Science & Discovery
Space science and discovery from Cosmic Herald — planetary science, cosmology, astrobiology, and the search for life beyond Earth.
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Science & Discovery
Frank Drake wrote seven terms on a blackboard in 1961. Here's what we know about each of them now.
The Drake Equation estimates the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy from seven factors. In 1961, most were guesses. In 2026, exoplanet surveys, astrobiology, and SETI experiments have turned several of them into data. The answer is still unknown — but for different reasons than before.
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Science & Discovery
Solar panels stop working past Jupiter. Nuclear reactors are the only practical power source for deep space.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generators have powered deep-space probes since the 1960s. A new generation of compact fission reactors — Kilopower and its successors — could power permanent lunar bases, Mars surface missions, and spacecraft to the outer planets and beyond.
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Science & Discovery
JWST can sniff exoplanet atmospheres. Scientists are debating what a 'biosignature' actually proves.
Biosignatures — atmospheric chemicals whose presence is difficult to explain without biology — are the primary observational strategy for detecting life on exoplanets. JWST has made the first detections of molecules in rocky exoplanet atmospheres. The challenge is interpreting them unambiguously.
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Science & Discovery
The Sun occasionally fires plasma clouds at Earth that can knock out power grids. We're not prepared.
Coronal mass ejections — billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma from the Sun — can trigger geomagnetic storms that damage transformers, disable satellites, and disrupt GPS. The 1859 Carrington Event caused telegraph fires; a comparable storm today would have catastrophic infrastructure consequences.
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Science & Discovery
Something massive might be hiding at the edge of the solar system. Here's the evidence for and against.
A cluster of distant Kuiper Belt objects have orbits that seem to point toward an unseen planet — perhaps 5 to 10 times Earth's mass, orbiting 400 to 800 AU from the Sun. The hypothesis is compelling, the search is active, and the skeptical case is real.
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Science & Discovery
Where did the Moon come from? Apollo's rocks are still answering that question.
The giant impact hypothesis — a Mars-sized body struck the early Earth and the debris coalesced into the Moon — has dominated lunar science for 40 years. New analyses of Apollo samples and Chinese lunar returns are both confirming and complicating it.
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Science & Discovery
For 30 years, the Sun appeared to be broken. Then we realized the problem was the neutrino.
Ray Davis built a detector in a gold mine and counted solar neutrinos for decades — finding only a third of what theory predicted. The discrepancy that resulted forced physicists to rewrite the Standard Model and earned two Nobel Prizes.
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Science & Discovery
Fast radio bursts are the most energetic millisecond events in the universe — and we're finally finding their sources
For two decades, fast radio bursts were detected but unexplained — extragalactic flashes of radio energy that lasted a millisecond and were gone. CHIME changed the scale of the problem. A magnetar flare in 2020 finally pointed toward an answer.
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Science & Discovery
After a century of searching, we know where at least some cosmic rays come from
Victor Hess discovered cosmic rays in 1912 but could not trace their origin — magnetic fields erase their direction in transit. More than a century later, IceCube has linked high-energy neutrinos to NGC 1068, the first confirmed extragalactic neutrino source.
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Science & Discovery
Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields strong enough to restructure atoms — and they are reshaping our understanding of dense matter
A magnetar packs the mass of the Sun into a sphere the size of a city, then generates a magnetic field 10^15 times stronger than Earth's. The physics at work inside them cannot be reproduced in any terrestrial laboratory — which makes their X-ray and radio bursts the only experimental data we have on matter at nuclear density.
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Science & Discovery
A strange gravitational wave is reviving an old idea: black holes older than the stars
A peculiar signal recorded by LIGO has astronomers entertaining a radical possibility — that it came from primordial black holes born in the universe's first instants, which could also help solve the dark matter problem.
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Science & Discovery
After 11 years reading the Martian air, MAVEN goes quiet
NASA has ended its MAVEN mission after more than a decade studying how Mars lost its atmosphere. The orbiter rewrote our understanding of why a once-wet world dried out — and found auroras nobody expected.
