Science & Discovery
Space science and discovery from Cosmic Herald — planetary science, cosmology, astrobiology, and the search for life beyond Earth.
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Science & Discovery
Solar panels stop working past Jupiter. Nuclear reactors are the only practical power source for deep space.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators have powered deep-space probes since the 1960s. A new generation of compact fission reactors — Kilopower and its successors — could power permanent lunar bases, Mars surface missions, and spacecraft to the outer planets and beyond.
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Science & Discovery
JWST can sniff exoplanet atmospheres. Scientists are debating what a 'biosignature' actually proves.
Biosignatures — atmospheric chemicals whose presence is difficult to explain without biology — are the primary observational strategy for detecting life on exoplanets. JWST has made the first detections of molecules in rocky exoplanet atmospheres. The challenge is interpreting them unambiguously.
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Science & Discovery
The Sun occasionally fires plasma clouds at Earth that can knock out power grids. We're not prepared.
Coronal mass ejections — billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma from the Sun — can trigger geomagnetic storms that damage transformers, disable satellites, and disrupt GPS. The 1859 Carrington Event caused telegraph fires; a comparable storm today would have catastrophic infrastructure consequences.
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Science & Discovery
Something massive might be hiding at the edge of the solar system. Here's the evidence for and against.
A cluster of distant Kuiper Belt objects have orbits that seem to point toward an unseen planet — perhaps 5 to 10 times Earth's mass, orbiting 400 to 800 AU from the Sun. The hypothesis is compelling, the search is active, and the skeptical case is real.
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Science & Discovery
Where did the Moon come from? Apollo's rocks are still answering that question.
The giant impact hypothesis — a Mars-sized body struck the early Earth and the debris coalesced into the Moon — has dominated lunar science for 40 years. New analyses of Apollo samples and Chinese lunar returns are both confirming and complicating it.
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Science & Discovery
For 30 years, the Sun appeared to be broken. Then we realized the problem was the neutrino.
Ray Davis built a detector in a gold mine and counted solar neutrinos for decades — finding only a third of what theory predicted. The discrepancy that resulted forced physicists to rewrite the Standard Model and earned two Nobel Prizes.
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Science & Discovery
Fast radio bursts are the most energetic millisecond events in the universe — and we're finally finding their sources
For two decades, fast radio bursts were detected but unexplained — extragalactic flashes of radio energy that lasted a millisecond and were gone. CHIME changed the scale of the problem. A magnetar flare in 2020 finally pointed toward an answer.
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Science & Discovery
After a century of searching, we know where at least some cosmic rays come from
Victor Hess discovered cosmic rays in 1912 but could not trace their origin — magnetic fields erase their direction in transit. More than a century later, IceCube has linked high-energy neutrinos to NGC 1068, the first confirmed extragalactic neutrino source.
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Science & Discovery
Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields strong enough to restructure atoms — and they are reshaping our understanding of dense matter
A magnetar packs the mass of the Sun into a sphere the size of a city, then generates a magnetic field 10^15 times stronger than Earth's. The physics at work inside them cannot be reproduced in any terrestrial laboratory — which makes their X-ray and radio bursts the only experimental data we have on matter at nuclear density.
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Science & Discovery
A strange gravitational wave is reviving an old idea: black holes older than the stars
A peculiar signal recorded by LIGO has astronomers entertaining a radical possibility — that it came from primordial black holes born in the universe's first instants, which could also help solve the dark matter problem.
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Science & Discovery
After 11 years reading the Martian air, MAVEN goes quiet
NASA has ended its MAVEN mission after more than a decade studying how Mars lost its atmosphere. The orbiter rewrote our understanding of why a once-wet world dried out — and found auroras nobody expected.
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Science & Discovery
The little moon that sprays its ocean into space — and why it tops the list for life
Enceladus is a frozen moon of Saturn barely 500 kilometres across, but it does something no other world is known to do: it jets plumes of its hidden ocean directly into space, where a spacecraft can taste them. What's in those plumes has made it a prime target in the search for life.
