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Why Are Supermassive Black Holes Growing So Slowly?
As our powerful infrared telescopes allow astronomers to peer further and further back in time, they’ve discovered some puzzling things. One of them concerns supermassive black holes (SMBH), the physics-challenging behemoths at the center of large galaxies like the Milky Way. As it turns out, SMBH grew much more rapidly at high redshifts than they
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The Artemis Generation Begins! Artemis II Launches for the Moon
At 06:25 p.m. EDT (03:25 p.m. PDT) on April 1st, the Artemis II mission lifted off from the historic Launch Pad-39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The four-person crew – consisting of Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), and mission specialists Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen – began the ten-day journey
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The Habitable Worlds Observatory Will Need Astrometry To Find Life
We’re getting closer and closer to finding a real Earth-like exoplanet. But finding one is only half the battle. To truly know if we’re looking at an Earth analog somewhere else in the galaxy, we have to directly image it too. That’s a job for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a planned space-based telescope whose
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An Aerobot With ISRU Capabilities Could Explore Venus’ Atmosphere for Years
In Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Hell is described as an “Inferno” with nine concentric circles, the entrance of which has a sign that reads “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” For the planets of the Solar System, Venus is about as close to this description as one can get. On the surface, temperatures are hot
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If Life Exists in Venus’ Atmosphere, It Could Have Come From Earth
The theory of Panspermia holds that life is spread through the cosmos via asteroids, comets, and other objects. When the building blocks of life emerge on one planet, impacts can eject surface material into space, which then carries these seeds to other worlds. For decades, scientists have debated whether this could have occurred between Earth
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Artemis II Mission Shares New Photo of Earth
On April 1st, 2026, the Artemis II mission launched from Earth, carrying its four-person crew on a journey that will take them around the Moon. Since then, mission control has performed the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI), while the crew has been performing proximity operations, testing flight instruments, and troubleshooting the Orion’s systems (including the zero-g toilet).
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JWST Spies Once-hidden Treasures in the W51 Starbirth Crèche
Star formation is a dramatic and complex process that erupts throughout the Universe. Yet, a lot of that action gets hidden by clouds of gas and dust. That’s where observatories such as the James Webb Telescope JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) come in handy. They use infrared light and radio waves respectively,
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Blue Origin Plans A Pair Of Low-Flying Prospectors Around The Lunar South Pole
The water locked up in the Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) of the Moon’s south pole is a critical resource if we are ever going to get a permanent lunar presence off the ground. But while we know the water ice there exists, we don’t really know how much. We have to move from general estimates
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JAXA Plans To Bring Back Pristine Early Solar System Samples From A Comet
Japan’s space agency, JAXA, has been knocking it out of the park with small-body exploration missions for decades. They had historic successes with both Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, and they are going to visit the Martian Moons soon with the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. But after that, they are aiming for something much more pristine
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The Outer Solar System Contributed Nothing To Earth
Piecing together the history of Earth’s formation leans heavily on evidence from meteorites. Since the vast majority of meteorites come from asteroids, that means understanding asteroids can also lead to an understanding of Earth’s formation. Together, asteroids and meteorites make up the population of debris left over after the rocky planets formed. Asteroids and meteorites
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