Astro Blog

By Selam Gebrekidan , The New York Times.  Excerpt: More space debris is raining down on Earth than ever before — one effect of the frenetic race among governments and companies like SpaceX to reign over the skies. Last year, the U.S. Space Force issued alerts for nearly 820 objects entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The government issued alerts for 110 objects a decade ago. “The re-entries happen each and every day,” said Mariusz Slonina, who heads space situational awareness operations for the Polish Space Agency. Huge objects weighing a metric ton or more arrive about once a week, he said. Much of the debris incinerates in the atmosphere or splashes into the Pacific, but when it does not, it plummets to the ground, uncontrolled and unpredictable. ...Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit, has applied to launch a million more . Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origins has similar ambitions and Chinese “megaconstellations” are expected to have hundreds of thousands of sa...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Astronomers have discovered more than 6000 planets orbiting other stars—many of them small and rocky like Earth. But despite years of searching, firm evidence that such worlds have stable atmospheres has remained elusive. Now, researchers report in Science that the relatively nearby super-Earth LHS 1140b appears to be leaking helium gas into space , implying it still has a substantial atmosphere billions of years after its birth. ...Many teams are zooming in on LHS 1140b, because of its many charms. Besides being nearby, it could be hiding other gases in its lower atmosphere, such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide—much like Earth. And if those gases provide an element of greenhouse warming, it could possess a liquid water ocean warm enough to swim in....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/astronomers-spot-first-atmosphere-around-potentially-habitable-alien-world .  See also New York Times article, Astronomers Find a...

2026-07-18. A drop-in visitor carried clues about life’s origins . By ScienceAdvisor. Excerpt: On 16 July 2024, a homeowner in northern New Jersey heard a loud crash in his upstairs bedroom. When he went to investigate, he found the room covered in black dust and rock fragments, and a sulfurlike odor hung in the air. There was also a foot-wide hole in the roof. Earlier in the day, 60 observers across the northeast United States had witnessed a 117-pound meteor streaking across the sky and breaking down into small chunks, including the one that broke into the New Jersey bedroom and burst into pieces. The homeowner...quickly sealed the evidence in glass jars...2 pounds of the meteorite’s fragments... preserved in unusually pristine condition.... On the two-year anniversary of the impact, a team of researchers revealed that the meteorite contained many organic chemicals, including amino acids, thought to be key ingredients for the emergence of life on Earth . The scientists also found hi...

By ScienceAdvisor.  Excerpt: Victory is sweet for astronomers, who have just discovered the presence of a sugar molecule in interstellar space —a discovery that may have implications for the origin of life. The molecule, erythrulose, is also found on Earth in raspberries and self-tanner. ...researchers observed a large cloud of gas and dust called G+0.693–0.027, located about 27,000 light-years from Earth, using ...radio waves, which can pass through gas and dust and reveal information about the molecules within. ...Erythrulose isn’t the first sugar to be detected outside Earth, as samples from meteorites and the asteroid Bennu have shown ribose and glucose. But the new, more complex sugar is the first to be detected in interstellar space—and a further sign of how the carbon-rich building blocks of genetic material could have first formed in space. “ We have been waiting for an actual detection like this ,” geochemist Yoshihiro Furukawa, who was not involved in the study, told The ...

By Sara Hashemi , Smithsonian Magazine.  Excerpt: On July 5, a Japanese spacecraft flew past an odd-looking asteroid named Torifune. The probe snapped photos, which it beamed to Earth, revealing that the object is actually made of two space rocks that are stuck together—something called a “contact binary.” ...The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spacecraft that captured the data, Hayabusa2 , snapped a particularly show-stopping close-up from just over half a mile from Torifune’s surface, according to a statement ....  Full article at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-images-reveal-that-this-asteroid-is-actually-two-conjoined-space-rocks-that-form-a-peanut-shaped-object-called-a-contact-binary-180989090/ .  See also The New York Times article, Cosmic Conjoined Twins, Caught on Camera .  

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: For decades, elementary students learned the same tale of the Solar System: first come rocky terrestrial planets such as Earth, followed by gas giants such as Jupiter and ice giants such as Neptune, with lovable Pluto bringing up the rear. ...the so-called ice giants likely contain very little ice. ...Uranus and Neptune were first called ice giants because they orbit past the Solar System’s so-called ice lines: the points beyond which water, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other volatile molecules exist as solids rather than gases. If this region abounded with frozen water during the early Solar System, then Uranus and Neptune’s interiors might consist mostly of water, squeezed by the pressure of the planets’ gravity into a hot “supercritical” soup. ...researchers have come up with a smorgasbord of ideas about the interiors of our outermost planets. The newest, posted as a preprint last week and currently in review at The Astrophysical Journal ,...