of white dwarfs are orbiting each other faster than once per hour and exhibiting temperatures between 10,000 and 30,000 degrees Kelvin, significantly hotter than expected and twice their usual size.
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Solving the Mystery of Solar Rain

By Mark Thompson - October 15, 2025 01:12 AM UTC | Solar Astronomy
It rains on the Sun! Although not in any way we'd recognise from Earth. In the Sun's corona, the superheated atmosphere that extends millions of kilometres above its visible surface, cooler blobs of plasma occasionally form and fall back downward in what astronomers are calling coronal rain. Until now, the mechanism behind the rain has remained a mystery especially during solar flares where it seems to accelerate but researchers at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy have finally cracked the puzzle.
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When Black Holes Don’t Play by the Rules

By Mark Thompson - October 15, 2025 01:01 AM UTC | Black Holes
Scientists have begun to piece together the origin story of a cataclysmic collision between two black holes that met their fate on an unusual orbital path. The merger, designated GW200208_222617 (that really rolls of the tongue,) stands out among gravitational wave detections as one of the rare events showing clear signs of orbital eccentricity, meaning the black holes followed a squashed, oval shaped orbit rather than a circular one as they spiralled toward their final encounter.
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Modular Robots Could Both Explore Off-World And Build Infrastructure

By Andy Tomaswick - October 14, 2025 03:06 PM UTC | Space Exploration
Modularity is taking off in more ways than one in space exploration. The design of the upcoming “Lunar Gateway” space station is supposed to be modular, with different modules being supplied by different organizations. In an effort to extend that thinking down to rovers on the ground, a new paper from researchers at Germany’s space agency (DLR), developed an architecture where a single, modular rover could be responsible for both exploration and carrying payloads around the Moon or Mars.
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Arab Scholars May Have Noted the Supernovae of 1006 and 1181

By David Dickinson - October 14, 2025 02:48 PM UTC | Milky Way
It’s great to see old astronomical observations come to light. Not only can these confirm or refute what’s known about historic astronomical events, but they can describe what early observers actually saw. A recent study cites two Arabic texts that may refer to accounts of two well-known supernovae seen in our galaxy: one in 1006 AD and another in 1181 AD.
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The Hidden Rings of the Milky Way

By Mark Thompson - October 14, 2025 11:06 AM UTC | Milky Way
We know lots about our Galaxy yet still, some regions still hold countless secrets. Recently, a team of astronomers using South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope uncovered 164 of them, compact radio rings. Each one smaller than an arcminute across, were hiding along the plane of the Milky Way, and were just waiting for a telescope powerful enough to reveal them.
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A Message in a Bottle from Another Star

By Mark Thompson - October 14, 2025 10:57 AM UTC | Planetary Science
For millions of years, a fragment of ice and dust drifted through interstellar space, its origin, a distant planetary system. This summer, that fragment finally entered our Solar System, becoming only the third confirmed interstellar visitor and earning the designation 3I/ATLAS. When astronomers at Auburn University pointed NASA's Swift Observatory toward this icy chunk, they detected water vapour streaming from its surface. It was revealed through the faint ultraviolet glow of hydroxyl molecules and was completely unexpected.
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Mathematicians Are Making Earth Based Telescopes Rival Space Observatories

By Mark Thompson - October 13, 2025 09:02 PM UTC | Observing
Earth's atmosphere has always been the enemy of ground based astronomy and don’t I know it. What would otherwise be crisp, clean datasets gets turned into blurry smudges. Space telescopes avoid the problem entirely but can only photograph tiny fragments of sky. Now, a team of mathematicians has cracked the code with an elegant algorithm that strips away atmospheric interference in seconds, potentially giving ground based observatories space quality vision whilst keeping their ability to survey great regions of sky.
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Simulating Complex Coronal Mass Ejections Shows A Weakness In Space Weather Forecasting

By Andy Tomaswick - October 13, 2025 04:22 PM UTC | Solar Astronomy
Avoiding, or at least limiting the damage from, geomagnetic storms is one of the most compelling arguments for why we should pay attention to space. Strong solar storms can have an impact on everything from air traffic to farming, and we ignore them at our own peril and cost. Despite that threat, the tools that we have applied to tracking and analyzing them have been relatively primitive. Both simulations and the physical hardware devoted to it require an upgrade if we are to accurately assess the threat a solar storm poses. As a first step, a new paper from a group led by researchers at the University of Michigan created a much more detailed simulation that shows how important it is that we also have the appropriate sensing hardware in place to detect these storms as they happen.
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The Moon's Biggest Crater Tells a New Story

By Mark Thompson - October 13, 2025 09:51 AM UTC | Planetary Science
For decades, the dramatic difference between the Moon's two faces has been the subject of much debate. Now, a fresh look at the Moon's largest and oldest impact crater has revealed something quite unexpected. The asteroid that formed it seems to have hit from the opposite direction than everyone thought, and it created a radioactive splash zone that may finally explain the mystery. Even better, NASA's Artemis astronauts are about to land right in the middle of it.
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Hunting for Pairs of Monster Black Holes

By Mark Thompson - October 13, 2025 09:42 AM UTC | Black Holes
When two galaxies merge, the supermassive black holes at their centres should eventually find each other and begin a gravitational dance that lasts millions of years. Despite decades of predictions, astronomers are still hunting for definitive proof these binary systems exist. A new review examines the clues scattered across the universe, from wobbling jets spanning hundreds of thousands of light years to specific spectral signatures, and explores why finding these black hole pairs matters for understanding both the past and future of our own Galaxy.
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What has Webb Taught Us About Rocky Exoplanets So Far?

By Matthew Williams - October 12, 2025 11:13 PM UTC | Missions
The JWST has pushed the boundaries of exoplanet characterization. But one thing it hasn't done yet is to determine if rocky exoplanets close to our Solar System can retain their atmospheres. The authors of a new study propose a new "five-scale height challenge" that will help astronomers obtain more precise atmospheric information on rocky exoplanets using Webb.
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Betelgeuse's Secret Companion Finally Revealed

By Mark Thompson - October 12, 2025 08:46 PM UTC | Stars
Betelgeuse, the stunning red star in Orion's shoulder, has been hiding a secret companion for years but proving it has been somewhat challenging. When the elusive "Betelbuddy" (I love that name) reached its maximum separation from the supergiant star last December, astronomers had just one chance before it disappeared behind Betelgeuse for another two years. Using NASA's most powerful space telescopes, researchers finally captured the tiny companion lurking in the overwhelming glare of a star 700 times larger than our Sun. But the real surprise wasn't just finding it, it was discovering what type of object it actually is, and what that reveals about one of the night sky's most famous stars and its puzzling six year brightening cycle.
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Could We Really Turn Mars Green?

By Mark Thompson - October 12, 2025 08:20 PM UTC | Planetary Science
Science fiction is edging closer to reality. A team of scientists has created a detailed roadmap for transforming Mars from a frozen, lifeless desert into a world where plants could grow and humans might one day breathe without spacesuits. The plan isn't about launching missions tomorrow, it’s about whether we should even try, and what recent breakthroughs in biology, climate engineering, and space launch technology tell us about what's now possible. But there's a catch, terraforming a planet like Mars might erase its geological history forever, destroying any traces of ancient Martian life and eliminating our chance to understand how worlds evolve. The question has shifted from "could we turn Mars green?" to something far more profound "should we?”
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Imaging Dark Matter One Clump at a Time

By Mark Thompson - October 12, 2025 07:54 PM UTC | Cosmology
What if you could photograph something completely invisible? To our rather limited eyes that’s what astronomers seem to do all the time with infra red and radio astronomy to name a few. But, astronomers can do this in a rather intriguing way with something that does seem to be truly invisible! A team of astronomers have captured the latest "image" of a dark matter object a million times more massive than our Sun, not by seeing it, but by watching how it warps the light from galaxies billions of light years beyond it. Using an Earth sized telescope network they have revealed one of the smallest dark matter clumps ever found, offering a glimpse into the hidden structure of our universe.
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Phosphine Discovered In A Brown Dwarf's Atmosphere For The First Time

By Andy Tomaswick - October 10, 2025 02:29 PM UTC | Exoplanets
Phosphine has caused quite a stir in the astronomical world lately. That was largely due to its (still hotly debated) detection in the atmosphere of Venus. While the only known way for phosphine to be created on terrestrial worlds, like Venus, is through some sort of biological origin, it is relatively common among larger gas giants and even “brown dwarfs” - failed stars larger than Jupiter but not quite large enough to start their own hydrogen fusion process. Previously, we hadn’t yet seen phosphine in the atmosphere of brown dwarf in other solar systems, but a new paper from a diverse group of researchers, available in pre-print form on arXiv, used data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find it for the first time. They also realized the mechanism that made it so hard to spot in the first place - the object’s metallicity.
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Longstanding “Ice Giant” Classification of Uranus and Neptune Might Be Conflicted

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - October 09, 2025 01:04 AM UTC | Planetary Science
What if our understanding of Uranus and Neptune’s compositions have been wrong, specifically regarding their classifications as “ice giants”? This is what a recent study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Zurich investigated the interior structures of Uranus and Neptune. This study has the potential to help scientists not only better understand the formation and evolution of Uranus and Neptune but could also provide key insights into Jupiter and Saturn, and gaseous exoplanets, too.
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Open Source Mega-Constellations Could Solve Overcrowding

By Andy Tomaswick - October 08, 2025 11:26 AM UTC | Space Policy
Duplicating expensive resources is expensive and wasteful, and most people would agree it's unnecessary. However, the planned increase in major satellite constellations is currently causing a massive duplication of resources as individual companies and even countries try to set up their own infrastructure in space. What’s more, there is a relatively limited amount of space in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), where many of these satellites are supposed to go - any more than that and a single collision could cause Kessler Syndrome, where many of the ones already in orbit would be destroyed and we wouldn’t be able to launch any more for a long time. A new paper from researchers at the National University of Defense Technology in China suggests an alternative to these multiple megaconstellations - a single, modular system similar to how cloud computing works on the current internet.
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Comet A6 Lemmon's Encore October Evening Show

By David Dickinson - October 07, 2025 02:00 PM UTC | Observing
October 2025 may provide a memorable sky scene, as Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon puts on an encore appearance at dusk. The comet joins Comet R2 SWAN, which slides 0.26 Astronomical Units (AU) past Earth on October 20th. Both are currently fine objects for binoculars or a small telescope, vying for top spot at magnitude +6.
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