Universe Today Feed

But in space, like on the Moon or Mars, we have…none of that. Zero. No GPS satellites, no globe-spanning networks. Just radio broadcasts from command centers here on Earth to tell our robots and crews what to do.

Space is hard. There's no doubt about that. It's completely unlike any environment we have ever faced on the Earth.

The Large Hadron Collider has changed particle physics, and now scientists are dreaming up even bigger supercolliders. But humanity can't match the raw particle-colliding power of a supermassive black hole. In a new paper, researchers describe how supermassive black holes create a dense environment where particles are spinning at relativistic speeds and crashing into each other, releasing other particles that could be detectable on Earth.

The monster black hole lurking at the center of galaxy M87 is an absolute beast. It is one of the largest in our vicinity and was the ideal first target for the Event Horizon Telescope. Scientists have taken a fresh look at the supermassive black hole using those iconic Event Horizon Telescope images and have now figured out just how fast this monster is spinning and how much material it's devouring.

Japan's private space company ispace experienced another setback on Thursday 5th June when its Resilience lunar lander crashed into the surface of the Moon, marking the company's second consecutive failed landing attempt in just over two years.

Titan has no liquid water whatsoever on its surface. But it does have liquids. Seas, lakes, streams, rivers…of methane and ethane.

It's official. NASA's Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Request (FY 2026) has been released, and the news is decidedly mixed. In a previous article, we examined the FY 2026 Budget Request (released on May 2nd) and its recommendations for the coming year. With the release of the FY 2026 Budget, what was previewed and the anxiety it caused for many have been confirmed. While the Budget bolsters funding for NASA's exploration programs for the Moon and Mars, it also contains deep cuts to many other programs and the cancellation of key elements in NASA's Moon to Mars architecture.

The discovery of a Saturn-sized gas giant orbiting a small red dwarf is urging astronomers to reconsider their theories of planet formation. Core accretion theory is the most widely accepted explanation for planetary formation. It describes how planet formation begins with tiny dust grains gathering together and forming planetary cores that grow larger through accretion. It explains much of what we see in our Solar System and others. This discovery introduces some doubt.

Across the universe, some of the most dramatic events occur when a black hole meets a neutron star. A neutron star is the ultra-dense remains of a massive star that exploded—imagine all the mass of our Sun compressed into a sphere just a few tens of kilometres wide. When a black hole and neutron star spiral toward each other, the result is one of nature's most violent spectacles.

For years, scientists have been scratching their heads over the "Hubble Tension,” the mismatch between how fast the cosmos expanded in its youth versus how fast it's expanding today. But now, armed with the most precise data ever captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found the perceived gap is staring to narrow!I n fact, the expansion rate measured by Cepheid variables versus the cosmic background has overlapping error bars again. Will the tension mystery finally be resolved?

Astronomers have found another super-Earth. It's about 10 times more massive than Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star about 2475 light-years away. These massive Earth-like planets hold key information about how planets form and evolve.

When the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto and Charon in 2015, it revealed two amazingly complex worlds and an active atmosphere on Pluto. Those snapshots redefined our understanding of the system. Now, new observations using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) taken over the space of a week, show that Pluto's atmosphere is completely different from any other one in the Solar System.

As the years go by, the chance of Europa hosting life seems to keep going down. But it's not out of contention yet.

On the surface (you're welcome for the joke), Venus is not even close to being hospitable to life. But that's not the end of the story.

Chinese rocket startup Space Epoch put on a show recently, with a demonstration test launch of their reusable Yanxinghe-1 rocket booster.

Mars is by far the most Earth-like planet in the solar system…but that’s not saying much.

In a recent paper, UCSB physicist Jack Kingdom identified a trajectory for a rapid transit (90 days) to Mars using SpaceX's Starship. This proposal offers an alternative to mission architectures that rely on nuclear propulsion to reduce transit times.

The challenge in the search for habitable worlds is clear. We need to be able to identify habitable worlds and distinguish between biotic and abiotic processes. Ideally, scientists would do this on entire populations of exoplanets rather than on a case-by-case basis. Exoplanets' natural thermostats might provide a way of doing this.

The idea that the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) will collide emerged after decades of observations by a host of astronomers. The Hubble played a decisive role in the determination during the early 2000s. It was a triumph of precision astronomy and space telescopes. Now, the Hubble has played an equally important role in cancelling the collision.

How can humanity use the developing Lunar Gateway as an appropriate starting point for advancing human space exploration beyond the Moon? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a team of researchers evaluated a myriad of ways that Lunar Gateway could be used as a testbed for future technologies involving sending humans to Mars and Ceres. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, astronauts, and mission planners develop novel strategies for advancing long-term human space exploration.