Stories from Payload’s weekly space science newsletter, Parallax.
Ah, black holes—those distressing voids in space known for gobbling up everything they touch. Those side effects of the theory of relativity are now believed to be present at the core of every galaxy in the universe, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about them. One of those outstanding mysteries is radio wave […]
As companies and government agencies push deeper into space, their spacecraft need to transmit large amounts of data very precisely and quickly across vast distances in the void of space—and radio comms just aren’t doing the trick anymore. That’s where lasers (or, to use the industry terminology, optical communications) come in. Future crewed missions to […]
Every once in a while a new kind of flash shows up in the cosmos that astronomers don’t quite know how to explain.
There’s something mysterious happening in the universe. It’s driving the formation of galaxies and it’s pushing outward in space, leading to an accelerated expansion. We call the culprits behind these mysterious phenomena dark matter and dark energy, and together, astronomers believe they comprise 95% of the universe. But that’s about where our knowledge ends. In […]
The Earth didn’t always look the way it does today. Here’s how we think it happened: About 4.5B years ago, the Earth was a smaller protoplanet without a moon. While tracing its orbit around the sun, that proto-Earth (sometimes called Gaia) collided violently with another early planet, Theia. Being the larger body, Gaia won the […]
Mars, near its center, is liquid rock. The composition of the Red Planet has long been a mystery. It is tough to accurately measure things like the density and composition of what you can’t see from remote observations alone, and there have been limited tools deployed on the planet that can actually probe very far […]
When a spacecraft reaches the end of its life, there are a few things you can do. You can leave it there, circling the Earth in, usually, a slowly lowering, uncontrolled orbit for potentially thousands of years, depending on its original altitude. That’s frowned upon—it makes the orbital environment more dangerous for everyone else. You […]
Starquakes. Like earthquakes, but in a hot, burning ball of gas, somehow.
The most accurate clock in the world will pass 50B years before it falls a single second behind. A clock like that could change everything we know about timekeeping and tracking our position in the world, dramatically transforming the precision of our measurements across the globe in a moment. This type of clock is a […]
Forget your dreams of harnessing the awesome power of antimatter to hover and float through the air in the science-fiction world of the future. As it turns out, that approach would leave you in the lurch. For the first time, researchers at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) have experimentally demonstrated that, just like […]
Everyone’s favorite roiling, sulfuric hellscape just got a little more interesting. For the first time, scientists have identified active volcanism on Venus. Cutting through the clouds Venus doesn’t make studying it easy for scientists. Its clouds are dense and shiny, making telescope observations from afar very difficult, and the incredible heat and pressure of the […]
We know less about the vast, mysterious universe we live in than we can even begin to comprehend. For thousands of years, astronomers have looked out to the heavens to try to make sense of it all, and bit by bit, we’ve increased our understanding of how it all works. Now, researchers may have made […]
