Don't Get Your Hopes Up for a City on the Moon

Bezos said we should move heavy industry to the Moon. Musk says we'll have sustainable lunar cities. We know there's ancient water ice in craters on the Moon's poles, but there's not enough water to support a city.

Tens of Thousands of Fast Radio Bursts Could Help Solve the Greatest Cosmic Mysteries

A new study led by researchers from Caltech demonstrates the effectiveness of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) as a tool for measuring cosmological distances and the clustering of matter.

Could the Clues to Ancient Alien Civilizations Be Hiding in a Bucket of Moon Dust?

Most of our experience with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been focused on capturing radio signals that alien species have sent out, whether intentionally or unintentionally. That creates a huge “synchronicity” problem - what if there aren’t any alien civilizations broadcasting radio signals now, but there were a billion years ago? The Milky Way is around 13 billion years old - hoping that we exist at the same time as an alien civilization that happens to be actively messaging is a huge leap of faith. But, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology by Lewis J Pinault, as associated researcher at the SETI Institute, and his co-authors, we could take a completely alternative approach to trying to find alien civilizations - by looking for evidence of them in lunar dirt.

A New Catalog of Close to 3,000 Supernova Challenges Theories on Dark Energy

The most comprehensive catalogue of exploding white dwarf stars ever assembled has revealed new clues about dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

A New Design For A Plasma Engine Fuels On Only Thin Air

Choosing what orbit to put a satellite in always comes with trade-offs. When it comes to Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), between 100-450 km, there are distinct advantages. Remote sensing cameras can take better pictures, comms and radar require less power, and atmospheric drag will automatically clean up dead satellites. But there’s also a cost - air friction requires any satellite in this orbit to use an engine near constantly to stay in orbit, which in turn requires fuel - typically in the form of expensive gases like Xenon. So, as part of his PhD thesis at the University of Stuttgart, which is available in arXiv, Francesco Romano decided to solve that problem by using the very air molecules that cause that friction as fuel for a plasma engine to keep satellites aloft indefinitely in VLEO.

Venus Moon Would Have Been Doomed From The Start, Says New Paper

Venus likely never had a moon and even if it did, it would have soon been torn asunder by the planet’s own gravity, says prominent planetary astrophysicist.

Dense Galaxies Are Carving Out A Bubble in the Early Universe

Light could only travel freely in the Universe after cosmic reionization. Before that, neutral hydrogen stopped photons from travelling. The JWST has found evidence of an overdensity of galaxies carving out a bubble of reionization. Is this how it all started?