Stories from Payload’s weekly space science newsletter, Parallax.
Humanity peered deep into the universe over the last years, uncovering unprecedented details about distant exoplanets, the nature of black holes and dark matter, and bringing back pieces of other celestial bodies to examine back on Earth. But it’s not like we’ve seen it all, and the astronomy community has a full slate of missions […]
Here’s your roundup of the biggest moments in space science during 2023.
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 […]
