by Jonathan O’Callaghan As Earth’s magnetic shield fails, so do its satellites. First, our communications satellites in the highest orbits go down. Next, astronauts in low-Earth orbit can no longer phone home. And finally, cosmic rays start to bombard every human on Earth. This is a possibility that we may start to face not in … Read more
When astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) exhale carbon dioxide (CO2), it’s removed from the air and pumped into space. Could an Earth-based version help remove greenhouse gas emissions from our atmosphere? In order to limit global warming to 1.5˚C above pre-industrial levels and avoid some of the worse impacts of climate change, it … Read more
by Gareth Willmer Measuring the vast quantities of cosmic dust in interstellar space may be a key to unlocking various mysteries of the cosmos, including how the grains form and whether new types of galaxy are obscured by the particle clouds. Cosmic dust grains, which are born in stars, are the building blocks for other stars … Read more
by Ethan Bilby New efforts to figure out just how fast the universe has expanded since the Big Bang, a speed known as the Hubble constant, could upend current theories of physics, according to some scientists. Professor Grzegorz Pietrzyński at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw is one … Read more
A new space telescope designed to peer into some of the farthest regions of the universe could finally answer one of the most puzzling questions surrounding Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The Euclid mission, which is due to be launched by the European Space Agency in 2021, will capture images of billions of distant … Read more
Scientists are hoping to understand one of the most enduring mysteries in cosmology by simulating its effect on the clustering of galaxies. That mystery is dark energy – the phenomenon that scientists hypothesise is causing the universe to expand at an ever-faster rate. No-one knows anything about dark energy, except that it could be, somehow, blowing … Read more