SPACE/COSMOS

Universe's greatest mysteries will remain unsolved thanks to Trump: scientists

Travis Gettys
May 29, 2025
ALTERNET

The active galaxy Centaurus A, with jets emanating from the central black hole. ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray), CC BY

President Donald Trump's proposed cuts to NASA's budget could throw away decades of research and leave the universe's greatest mysteries unsolved forever, a chorus of scientists warn.


The Trump administration intends to slash the space agency's budget by 24 percent – to $18.8 billion, the lowest figure since 2015 – and those cuts would decimate space and Earth science missions, with a 53 percent drop in funding since what they received last year, reported The Guardian.

“An extinction-level event is when something like an asteroid hits Earth, and life that has been otherwise perfectly well-functioning, healthy ecosystems that have been balanced and functioning, are wiped out in large numbers," said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society. "That’s functionally what this budget is."

The Planetary Society has been rallying lawmakers to oppose the budget, which scientists say would end research that has been ongoing for years and halt new discoveries.

“Projects that are functioning, that are on budget and on time, that are already paid for and returning good science, would be decimated," Dreier said. "You’d see missions turned off mid-flight, extended missions put into hibernation or left to tumble in space. You’d see projects that could launch next year canceled summarily, and hundreds if not thousands of scientists and engineers and others laid off due to loss of research money and technology investments."

The cuts could end NASA's search for signs of life on Mars and kill the Davinci+ and Veritas projects announced during Joe Biden's presidency and would have sent spacecraft to study Venus for the first time since 1989.

“What this does is turn off the spigot of discovery, the investments we’re making now that are going to pay off in five years, 10 years, maybe 20 years, that may fundamentally reshape our understanding of our place in the cosmos, our origins," Dreier said.

“Is Mars habitable for life, is Venus?" the scientist added. "How many Earth-like planets are there? Those types of questions will not be answered because we just decided not to answer them. We’re abandoning literally decades of debate and discussion and justification.”

Billions of dollars have already been spent on some projects on the chopping block, and Dreier asked why the administration would throw away research that has already been paid off.

“It’s just like we’re giving up and turning away. Instead of looking up we’re turning down and inwards,” Dreier said. “This is a budget of retrenchment, this is a budget of retreat. It’s basically the equivalent of hunching over a cellphone and swiping through pictures of the Grand Canyon while you’re sitting at the edge of it in reality and not even bothering to look.”

Other experts say the administration is sending a clear message that science is no longer important to the U.S., and scientists say that could drive away researchers to other countries.

“Is the U.S. going to be left behind?" said Ehud Behar, a high-energy astrophysicist at Technion- Israel Institute of Technology. "It might take time, this is not going to happen tomorrow, but China has enough people, they have enough scientists. If they are going to invest much more in science and technology development, they’re going to be more competitive, and they’re going to achieve things within five to 10 years that today maybe only NASA can achieve.”

The hunt for mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ offers up a surprise


By AFP
May 29, 2025


Does our solar system have a mysterious ninth planet? The discovery of a new dwarf world suggests not - Copyright AFP Eyad BABA

Daniel Lawler

It’s an evocative idea that has long bedevilled scientists: a huge and mysterious planet is lurking in the darkness at the edge of our solar system, evading all our efforts to spot it.

Some astronomers say the strange, clustered orbits of icy rocks beyond Neptune indicate that something big is out there, which they have dubbed Planet Nine.

Now, a US-based trio hunting this elusive world has instead stumbled on what appears to be a new dwarf planet in the solar system’s outer reaches.

And the existence of this new kid on the block could challenge the Planet Nine theory, the researchers have calculated.

Named 2017 OF201, the new object is roughly 700 kilometres (430 miles) across according to a preprint study, which has not been peer-reviewed, published online last week.

That makes it three times smaller than Pluto.

But that is still big enough to be considered a dwarf planet, lead study author Sihao Cheng of New Jersey’s Institute for Advanced Study told AFP.



– Distant traveller –



The object is currently three times farther away from Earth than Neptune.

And its extremely elongated orbit swings out more than 1,600 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, taking it into the ring of icy rocks around the solar system called the Oort cloud.

It goes so far out, it could have passed by stars other than our Sun in the past, Cheng said.

During its 25,000-year orbit, the object is only close enough to Earth to be observed around 0.5 percent of the time, which is roughly a century.

“It’s already getting fainter and fainter,” Cheng said.

The discovery suggests “there are many hundreds of similar things on similar orbits” in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, Cheng said.

After taking a risk spending more than half a year sorting through a difficult dataset in search of Planet Nine, Cheng said he was “lucky” to have found anything at all.

The researchers are requesting time to point the James Webb, Hubble and ALMA telescopes at their discovery.

But Sam Deen, a 23-year-old amateur astronomer from California, has already been able to track the dwarf planet candidate through old datasets.

“OF201 is, in my opinion, probably one of the most interesting discoveries in the outer solar system in the last decade,” Deen told AFP.



– What about Planet Nine? –



The icy rocks discovered in the Kuiper belt tend to have a clustered orbit going in a particular direction.

Two decades ago, astronomers proposed this was due to the gravitational pull of a world up to 10 times larger than Earth, naming it Planet Nine and kicking off a debate that has rumbled since.

It is also sometimes called Planet X, a name proposed for a hypothetical world beyond Neptune more than a century ago.

Back in 1930, astronomers were searching for Planet X when they discovered Pluto, which became our solar system’s ninth planet.

But Pluto turned out to be too tiny — it is smaller than the Moon — and was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006.

There are now four other officially recognised dwarf planets, and Cheng believes 2017 OF201 could join their ranks.

When the researchers modelled its orbit, they found it did not follow the clustered trend of similar objects.

This could pose a problem for the Planet Nine theory, but Cheng emphasised more data is needed.

Samantha Lawler of Canada’s University of Regina told AFP that this “great discovery” and others like it mean that “the original argument for Planet Nine is getting weaker and weaker”.

The Vera Rubin Observatory, which is scheduled to go online in Chile this year, is expected to shed light on this mystery, one way or another.

Deen said it was discouraging that no sign of Planet Nine has been found so far, but with Vera Rubin “on the horizon I don’t think we’ll have to wonder about its existence for much longer”.

For Cheng, he still hopes that this huge planet is out there somewhere.

“We’re in an era when big telescopes can see almost to the edge of the universe,” he said.

But what is in our “backyard” still largely remains unknown, he added.