Making Sense Of Mars’ Tiny Moon Of Phobos

Understanding the Martian moon of Phobos’ origin hinges on decoding its interior. Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission due for launch in late 2026 should help.

Using Plants, Astronauts Could Create Their Own Medicine

A new pharmaceutical production method could allow astronauts on long space missions to "grow" fresh medicines on demand using plants. The work could also bring low-cost pharmaceutical production to resource-limited areas on Earth.

Astronomers Want to Build a Swarm of Telescopes to Find LIFE

Current plans for flagship telescopes in the 2040s are focused on answering a simple question - are we alone? Our best telescopes to date, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have only given us tantalizing glimpses into the atmospheres or other worlds, but not enough to truly determine whether or not life as we know it exists there. Astronomers have been waiting for technology to catch up to their dreams of what is possible in terms of new types of telescopes, and recently the W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies released a report detailing the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE) mission, which they hope will help provide a definitive answer to that simple question.

Plutonium in Earth Rocks Signals Long-ago Cosmic Collision

A small lump of rock pulled up from the Pacific Ocean seafloor in 1976 is giving scientists new clues about an ancient cosmic event. More than a hundred million years ago, two neutron stars collided. The resulting energetic kilonova sent a rain of long-lived elements, such as isotopes of plutonium, through space. Eventually, this stellar "debris" settled onto Earth. Some sank to the bottom of the ocean and got incorporated into a chunk of ferromanganese rock. Hidden inside were a few hundred atoms of plutonium radioisotopes. They provide the strongest clues about what created them in the merger and how long ago it happened.

What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 4: Black Hole Sun

Switch off fusion and, for ten thousand years, nothing happens. Then the Sun begins a slow, strange death: shrinking, briefly brightening, and coasting on gravitational heat for tens of millions of years. And the neutrinos give the whole thing away in just eight minutes.

What Would Happen if the Sun Stopped? Part 3: The Photon Traffic Jam

A photon born in the Sun's core takes around 100,000 years to fight its way to the surface, bouncing through a random walk so inefficient that the light on your face is older than human civilization. Why the Sun's surface is a hundred-millennia-delayed broadcast.

'High-Res' is the Secret to Finding Alien Life with the Next Great Space Telescope

We’re still in the definition phase of the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), but it seems like every week a new research group comes out with a paper helping to contribute to what is shaping up to be one of the most important space telescopes of the 2040s. A new paper from a team of researchers led by Daniel Jaffe of the University of Texas at Austin contributes to this ongoing definition work by arguing that it’s time HWO adopted a high-resolution near-IR spectroscopy capability, - which sounds great in practice, but so far hasn’t been attempted due to technological limitations. But, according to the paper, two recent inventions finally make a working version of an extremely high resolution exoplanet hunter viable.