All SPACE OUT Articles

It was all supposed to be great. On January 16th, NASA performed its first major test run in a long, long time. It was a test for the core stage of its upcoming Space Launch System (SLS), a beast of a rocket that will carry astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and more.

Take a planet with the mass of, say, Saturn. You know, pretty big, but not ridiculously big. Just…normal big.

The Milky Way is a giant, magnificent, truly transcendently beautiful spiral arm galaxy. It’s too bad we can’t get a decent picture of it. The problem is that we live inside it, and so astronomers have to work extra-hard to construct an accurate map.

Things are getting a little crowded at the red planet.

Small stars can pack a surprisingly powerful punch. For an example look no further than the nearest neighbor to our solar system, Proxima Centauri. This little red dwarf just sent off a blast a hundred times more powerful than anything that our own sun ever has.

Finally! It was initially proposed way back in 1998 and named the James Webb Space Telescope in 2002. After a decade of delays and over 10 billion dollars past its original budget, NASA’s next great observatory finally launched from the European Space Agency’s Guiana Space Centre in South America.

One of my favorite things about exoplanet systems is just how weird they can get. It seems that every few months we are treated to another surprise. This time around, NASA's TESS observatory delivered a planet almost three times more massive than Jupiter orbiting around not one, but two stars. As an added bonus: that planet orbits its twin suns closer than the Earth does around the sun. Who wants to take a trip?

Listen folks, I love a good sci-fi movie as much as anyone. Cruising around the galaxy, finding weird stuff, and blowing up aliens--it’s all good. But just because a writer can come up with something, it doesn’t make it possible. I’m sorry to say that we’re going to be bound to our solar system for a really, really long time. As in, probably forever.

Space is a busy place, with a lot of things going up (most of the time) and coming down (when we want them to). Let’s check in on the latest orbital happenings.

30 years--It’s been over 30 years since the Voyager 2’s historic flyby of Uranus and Neptune, the outermost and most mysterious planets in the solar system. It’s time to go back.

Meet TYC 7037-89-1, a six-star solar system. Astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter explains this stellar surprise discovery.

First, take a bunch of matter. It doesn’t matter what kind – a piece of paper, some leftover gum. Then, press it, and press it, and press it some more. Don’t stop now! We’ve got a long way to go.

There aren’t a lot of telescopes that are also movie stars. In fact, I can think of only one: the famed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

If Kevin Costner wanted to make a sequel, he’s got plenty of opportunities. Water is by far the most common molecule in the universe. It’s made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Hydrogen is element number 1 (both on the period table and in abundance), and has been hanging around since the first 15 minutes of the Big Bang. Oxygen is forged in the hearts of sun-like stars, and spreads around when those stars die and turn themselves inside out. And since sun-like stars are also very popular, oxygen gets quite a boost.

Meet the humble Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. It’s just another dense clump of galaxies, one of approximately a bajillion, dotting the universe. It sits about 240 million lightyears away from Earth.And its heart is missing.