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Category: space – Page 5

Using moon dirt with 3D printing to build future lunar colonies

Simulated lunar dirt can be turned into extremely durable structures, potentially paving the way to more sustainable and cost-effective space missions, a new study suggests. Using a special laser 3D printing method, researchers melted fake lunar soil—a synthetic version of the fine dusty material on the moon surface, called regolith simulant—into layers and fused it with a base surface to manufacture small, heat-resistant objects.

If utilized on the lunar surface, the material may help build sturdy, nontoxic habitats and tools for future astronauts, capabilities that would be vital to the NASA Artemis missions that aim to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by the end of the decade.

But to assess how well this new construction material may work in space, the team tested their fabrication process under a range of different environmental conditions, revealing that the overall quality of the material depends greatly on the surface onto which the soil is printed.

10 Ancient Space Objects That Existed Before the Universe Itself

All right, let’s go.
Number 10. Methuselah’s Star.
In 2000, a team of astronomers led by Howard Bond at Penn State University pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a faint star in the constellation Libra and made a discovery that should have been impossible. The star, designated HD 140,283 and later nicknamed Methuselah, appeared to be 14.5 billion years old. The universe itself is only 13.8 billion years old. A star older than the cosmos that contains it shouldn’t exist. Yet there it was, burning quietly just 190 light years from Earth, defying the most fundamental timeline in all of physics.

Space-grade perovskite solar cells can survive extreme temperature fluctuations

The Aydin Group at LMU Munich has unveiled a novel strategy for making perovskite solar cells more robust against extreme temperature fluctuations. To this end, the researchers led by Dr. Erkan Aydin, group leader at LMU’s Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy, combined two molecular approaches. Their goal was to stabilize both the grain structure within the perovskite material and the interfaces of the solar cells, with a particular focus on enhancing the interaction between the perovskite layer and the underlying substrate. This enables the solar cells to maintain stable performance under the extreme thermal cycling typical of Low Earth orbit (LEO), as well as in other harsh environmental conditions. Their results have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Regarding the background: Perovskite solar cells are considered one of the most promising next-generation photovoltaic technologies. They are relatively inexpensive to manufacture and achieve high efficiencies.

However, their mechanical stability is an issue. In particular, when confronted with strong temperature fluctuations in LEO—for example, in the range between −80 and +80 degrees Celsius—materials inside the solar cell can expand and contract to varying extents. This creates mechanical stresses, which lead to cracks, delamination, or drops in performance.

Clearest evidence yet that giant planets spin faster than their cosmic lookalikes

For decades, astronomers have struggled to differentiate giant planets from brown dwarfs, a class of objects more massive than planets but too small to ignite nuclear fusion like true stars. Through a telescope, these cosmic lookalikes can have overlapping brightness, temperatures, and even atmospheric fingerprints. The striking similarity leaves astronomers unsure if they have observed an oversized planet or an undersized star. Now, a Northwestern University-led team has uncovered a crucial clue that separates the two: how fast they spin.

In a new study, astrophysicists found the clearest evidence yet that giant planets spin significantly faster than their brown dwarf counterparts. The new results suggest rotation measurements may provide a powerful new diagnostic for classifying these indistinguishable populations and suggest that these two objects evolve differently, perhaps even forming through distinct processes.

The study was published in The Astronomical Journal. It marks the largest survey of spin measurements of directly imaged extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs to date.

How two dim stars came together to shine brightly

Brown dwarfs get a bad rap in the stellar world, often labeled as “failed stars” for their inability to sustain nuclear fusion at their cores. The mass of these objects falls between planets and stars, ranging from 13 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter. Because they aren’t massive enough to sustain fusion, they are far fainter and cooler than their stellar comrades.

Now, a new finding led by researchers at Caltech shows how these dim bulbs can join together to shine brightly. Searching through archival observations captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, researchers have identified a very tight-knit pair of brown dwarfs in which one is actively siphoning material from the other.

Ultimately, the brown dwarfs are expected to merge to form a new star; alternatively, the brown dwarf gaining the extra mass will ignite to become a star. Either way, a pair of failed stars will have created a brilliant new star.

NASA’s Hubble unexpectedly catches comet breaking up

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings are published in the journal Icarus.

The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)—not to be confused with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS—was not the original target of the Hubble study.

“Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. “This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target—and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances.”

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