INFORMATION

A collaboration of engineers from NASA and academia recently tested hybrid printed electronic circuits near the edge of space, also known as the Kármán line . The space-readiness test was demonstrated on the Suborbital Technology Experiment Carrier-9 , or (SubTEC-9), sounding rocket mission, which was launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on April 25 and reached an altitude of approximately 174 kilometers (108 miles), which lasted only a few minutes before the rocket descended to the ground via parachute. Image of a Terrier-Improved Malamute sounding rocket launching from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility for the SubTEC-9 mission on April 25, 2023. The brief flight carried 14 new technology development experiments, including 3D-printed circuits, a faster telemetry link, and a new star tracker. (Credit: NASA/Kyle Hoppes) The test consisted of humidity and electronic sensors that were printed on two attached panels along with the payload door, all of which transmitted da...

In 2026, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch its next-generation exoplanet-hunting mission, the PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO). This mission will scan over 245,000 main-sequence F, G, and K-type (yellow-white, yellow, and orange) stars using the Transit Method to look for possible Earth-like planets orbiting Solar analogs. In keeping with the “ low-hanging fruit ” approach (aka. follow the water), these planets are considered strong candidates for habitability since they are most likely to have all the conditions that gave rise to life here on Earth. Knowing how many planets PLATO will likely detect and how many will conform to Earth-like characteristics is essential to determining how and where it should dedicate its observation time. According to a new study that will be published shortly in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics , the PLATO mission is likely to find tens of thousands of planets. Depending on several parameters, they further indicat...

On a basic level, a star is pretty simple. Gravity squeezes the star trying to collapse it, which causes the inner core to get extremely hot and dense. This triggers nuclear fusion, and the heat and pressure from that pushes back against gravity. The two forces balance each other while a star is in its main sequence state. Easy peasy. But the details of how that works are extremely complex. Modeling the interior of a star accurately requires sophisticated computer models, and even then it can be difficult to match a model to what we see on the surface of a star. Now a new computer simulation is helping to change that. Although the internal pressure and gravitational weight of a star are generally in equilibrium, the flow of heat is not. All the heat and energy generated in a stellar core has to escape in time, and there are two general ways in which it happens. The first is through a radiative exchange. High-energy gamma rays scatter against nuclei in the core, gradually losing some ...

We have discovered more than 5,400 planets in the universe. These worlds range from hot jovians that closely orbit their star to warm ocean worlds to cold gas giants. While we know they are there, we don’t know much about them. Characteristics such as mass and size are fairly straightforward to measure, but other properties such as temperature and atmospheric composition are more difficult. So the next generation of telescopes will try to capture that information, including one proposed telescope from the Chinese National Space Administration. Known as the Tianlin Mission, the proposed telescope would have a 6-meter primary mirror. That’s roughly the size of the primary mirror for the Webb Space Telescope. The goal of Tianlin, which means “Neighbors of Heaven”, would be to study the atmospheres of potentially habitable Earth-sized worlds. It’s very difficult to study the atmospheres of distant worlds. There are only a few cases of exoplanets we can see directly, and these are large ...

What do you get when a hot young world orbits a wildly unstable young red dwarf? For AU Microsopii b, the answer is: flares from the star tearing away the atmosphere. That catastrophic loss happens in fits and starts, “hiccuping” out its atmosphere at one point and then losing practically none the next. That frenetic activity is kind of shocking. Usually, interactions between stars and their planets are more constant. But not this one. “We’ve never seen atmospheric escape go from completely not detectable to very detectable over such a short period when a planet passes in front of its star,” said Keighley Rockcliffe of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. “We were really expecting something very predictable, repeatable. But it turned out to be weird. When I first saw this, I thought ‘That can’t be right.'” An artist’s impression of the red dwarf star AU Microscopii (AU Mic.) it’s losing some of its atmosphere each time its star flares. Image Credit: By NASA/ESA/G. Bacon...

At one time, astronomers believed that the planets formed in their current orbits, which remained stable over time. But more recent observations, theory, and calculations have shown that planetary systems are subject to shake-ups and change. Periodically, planets are kicked out of their star systems to become “rogue planets,” bodies that are no longer gravitationally bound to any star and are adrift in the interstellar medium (ISM). Some of these planets may be gas giants with tightly bound icy moons orbiting them, which they could bring with them into the ISM. Like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, these satellites could have warm water interiors that might support life. Other research has indicated that rocky planets with plenty of water on their surfaces could also support life through a combination of geological activity and the decay of radionuclides. According to a recent paper by an international team of astronomers, there could be hundreds of rogue planets in our cosmic n...

Supermassive black holes haunt the cores of many galaxies. Yet for all we know about black holes (not nearly enough!), the big ones remain a mystery, particularly when they began forming. Interestingly, astronomers see them in the early epochs of cosmic history. That raises the question: how did they get so big when the Universe was still just a baby? A team of astronomers in Taiwan is looking for answers. Led by Chi-Hong Lin and Ke-Jung Chen from Academia Sinica and Chorng-Yuan Hwang of National Central University, the team is researching formation theories for supermassive black holes (SMBH). They’ve used sophisticated models of galaxy mergers to take a peek at the formation of these monsters and included giant molecular clouds as part of the process. “Our research results can offer people a deeper understanding of galaxy evolution,” Lin said. “We anticipate that there will be more observational results to verify our conclusion.” Giant Molecular Clouds and SMBH The team suggests ...

When will we find evidence for life beyond Earth? And where will that evidence be found? University of Arizona astronomer  Chris Impey , the author of a book called  “Worlds Without End,”  is betting that the first evidence will come to light within the next decade or so. But don’t expect to see little green men or  pointy-eared Vulcans . And don’t expect to get radio signals from a far-off planetary system,  as depicted in the 1992 movie “Contact.” Instead, Impey expects that NASA’s  James Webb Space Telescope  — or one of the giant Earth-based telescopes that’s gearing up for observations — will detect the  spectroscopic signature of biological activity  in the atmosphere of a planet that’s light-years away from us. “Spectroscopic data is not as appealing to the general public,” Impey admits in the latest episode of the  Fiction Science podcast . “People like pictures, and so spectroscopy never gets its fair due in the general talk ...

From the dust, we rise. Vortices within the disks of young stars bring forth planets that coalesce into worlds. At least that’s our understanding of planetary evolution, and new images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Very Large Telescope’s Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) further support this. We know that most stars have planetary systems and that these systems form with their star via protoplanetary disks. But there are still plenty of smaller details we don’t fully understand. What causes the initial clumping of material from which planets grow, and how do planets clear the debris of a disk to become a fully-fledged planetary system? Studying the early period of a star system is difficult because the same gas and dust that forms planets also obscure them from view. But in recent years advanced infrared and radio observatories have yielded high-resolution images of many young stars. We can now see large protoplanet...

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) examines what are known as dark stars , which are estimated to be much larger than our Sun, are hypothesized to have existed in the early universe, and are allegedly powered by the demolition of dark matter particles. This study was conducted using spectroscopic analysis from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) , and more specifically, the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) , and holds the potential to help astronomers better understand dark stars and the purpose of dark matter, the latter of which continues to be an enigma for the scientific community, as well as how it could have contributed to the early universe. “Discovering a new type of star is pretty interesting all by itself but discovering it’s dark matter that’s powering this—that would be huge,” said Dr. Katherine Freese , who is a professor in the Department of Physics at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Aus...

NASA plans to send astronauts to Mars in the coming decade. This presents many challenges, not the least of which is the distance involved and the resulting health risks. To this end, they are investigating and investing in many technologies, ranging from life support and radiation protection to nuclear power and propulsion elements . A particularly promising technology is Nuclear-Thermal Propulsion (NTP), which has the potential to reduce transit times to Mars significantly. Instead of the usual one-way transit period of six to nine months , a working NTP system could reduce the travel time to between 100 and 45 days ! In January of this year , NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that they were launching an interagency agreement to develop a nuclear-thermal propulsion (NTP) system – known as the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). Just yesterday, DARPA announced that it had finalized an agreement with Lockheed Martin...