A Road Trip with Commander Chris

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Two New Exoplanets And The Need For New Habitable Zone Definitions January 14, 2026
How solid is our understanding of exoplanet habitability? Are the ideas of an Optimistic Habitable Zone and a Conservative Habitable Zone sufficient to advance our understanding? New research introduces an expanded exoplanet 'temperate zone,' highlighting planets that are amenable to atmospheric study by the JWST.
Solving the Mystery of Blue Flashes January 14, 2026
Brief, brilliant flashes of blue light occasionally appear across the universe, burning hundreds of times brighter than ordinary supernovae before fading within days. Astronomers have puzzled over these luminous fast blue optical transients for years, unable to determine whether they were unusual stellar explosions or something else entirely. Observations of AT 2024wpp, the brightest example […]
NASA Bids Farewell to Historic Test Stands That Built the Space Age January 14, 2026
Two towering buildings that helped launch humanity's greatest space achievements came down on January 10 at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama. The Dynamic Test Stand and the T-tower, both designated National Historic Landmarks, played crucial roles in developing the Saturn V rockets that carried Apollo astronauts to the Moon and the Space Shuttle […]
A Supernova That Shouldn't Exist January 14, 2026
For decades, astronomers believed that the most massive stars in the universe lived fast and died quietly, collapsing directly into black holes without the spectacular fireworks of a supernova explosion. That understanding has been dramatically overturned by observations of SN 2022esa, a peculiar supernova that erupted from an incomprehensibly massive star and is now destined […]
To Study the Moon's Ancient Ice, We First Have to Pollute It January 14, 2026
There is a fundamental tension in space exploration that has created ongoing debates for decades. By creating the infrastructure we need to explore other worlds, we damage them in some way, making them either less scientifically interesting or less “pristine,” which some would argue, in itself, is a bad thing. A new paper available in […]