Parallax
Stories from Payload’s weekly space science newsletter, Parallax.
Scientists Uncover Possible Origin of Dark Energy: Black Holes
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…
Airbus Readies JUICE for Launch to Jupiter
A mission set to explore the distant, icy moons of Jupiter is go for launch. This week, Airbus announced that the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE, at a stretch) mission is fully assembled in Toulouse, France, and is undergoing final testing before it’s shipped to French Guiana ahead of a planned launch in April. The…
Citizen Science Initiative on Light Pollution Reveals a Brightening Sky
To get a clear, untouched view of the night sky, a person has to travel to the remotest corners of the Earth, far from any city or town where artificial light blocks out the delicate light from the stars. The sky that most of humanity sees at night is obscured by a filmy haze of…
JWST and TESS Spot Rocky, Earth-like Exoplanets
JWST has confirmed its first exoplanet—and it’s a good one. Using the NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument aboard the orbiting telescope, scientists identified an exoplanet (i.e., a planet in a star system besides our own) in the LHS 475 star system that’s about as similar to Earth as any we’ve found. The planet, called LHS 475…
Space Science News 2022 Recap
Here we are, in the final weeks of 2022, having learned so much about the vast, mysterious universe we live in. Here’s a recap of some of the biggest moments in space science this year. Eyes on the sky Last Christmas, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope in its mission to, as the agency…
Lessons from Artemis: A Q&A with Former NASA Astronaut Jim Reilly
NASA’s triumphant return to the Moon has begun. Right now, Artemis I is coming to an end, as the Orion capsule hurtles back from lunar orbit for a planned splashdown this weekend. Over the next few years, NASA is planning to lay the groundwork to prepare for long-haul trips to Mars. There’s a lot of…
NASA Refutes Findings of Phosphine on Venus
In September 2020, a team of astronomers made waves across the scientific community when they reported they’d identified phosphine, a potential marker of life, in the atmosphere of Venus. Now, NASA says those findings were too good to be true. What’s the big deal about Venus? Venus remains somewhat of a mystery to us. It’s…
Artemis I Carries Science Cubesats to Orbit
It finally happened. SLS made it off the ground, and as you read this, the Orion capsule is en route to the Moon. Though the main spectacle was certainly NASA’s $4.1B, 322-foot-tall rocket lifting off and launching Orion farther than any human-rated spacecraft has gone before, that’s not all that Artemis I had going for…
NSF Sends Seven Experiments to ISS
On Sunday, Northrop Grumman launched the NG-18 mission, sending a Cygnus full of supplies and new science experiments to the ISS. After the Antares launcher deployed the Cygnus capsule, a problem arose: One of the craft’s two solar arrays failed to deploy. Luckily, it still had enough power to reach the station. Early yesterday morning,…
NOIRLab Identifies Three “Planet Killer” Asteroids
Peering through the light-warping haze of the atmosphere at twilight, astronomers made a rare discovery: Three huge near-Earth asteroids, each capable of causing the next mass extinction event on Earth. Now, before I get ahead of myself, these asteroids aren’t headed for Earth. Two of the three will orbit completely inside Earth’s orbit, never crossing,…
Seismic Waves Detected on the Surface of Mars
For the first time ever, researchers have detected seismic waves on the surface of another celestial body. On December 24, 2021, scientists working on the Marsquake Service at ETH Zurich recorded the unexpected quake using the seismometer on NASA’s InSight lander. Unlike the deep-seated rumblings kilometers below the surface they’d observed over the past three…
Scientists Uncover Long-Lost Star Catalog
For millennia, humanity has been gazing up toward the stars, trying to make sense of the glittering madness. Hipparchus, a Greek astronomer who lived about 2,100 years ago, is credited not only with creating trigonometry, but also with assigning the first numerical coordinates to stars. The fabled star catalog itself was lost to the ages.…
A Binary Black Hole Found Wobbling
Has Einstein ever been wrong? A study published yesterday in Nature revealed the first direct observation of a phenomenon that the famed physicist described in his theory of general relativity. In a mid-collision pair of black holes, the Cardiff University researchers found the strongest evidence yet of a wobbling orbit caused by the distortion of…
