Andy Tomaswick

Life Might Show Up As Pink And Yellow Clouds On Distant Worlds

November 15, 2025

Carl Sagan, along with co-author Edwin Salpeter, famously published a paper in the 70s about the possibility of finding life in the cloud of Jupiter. They specifically described “sinkers, floaters, and hunters” that could live floating and moving in the atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet. He also famously talked about how clouds on another of our solar system’s planets - Venus - obfuscated what was on the surface, leading to wild speculation about a lush, Jurassic Park-like world full of life, just obscured by clouds. Venus turned out to be the exact opposite of that, but both of those papers show the impact clouds can have on the Earth for life. A new paper by authors as the Carl Sagan Institute, led by Ligia Coelho of Cornell, argues that we should look at clouds as potential habitats for life - we just have to know how to look for it.

Demand for JWST's Observational Time Hits A New Peak

November 14, 2025

Getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the dream of many astronomers. The most powerful space telescope currently in our arsenal, the JWST has been in operation for almost four years at this point, after a long and tumultuous development time. Now, going into its fifth year of operation, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the science and mission operations centers for the JWST has received its highest number ever of submission for observational programs. Now a team of volunteer judges and the institute's scientists just have to pick which ones will actually get telescope time.

It's Time to Give the Moon Its Own Time

November 13, 2025

Tracking time is one of those things that seems easy, until you really start to get into the details of what time actually is. We define a second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom. However, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, mass slows down these oscillations, making time appear to move more slowly for objects in large gravity wells. This distinction becomes critical as we start considering how to keep track of time between two separate gravity wells of varying strengths, such as on the Earth and the Moon. A new paper by Pascale Defraigne at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and her co-authors discusses some potential frameworks for solving that problem and settles on using the new Lunar Coordinate Time (TCL) suggested by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

This 1.4kg Soft Suit Simulates Earth's Gravity to Stop Muscle Loss in Space

November 12, 2025

Astronauts lose significant amounts of muscle mass during any prolonged stay in space. Despite spending 2-3 hours a day exercising in an attempt to keep the atrophy at bay, many still struggle with health problems caused by low gravity. A new paper and some further work done by Emanuele Pulvirenti of the University of Bristol’s Soft Robotics Lab and his colleagues, describe a new type of fabric-based exoskeleton that could potentially solve at least some of the musculoskeletal problems astronauts suffer from without dramatically affecting their movement.

Scientists Just Built A 1-Kilometer Resolution Digital Twin Of Earth

November 11, 2025

Weather forecasting is notoriously wonky - climate modeling even more so. But their slowing increasing ability to predict what the natural world will throw at us humans is largely thanks to two things - better models and increased computing power. Now, a new paper from researchers led by Daniel Klocke of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and available in pre-print form on arXiv, describes what some in the climate modeling community have described as the “holy grail” of their field - an almost kilometer-scale resolution model that combines weather forecasting with climate modeling.

This New Robot Has A Clever Spin On Lunar Mining

November 11, 2025

Work continues on designs for robots that can help assist the first human explorers on the Moon in over half a century. One of the most important aspects of that future trip will be utilizing the resources available on the Moon’s surface, known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). This would give the explorers access to materials like water, structural metals, and propellant, but only if they can recover it from the rock and regolith that make up the Moon’s surface. A new paper from researchers mainly affiliated with Tohoku University describes the design and testing of a type of robot excavator that could one day assist lunar explorers in unlocking the world’s potential.

The Archeologist's Guide To Colonizing Other Worlds

November 10, 2025

Models help scientists understand everything from the particles that make up the universe to massive superstructures of galaxies at the beginning of time. But sometimes they model more mundane, though perhaps even more complex, features - including the course of human civilization. A new paper by Thomas Leppard of the International Archaeological Research Institute and his co-authors, all of whom are also archeologists, propose applying a model of how humans expanded to the different islands across the Pacific Ocean during their early migration to what glean insights into how humanity should manage our colonization of space.

Cosmic Dust Bunnies - Why the Universe Might Be Fluffier Than We Thought

November 10, 2025

Space dust provides more than just awe-inspiring pictures like the Pillars of Creation. It can provide the necessary materials to build everything from planets to asteroids. But what it actually looks like, especially in terms of its “porosity” (i.e. how many holes it has) has been an area of debate for astrochemists for decades. A new paper from Alexey Potapov of Friedrich Schiller University Jena and his co-authors suggest that the dust that makes up so much of the universe might be “spongier” than originally thought.

Why the Milky Way’s Dark Heart Might Be Shaped Like a Box

November 10, 2025

Back in 2009, astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope noticed that there was a lot more gamma-ray light coming from the center of the Milky Way than might otherwise be expected given the objects there. Since then, two theories have appeared to explain this Galactic Center Excess (GCE) as it’s become known. One theory posits that the extra gamma rays are created by thousands of unseen milli-second pulsars (MSPs) in the Galactic center, while the other suggests that dark matter annihilating itself could also be the source. A new paper from Moortis Muru and hisco-authors at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) hasn’t necessarily solved the conundrum, but does level the playing field between the two theories again.

Euclid Has 8 Extra Years of Fuel. A Scientist Has A Brilliant Plan To Use It.

November 08, 2025

It’s almost become expected that many space telescopes and probes can have “extended missions”. Both Voyagers are still sending data back 40+ years after their 5-year primary mission ended. But figuring out what to do with those spacecraft after their primary mission takes some negotiation. One such craft that will reach its end-of-mission in 2030 is Euclid, which is currently on a mission to map the “dark universe” of dark energy and dark matter. According to a new paper from Luigi “Rolly” Bedin of the Astronomical Institute of Padova, which is available in pre-print form on arXiv, for its second act we could turn Euclid into the most powerful astrometric telescope ever made.

The "Anti-Weather" Of Venus

November 07, 2025

Conditions on Venus’ surface have largely remained a mystery for decades. Carl Sagan famously pointed out that people were quick to jump to conclusions, such as that there are dinosaurs living there, from scant little evidence collected from the planet. But just because we have little actual data doesn’t mean we can’t draw conclusions, and better yet models, from the data we do have. A new paper from Maxence Lefèvre of the Sorbonne and his colleagues takes what little data has been collected from Venus’ surface and uses it to valid a model of what the wind and dust conditions down there would be like - all for the sake of making the work of the next round of Venusian explorer easier.

Taking The Moon's Temperature With Beeswax

November 04, 2025

Sometimes space exploration doesn’t go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might not have succeeded, allowing them to try again. A group from MIT’s Space Enabled Research Group, part of its Media Lab, recently released a paper in Space Science Reviews that describes the design and testing results of a pair of passive sensors sent to the Moon on the ill-fated Rashid-1 rover.

Magnetic Forces Funnel Gas And Dust Into Young Stars

November 03, 2025

Star formation has a lot of complex physics that feed into it. Classical models used something equivalent to a “collapse” of a cloud of gas by gravity, with a star being birthed in the middle. More modern understandings show a feature called a “streamer”, which funnels gas and dust to proto-stars from the surrounding disc of material. But our understanding of those streamers is still in its early stages, like the stars they are forming. So a new paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Pablo Cortes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his co-authors is a welcome addition to the literature - and it shows a unique feature of the process for the first time.

We Could Use Neutrino Detectors As Giant Particle Colliders

November 03, 2025

There is a limit to how big we can build particle colliders on Earth, whether that is because of limited space or limited economics. Since size is equivalent to energy output for particle colliders, that also means there’s a limit to how energetic we can make them. And again, since high energies are required to test theories that go Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics, that means we will be limited in our ability to validate those theories until we build a collider big enough. But a team of scientists led by Yang Bai at the University of Wisconsin thinks they might have a better idea - use already existing neutrino detectors as a large scale particle collider that can reach energies way beyond what the LHC is capable of.

We're Putting Lots Of Transition Metals Into The Stratosphere. That's Not Good.

October 30, 2025

We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime. According to a new paper by Leonard Schulz of the Technical University of Braunschweig and his co-authors, material from satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, especially transition metals, could have unforeseen consequences on atmospheric chemistry - and we’re now the biggest contributor of some of those elements.

A Second Instrument On HWO Could Track Down Nearby Earth-Size Planets

October 29, 2025

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is slated to be the next Great Observatory for the world. Its main focus has been searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-like exoplanets. However, to do that, it will require a significant amount of effort with only a coronagraph, the currently planned primary instrument, no matter how powerful that coronagraph is. As new paper from Fabien Malbet of the University of Grenoble Alpes and his co-authors suggest an improvement - add a second instrument to HWO’s payload that will be able to astrometrically track planets down to a precision of .5 micro-arcseconds (µas). That would allow HWO to detect Earth-size planets around hundreds of nearby stars - dramatically increasing the number of potential candidates for atmospheric analysis.

Many Asteroid Rotations Are Chaotic. A New Model Helps Explain Them.

October 28, 2025

Asteroids spin. Most of them do so rather slowly, and up until now most theories of asteroid rotation have failed to explain exactly why. A new paper from Wen-Han Zhou at the University of Tokyo and his co-authors might finally be able to fully explain that mystery as well as a few others related to asteroid rotation. Their work was presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in late September and could impact our understanding of how best to defend against a potentially hazardous asteroid.

Teach-And-Repeat Driving Could Automate Lunar Cargo Delivery

October 24, 2025

Driving on the Moon for the first time has got to be an exhilarating experience. But driving the same path on the Moon for the 500th time probably won’t be nearly as exciting to whatever poor astronaut got stuck with that duty for the day. With that in mind, a team of researchers led by PhD student Alec Krawciw and Professor Tim Barfoot of the University of Toronto are working on a way to automate the mundane task of driving goods back and forth from a lunar landing site to a nascent lunar exploration base.

Are We In The Solitude Zone Of The Universe?

October 24, 2025

Are we alone? It’s probably one of the, if not the most basic questions of human existence. People have been trying to answer it for millennia in one form or another, but only recently have we gained the tools and knowledge to start tractably trying to estimate whether we are or not. Those efforts take the form of famous tools like the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation, but there’s always room for a more nuanced understanding. A new paper in Acta Astronautica from Antal Veres of the Hungarian University of Agriculture introduces a new one - The Solitude Zone.

ESA Is Simulating A Solar Storms For Satellite Operator Training

October 24, 2025

Threats from space aren’t always obvious, but statistically its only a matter of time before one of them happens. One of the most concerning for many space experts is a massive solar storm, like the one that literally lit telegraph paper on fire when it hit back in 1859. In the last 150 years our technology has improved by leaps and bounds, but that also means it's much more susceptible to damage if another event like the “Carrington Event”, as the storm in 1859 is called. Estimates for potential damage range into the trillions of dollars, with full economic recovery taking well over a decade if something isn’t done to mitigate the damage beforehand. As part of that preparedness, the European Space Agency (ESA) has started requiring the operational crew of new satellites, which would be on the frontlines of any solar storm catastrophe, to simulate how they would handle such an event, as described in a recent press release focused on one of those simulations.

Recent Articles