Andy Tomaswick

Recent Articles

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  Astronomers Find a Sub-Neptune Orbiting Completely Backward Around a Red Dwarf

  September 25, 2026

  In our own solar system, all eight planets orbit our Sun in a nice, orderly fashion. None are more than 7° or so out of alignment with the equator, and all of them rotate in the same direction as the Sun itself. But that’s not the case for all solar systems, and a new paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics from a team of researchers led by Yann Carteret, a PhD student at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), describes the first time we’ve ever found an exoplanet orbiting the opposite direction of its red dwarf parent star - and it has major implications for our understanding of planet formation theory.

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  Swiss Engineers Just Designed a Better 'Shock Absorber' for Spacecraft

  September 24, 2026

  Rocket launches are some of the most violent travel methods man has ever created. They generate millions of pounds of thrust and convert that into intense g-forces. Humans must undergo serious training to withstand those experiences, but machines have to do so as well, but by design rather than training. If a delicate mirror or solder joint cracks before a multi-billion dollar satellite even begins its mission, the years of effort that went into its design and assembly could be lost. Now, researchers in Switzerland have come up with an ingenious way to make sure that is much less likely to happen.

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  Stanford Engineers Teach Spacecraft to "Dream" Their Way to the Space Station

  September 24, 2026

  Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so is a showcase in how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s equivalent to traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr and parallel parking into an open garage on a multi-billion dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward you actually drift up, and there’s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone onboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resultant debris field could both wipe out dozens of satellites and even people on the ground. No pressure, obviously. For decades, aerospace engineers have been docking successfully using hard coded physics equations and human pilots to correct them. But now, a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at Stanford, is taking a shot at building an AI to perform a series of “mental simulations” that could fundamentally change how future spacecraft interact with each other.

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  Astronomers Directly Image the Youngest Exoplanet Ever

  September 23, 2026

  Most exoplanets we find have been around a long time. They’ve cleared out their orbital path (one of the requirements of planethood, as fans of Pluto well know), have their own gravitational pull, and in many cases shine with their own infrared light. But it takes a long time to get to that point - finding “young” planets is much harder. But a new paper available in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by a research team led by Andrea Bernardi of Diego Portales University in Chile describes a new paper that definitely takes the prize as the youngest exoplanet we’ve yet found.

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  How Diffractive Solar Sails Could Stop a Killer Asteroid at 100 km/s

  September 23, 2026

  Asteroids don’t come with a warning label that they might one day hit Earth. While we don’t know of any currently on course to do so, we are finding thousands of new ones each year, and there’s always a potential that one could. We proved a viable technique for dealing with that eventuality - the DART mission successfully moved a small asteroid using a “kinetic impactor” - basically a big rod designed to push the asteroid off its trajectory. But DART had one big flaw - it was traveling in the same direction as the asteroid, and approached it from behind, eventually hitting it with an impactor launched while in orbit around it. That technique might work if we have enough warning, but would require years of orbital mechanical maneuvering to pull off. An alternative, proposed by researchers at Beihang University, is to use a new type of solar sail to deflect a potentially hazardous asteroid by hitting it head on.

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  3I/ATLAS Has An Extreme Taste For Heavy Water

  September 22, 2026

  More and more details about 3I/ATLAS are filtering through the scientific process as time goes on. Our third known interstellar visitor attracted the attention of some of the most powerful observatories in the world when it was discovered in July 2025, and some of those telescopes found something peculiar - the isotopes it contained appeared different. A new paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters (and available in pre-print on arXiv) by Kenji Furuya of the RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute in Japan and his co-authors, shows how that isotopic discrepancy is likely due to the “low-metallicity” of the stellar nursery 3I/ATLAS was born in.

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  Space Rocks Carry Hundreds of Thousands of Complex Organic Molecules—and We Just Photographed Them

  September 22, 2026

  Scientists have known for a while that meteorites contain the “building blocks” of life - complex organic molecules such as amino acids, simple sugars, or even the chemical rungs of DNA. But anyone who has taken an organic chemistry class knows there are plenty of other carbon-based molecules out there, and a new study from Joseph W. Frye-Jones of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Florida State, which was published in The Planetary Science Journal, found tens of thousands of types of previously unseen organic compounds in two of the world’s most famous meteorites.

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  Scientists Release Details About Moon's New Massive Crater

  September 21, 2026

  It's easy to think of the Moon as the static constant companion in the night sky. Its face hasn’t visibly changed in millennia, and always faces us with the same side. But looks can be deceiving, as our closest companion is constantly bombarded by asteroids and comets that make small craters across the lunar landscape. While they might not be large enough for us to see with our naked eye, professional Moon watchers can pick up on them. And a recent paper published in Science Advances, describes the largest ever found in modern times.

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  Solar Orbiter Catches the Sun’s Missing High-Speed Vibrations

  September 21, 2026

  The Sun’s magnetic fields are a twisty, curvy, ever changing mess. In particular, our star’s polar regions host regions called polar coronal holes that host invisible magnetic highways that stretch out into interplanetary space. But there’s a lot we don’t know about how those highways actually work, and in particular how they give the particles that form the fast solar wind an extra “kick” that sends them zooming at hundreds of kilometers per second. A new paper from a team led by Dr. Yuhang Gao and Prof. Hui Tian at Peking University, and published recently in the journal National Science Review, thinks they might have found an answer by using high-speed shots from Solar Orbiter to detect never-before seen rapid, high-frequency magnetic waves in those areas.

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  Astronomers Uncover "Hypersoft" X-ray Sources

  September 21, 2026

  X-rays showcase some of the most unique astronomical objects in the universe. Neutron stars and black holes siphoning gas from companion stars stick out like sore thumbs at this level of radiation. However, according to a new paper by Mustafa Muhibullah and Jimmy Irwin from the University of Alabama and Rosanne Di Stefano from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & the Smithsonian, there appears to be another group of ultra-bright X-ray emitters that we’ve completely missed until now. They call them Hypersoft X-ray Sources (HSSs) and, according to a press release accompanying the paper, might answer two long-standing astronomical questions.

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  The Sun Is Physically Capable of Producing a "Superflare" According To A New Study

  September 20, 2026

  We have long known that the Sun is active. It “flares” quite often, sending huge amounts of energy off in a certain direction - sometimes directly at Earth. But we also know that, compared to other Sun-like stars, it seems relatively quiet, and not capable of producing the “superflares” we sometimes see in its stellar equivalents. That sounds like great news for humanity, and some scientists have even argued that lack of superflares was a critical impetus for the development of complex life on Earth. But a new paper from Natalie Krivova of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and her co-authors in the journal Philosophical Transactions A calls the assumption that our Sun is incapable of such dramatic outbursts into question. That also means that, eventually, our highly technological society could bear the brunt of one of them.

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  Genetically Engineered Yeast Could Build the First Martian Outposts

  September 17, 2026

  If we are ever to have a permanent presence on Mars, we will have to learn to build there. Shipping the material from Earth to build something as simple as a pressurized habitat is prohibitively expensive, so we will have to make sure of the materials available on Mars’ surface. A research team led by Ning Liu at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology recently published a paper in Chem Circularity that uses biology to do much of the heavy lifting for the structural materials we would typically use concrete for. If their method is adopted, we might quickly find another Earth-based lifeform in abundance on Mars - yeast.

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  Could the Clues to Ancient Alien Civilizations Be Hiding in a Bucket of Moon Dust?

  September 13, 2026

  Most of our experience with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been focused on capturing radio signals that alien species have sent out, whether intentionally or unintentionally. That creates a huge “synchronicity” problem - what if there aren’t any alien civilizations broadcasting radio signals now, but there were a billion years ago? The Milky Way is around 13 billion years old - hoping that we exist at the same time as an alien civilization that happens to be actively messaging is a huge leap of faith. But, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and submitted to the International Journal of Astrobiology by Lewis J Pinault, as associated researcher at the SETI Institute, and his co-authors, we could take a completely alternative approach to trying to find alien civilizations - by looking for evidence of them in lunar dirt.

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  Earth From Orbit Is Unpredictable and Messy. Could 'Liquid' AI Clear the View?

  September 12, 2026

  Monitoring Earth from above is a messy, inconsistent business. Clouds can block a satellite view, the angle of the Sun can create huge shadows, and orbital paths might not take a system across the same general area for weeks. That inconsistency is hard to deal with for traditional software, and can even confuse standard deep learning algorithms. But, according to a new review paper by researchers Raul-Alexandru Gorgan and Dorian Gorgan of the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, there’s a new type of frontier AI that could be able to help - bio-inspired Liquid Neural Networks.

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  A New Design For A Plasma Engine Fuels On Only Thin Air

  September 12, 2026

  Choosing what orbit to put a satellite in always comes with trade-offs. When it comes to Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), between 100-450 km, there are distinct advantages. Remote sensing cameras can take better pictures, comms and radar require less power, and atmospheric drag will automatically clean up dead satellites. But there’s also a cost - air friction requires any satellite in this orbit to use an engine near constantly to stay in orbit, which in turn requires fuel - typically in the form of expensive gases like Xenon. So, as part of his PhD thesis at the University of Stuttgart, which is available in arXiv, Francesco Romano decided to solve that problem by using the very air molecules that cause that friction as fuel for a plasma engine to keep satellites aloft indefinitely in VLEO.

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  How Big Can The Universe's First Starbursts Get?

  September 11, 2026

  As our telescopes have improved and we’ve been able to peer farther back in time, we’ve begun finding more fascinating features of the universe. But one thing we definitely haven’t found yet is Population III (Pop III) stars. These were the earliest stars in the universe, formed completely from pristine hydrogen and helium, with no “metals” (i.e. elements heavier than those two) polluting their processes. They are also theorized to be absolutely massive, and “die with passion” as Bill Wurtz once put it in a famous YouTube video. A new paper, available in pre-print form on arXiv by Tae Bong Jeon from the Cosmic Frontier Center at the University of Texas at Austin, looks at just how massive those starbursts could be, and whether the James Webb Space Telescope could detect one.

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  What's Carving Active Gullies on Mars? It's Not Water

  September 11, 2026

  Scientists were shocked when they received the first images of Martian gullies. They were even more shocked as those gullies appeared to change over time. Their similarities to gullies seen on Earth were uncanny, but all of Earth’s gullies are formed by the water run-off, and Martian is too cold and has too sparse an atmosphere to have liquid water on its surface. Whatever has been causing those changing gullies couldn’t have been water, so what was it? A new paper from Apolline Leclef of the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale at Université Paris-Saclay and her colleagues, available in pre-print on arXiv, shows how they are likely caused by CO2 frost turning into a fluid.

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  NASA's Next Great Observatory Could Spot Oceans on Distant Worlds

  September 11, 2026

  We’ve found over 5,500 exoplanets so far. Dozens of them have been in the habitable zone of their parent stars, where, at least in theory, they could host an ocean. But we’ve never definitively found a liquid ocean on another planet. A new paper from researchers Eleanor Cornish and Tyler Robinson of the University of Arizona, available in pre-print on arXiv and submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, looks at a unique way we might be able to find one - by looking for its “glint”.

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  JWST Ruled Out Finding Tiny Moons Around An Exoplanet - That's Great News

  September 10, 2026

  The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has opened up many wonders of the cosmos to scientists since it began its science operations a few years ago. But one thing that it hasn’t done is find an “exomoon”. These, as yet still theoretical, moons orbit exoplanets in other star systems, and JWST was supposed to find a plethora of them. However, so far it has found precisely none. It seems the cause is noise in the telescope’s instrumentation or noise from the star itself. But a new paper, available in pre-print form on arXiv from David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia and also the host of the Cool Worlds YouTube Channel, shows how JWST can, in fact, find an exomoon. It likely just has to look for one in the same place repeatedly.

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  Tiny Salt Crevices Could Act As Miniature "Greenhouses" For Martian Microbes

  September 09, 2026

  We’ve been searching for life on Mars for a long time now, but so far we’ve come up empty. The fundamental problem is a Catch-22 of two of the key ingredients for life. Life as we know it needs liquid water and reasonable temperatures, both of which are available on Mars, but hardly ever at the same time. But a new paper from lead author Anna Bognar and her team at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University and the Konkoly Observatory describes a way for life to have access to both requirements at the same time - by hiding away in salt crystals.