Space

To boldly go where no man has gone before

Nearly three years ago, a particle from space slammed into the Mediterranean Sea and lit up the partially complete Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope (KM3NET) detector off the coast of Sicily. The particle was a neutrino, a fundamental component of matter commonly known for its ability to slip through other matter unnoticed.

The IceCube observatory in Antarctica, a comparable detector that has been running for more than a decade, has found hundreds of cosmic neutrinos — but none quite like this one. Some 35 times more energetic than any neutrino seen before, the particle might have shot out from a highly active galaxy — a blazar — or a background source (opens a new tab) of cosmogenic high-energy particles that scientists suspect pervade the cosmos.

But those aren’t the only possibilities. The day after the KM3NET collaboration announced the detection (opens a new tab), the physicist David Kaiser (opens a new tab) walked into a room full of his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bold proposition: What if the monster neutrino came from an exploding primordial black hole?

Such black holes “could form before there were even atoms, let alone stars,” said Kaiser, who has been heavily involved in the hunt for these hypothetical objects.

The idea that the neutrino came from a primordial black hole is a long shot; Kaiser said he was “half-joking” when he suggested it. But in the absence of a definitive explanation, it remains intriguing, not least because the existence of primordial black holes could mean they play a role in dark matter.

So the question is, did we just spot one?

As we prepare for missions beyond Earth orbit, one crucial challenge remains: keeping astronauts healthy in microgravity. Without daily exercise, their muscles, bones and cardiovascular systems weaken, which could impact mission success and astronaut safety, especially in destinations such as the moon or Mars, where crew will have to operate autonomously immediately after landing.

This is why ESA has developed the European Enhanced Exploration Exercise Device (E4D)—a compact, versatile in-flight exercise system designed to ensure astronauts stay strong and ready for the physical demands of returning to Earth or working on other planetary surfaces.

E4D combines four exercise modes: resistive training, cycling, rowing and rope pulling, offering a wide range of workouts and the flexibility to add new ones later.

"E4D is a gamechanger for astronaut health. By enabling a broader and more adaptable range of resistance exercises, it supports the preservation of muscle mass and bone integrity in microgravity, which are two of the biggest physiological challenges during long‑duration missions," says ESA's E4D principal investigator Tobias Weber.

"Just as important is E4D's self‑monitoring capability. Using an integrated camera-based motion capture system, it allows astronauts to track their performance, evaluate their movement execution and self‑correct posture in real time. This reduces reliance on ground supervision and helps ensure that every training session remains safe, precise and effective, even in the demanding environment of orbit," adds Jennifer Struble, ESA's Operations Team Lead for E4D and Co-Investigator.

"E4D is a system I'm really looking forward to using during the εpsilon mission. I really enjoy exercising for both physical and mental well-being and since it's especially important to protect our bones and muscles in microgravity, I'm excited to try the new workouts made possible in space thanks to this European technology," says ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, who is now practicing with E4D on the ground as part of her mission preparations.

More in the article. I've also crossposted this to mander.xyz/c/space.

This is what happens when you have too many billionaires.

Everest has been turned into a run-of-the-mill tourist attraction. Space tourism is over now that any celebrity can blast off into orbit. Next up: a hotel on the Moon, now taking reservations for only about six years from now, if you're willing to make a small deposit.

For the low, low deposit cost of either $250,000 or $1 million, depending on the option selected, you can get in on the inflatable ground floor of GRU's definitely-going-to-happen inflatable Moon hotel, which it said it wants to have deployed by 2032.

Don't expect to foot the bill of a private five-day lunar expedition for you and up to three others for the meager deposit cost, though.

"Final pricing has not yet been determined will likely exceed $10 million," the company states on its reservation website. Yes, we know that sentence is missing either a coordinating conjunction or some critical punctuation. Cut GRU a break - it's too busy brainstorming Moon hotels to run its website copy through a grammar checker.

The universe continues to surprise those who study it. This week, astronomers announced the discovery of a new kind of cosmic object, something that is very nearly a galaxy, save for one crucial, missing ingredient: stars.

The almost-galaxy is about 14 million light-years from Earth. It was the ninth cloud found to be associated with a nearby spiral galaxy, leading to its serendipitous name: Cloud-9. The object is starless, consisting of only a haze of hydrogen gas that astronomers believe is swaddled in a much more massive clump of dark matter, the invisible substance that permeates the cosmos and shapes its overarching structure.

“There’s nothing like this that we’ve found so far in the universe,” Rachael Beaton, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix on Monday.

“It’s basically a galaxy that wasn’t,” she added.

Cloud-9 is the first confirmed example of what astronomers call a RELHIC, short for Reionization-Limited H I Cloud and pronounced “relic.” Such objects are rich in gaseous hydrogen but devoid of any stars. They are failed galaxies thought to be nearly as old as time itself, primordial fossils that can help astronomers understand the conditions required for galaxies to grow.

A paraplegic engineer from Germany blasted off on a dream-come-true rocket ride with five other passengers on Saturday, leaving her wheelchair behind to float in space while beholding Earth from on high.

Severely injured in a mountain bike accident seven years ago, Michaela Benthaus became the first wheelchair user in space, launching from west Texas with Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin. She was accompanied by a retired SpaceX executive also born in Germany, Hans Koenigsmann, who helped organize and, along with Blue Origin, sponsored her trip. Their ticket prices were not divulged.

An ecstatic Benthaus said she laughed all the way up – the capsule soared more than 65 miles (105km) – and tried to turn upside down once in space.