INFORMATION

When our Sun dies, it will turn into a white dwarf. They are a common aspect of stellar evolution and a team of researchers have now turned their attention onto them. They have just completed a survey of 26,000 white dwarfs and confirmed a long-predicted theory that the hotter the star, the puffier it is! This new study will help us to understand white dwarfs and the processes that drive them.  All stars age. Our Sun is a giant ball of electrically charged gas and, during the majority of its life will be fusing hydrogen to helium in its core. During this process, the fusion will generate an outward pushing force known as thermonuclear pressure which will for the most part, balance the inward pull of gravity. Eventually, the thermonuclear force will overcome the force of gravity and the star will shed its outer layers, leaving behind a dense, hot core. The core is known as a white dwarf and it is this which, despite its small size and incredibly high density, has captivated astron...

Gaze up at the Moon on any night and you will see a barren world displaying all manner of shades of grey. Aside from the obvious craters and lunar maria, the surface of the Moon is covered in the fine, dusty lunar regolith. The Apollo astronauts in the 60’s and 70’s learned that it was electromagnetically charged and was very abrasive posing a problem for mechanical equipment. Now a new payload on the Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative will explore the regolith even further.  The Moon is our only natural satellite. It has a diameter of 3,474 kilometres and is about a quarter the size of the Earth. Orbiting Earth at a distance of 384,400 kilometres, the Moon is our closest neighbour and has inspired artists, authors and scientists alike. From Earth we can only see half of the Moon, the near side due to a phenomenon known as captured or synchronus rotation. The countless craters are the result of meteorite strikes ont eh lunar surface and the darker, larger lunar maria ar...

Located in Tuscon, Arizona, the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) is a national facility consisting of four observatories that provide astronomers affiliated with any US institution with access to observing time. As part of its mission to advance astronomy and science education, NOIRLab recently announced the release of the 88 Constellations Project , a collection of free, high-resolution, downloadable images of all IAU-recognized constellations. This project is an educational archive that is free for all and includes the largest open-source all-sky photo of the night sky. The high-quality images behind this collection were taken by German astrophotographer Eckhard Slawik (whose portfolio can be found here ). The images were taken on film, and each panel consists of two separate exposures, with and without a diffuser filter, to emphasize the stars’ colors. The collection is arranged alphabetically, from Andromeda to Vulpecula , and includes informa...

Saturn’s rings are among the most glorious, stunning, and well-studied features in the Solar System. However, their age has been difficult to ascertain. Did they form billions of years ago when the planet and the Solar System were young? Or did they form in the last few hundred millions of years? The latest new research shows that the iconic rings are, in fact, very old. We first became aware of Saturn’s opulent rings hundreds of years ago. Galileo was the first to see them, though he couldn’t tell they were rings in his early telescope. Nobody had ever seen anything like them before, obviously, and he thought they were moons. When he observed the planet two years later, the ‘moons’ had disappeared, leaving him confused. Another two years passed, and when he observed Saturn again, they had returned. However, the viewing angle had changed, and what he once thought were moons he concluded were ‘arms’ of some sort. Top: Galileo’s sketch of Saturn from 1610. Bottom: Galileo’s sketch o...

Exploring asteroids and other small bodies throughout the solar system has gotten increasingly popular, as their small gravity wells make them ideal candidates for resource extraction, enabling the expansion of life into the solar system. However, the technical challenges facing a mission to explore one are fraught – since they’re so small and variable, understanding how to land on one is even more so. A team from the University of Trieste in Italy has proposed a mission idea that could help solve that problem by using an ability most humans have but never think about. Have you ever closed your eyes and tried to touch your fingers to one another? If you haven’t, try it now, and you’ll likely find that you can easily. It’s possible to do even without guidance from your five normal senses. That is what is known as proprioception – our hidden “sixth” sense. It is that ability to know where objects are in relation to one another – in this case, where your hands are in relation to one ano...

Ingenuity became the first aircraft to fly on another world in the first half of 2021. It explored the Martian terrain from above proving that powered air flight was a very efficient way to move around alien worlds. Now NASA have released a computer rendering of their next design, the Mars Chopper!  Ingenuity was a small helicopter, or rather more a drone, that was carried to Mars on board the Perseverance rover mission in 2020. It was designed as a technology demonstration to prove that powered flight was possible in the thin atmosphere of Mars. It made its first flight on 19 April 2021 and hovered just 10 feet above the ground before safely landing again. Since then, Ingenuity has completed 60 flights on Mars helping to survey and scout for areas of interest for further study.  This view of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was generated using data collected by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover on Aug. 2, 2023, the 871st Martian day, or ...

In August 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe (PSP) began its long journey to study the Sun’s outer corona. After several gravity-assist maneuvers with Venus, the probe broke Helios 2 ‘s distance record and became the closest object to the Sun on October 29th, 2018 . Since then, the Parker probe’s highly elliptical orbit has allowed it to pass through the Sun’s corona several times (“touch the Sun”). On December 24th, 2024 , NASA confirmed that their probe made its closest approach to the Sun, passing just 6 million km (3.8 million mi) above the surface – roughly 0.04 times the distance between the Sun and Earth (0.04 AU). In addition to breaking its previous distance record , the PSP passed through the solar atmosphere at a velocity of about 692,000 km/h (430,000 mph). This is equivalent to about 0.064% the speed of light, making the Parker Solar Probe the fastest human-made object ever. After the spacecraft made its latest pass, it sent a beacon tone to confirm that it made it throu...

For centuries, comets have captured our imagination. Across history they have been the harbingers of doom, inspired artists and fascinated astronomers. These icy remnants of the formation of the Solar System hold secrets to help us understand the events nearly 5 billion years ago. But before these secrets can be revealed, comets have to be studied and to study them they need to be found. A team of researchers have developed a technique to hunt down comets based upon data from meteor showers and to asses if they pose any threat to us here on Earth! Comets are objects that orbit the Sun like the planets but their orbits are usually more elliptical. They are composed of dust, gas and water ice and often called ‘dirty snowballs.’ Many comets are part of, or were a part of the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt. These distant regions of space house many of the Solar System’s icy bodies. On occasions, interactions between the bodies in the clouds can send chunks in toward the inner Solar System tr...

In the coming years, NASA and other space agencies will send humans back to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo Era—this time to stay! To maximize line-of-sight communication with Earth, solar visibility, and access to water ice, NASA, the ESA, and China have selected the Lunar South Pole (LSP) as the location for their future lunar bases. This will necessitate the creation of permanent infrastructure on the Moon and require that astronauts have the right equipment and training to deal with conditions around the lunar south pole. This includes lighting conditions, which present a major challenge for science operations and extravehicular activity (EVA). Around the LSP, day and night last for two weeks at a time, and the Sun never rises more than a few degrees above the horizon. This creates harsh lighting conditions very different from what the Apollo astronauts or any previous mission have experienced. To address this, the NASA Engineering and Safety Council (NESC) has reco...

Most of the neutron stars we know of have a mass between 1.4 and 2.0 Suns. The upper limit makes sense, since, beyond about two solar masses, a neutron star would collapse to become a black hole. The lower limit also makes sense given the mass of white dwarfs. While neutron stars defy gravitational collapse thanks to the pressure between neutrons, white dwarfs defy gravity thanks to electron pressure. As first discovered by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in 1930, white dwarfs can only support themselves up to what is now known as the Chandrasekhar Limit , or 1.4 solar masses. So it’s easy to assume that a neutron star must have at least that much mass. Otherwise, collapse would stop at a white dwarf. But that isn’t necessarily true. It is true that under simple hydrostatic collapse, anything under 1.4 solar masses would remain a white dwarf. But larger stars don’t simply run out of fuel and collapse. They undergo cataclysmic explosions as a supernova. If such an explosion were to squeeze...

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was specifically intended to address some of the greatest unresolved questions in cosmology. These include all of the major questions scientists have been pondering since the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) took its deepest views of the Universe: the Hubble Tension , how the first stars and galaxies came together, how planetary systems formed, and when the first black holes appeared. In particular, Hubble spotted something very interesting in 2003 when observing a star almost as old as the Universe itself. Orbiting this ancient star was a massive planet whose very existence contradicted accepted models of planet formation since stars in the early Universe did not have time to produce enough heavy elements for planets to form. Thanks to recent observations by the JWST, an international team of scientists announced that they may have solved this conundrum. By observing stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which lacks large amounts of heavy e...

The James Webb Space Telescope was designed and built to study the early universe, and hopefully revolutionary our understanding of cosmology. Two years after its launch, it’s doing just that. One of the first things that astronomers noticed with the James Webb was galaxies that were brighter and larger than our models of galaxy formation suggested they should be. They were like seeing teenagers in a kindergarten classroom, challenging our assumptions of cosmology. But while there were some breathless claims that the Big Bang was broken, those statements were a little overblown . But still, big, bright, mature galaxies in the early universe are forcing us to reconsider how galaxy formation is supposed to proceed. Whatever nature is telling us through the James Webb, it seems to be that galaxies form far faster than we thought before. Related to that, for several years cosmologists have recognized a certain tension in their measurements of the present-day expansion rate of the unive...

Titan is one of the solar system’s most fascinating worlds for several reasons. It has something akin to a hydrological cycle, though powered by methane. It is the solar system’s second-largest moonMooner our own. It is the only other body with liquid lakes on its surface. That’s part of the reason it has attracted so much attention, including an upcoming mission known as Dragonfly that hopes to use its thick atmosphere to power a small helicopter. But some of the most interesting features on Titan are its lakes, and Dragonfly, given its means of locomotion, can’t do much with those other than look at them from afar. So another mission, initially conceived by James McKevitt, then an undergraduate at Loughborough University but now a PhD student at University College London would take a look at both their surface and underneath. The mission, which has undergone several iterations, was initially designed to mimic the hunting motion of a gannet. This seabird famously dives under the wat...

Catching the best sky watching events for the coming year 2025. Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS captured over the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona. Credit: Robert Sparks How about that eclipse in 2024? Certainly, the Great North American Eclipse of April 8 th 2024 was one for the ages, instilling the eclipse-chasing bug in many a new skywatching fan. Now, for the bad news: 2025 is a rare, totality free year, featuring only a pair of remote partial solar eclipses. The good news is, there’s lots more in store to see in the sky in 2025, with a pair of fine total lunar eclipses, Mars at its best, and lunar occultations galore. And hey, the Sun is still mighty active, and the cosmos does still owe us another fine comet. 2024: The Year in Brief To be sure, the April eclipse was spectacular… but 2024 was almost more notable for the unpredictable. First, the Sun unleashed two epic solar storms, sending amazing aurora displays southward towar...