The World's First Spacefaring Commercial Cardiologist Has Lessons for Would-Be Astronauts

Say what you want about the changes to the space industry that’s happened over the past 10-20 years, but one thing is for certain - there are a lot more people that have access to space now than there ever has been before. Some of them have some absolutely crazy stories about how they got there, and plenty of those have written their own books about their experiences, before, during, and after their flight. Add to that list A Heart for Space by Dr. Eiman Jahangir - a cardiologist that officially became an astronaut when he crossed the Kármán line on a Blue Origin flight in August 2024. But the story of how an Iranian-American cardiologist made it all the way to space has lessons for anyone that hopes to follow in his footsteps.

China Postpones the Chang’e-7 Mission

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again - space is hard. Another example, albeit lacking in the destructive displays of some past examples, is China’s recent delay of its Chang’e-7 lunar mission. The agency announced the mission would miss its late-August launch window with a very brief press release from the China National Space Administration and the China Manned Space Engineering Office. While that means a slight delay in China’s plan for the Moon, it’s only a matter of time before the cornerstone of the robotic lunar exploration program is back on the launch pad.

Rubin Observatory Peers Deep Into the Famous COSMOS Field

A new image from NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory offers a spectacularly deep view into a famous region of sky known as the COSMOS field.

Quiet Black Holes With a Stellar Companion Raise Questions About How They Form

Gaia has discovered three stellar mass black holes, each with a small stellar companion. For two of these systems the companions orbit closer that we would expect. Just how these systems form is a bit of a mysteries, but there are clues.

Astronomers Hear the Faint Whispers of Cosmic Hydrogen from the Distant Past.

Astronomers have directly detected an extremely faint radio signal from hydrogen gas billions of light years away, demonstrating a powerful new way to map the Universe.

A Pair of White Dwarfs Locked in a Six-Minute Orbit Might One Day Be Observed By Gravitational Waves

Future gravitational wave observatories will be able to see the gravitational waves of close-orbiting binary stars. A newly studied white dwarf system could be one of the first systems we observe.

Snapping the Sun's Grand Magnetic Border at 0.3 AU

Out in the solar system, there is a giant rippling curtain of charged particles that is actually the largest structure in our solar system. Known as the Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS), it marks the spot where the sun flips its magnetic north and south poles, and grows directly out of giant, glowing loops of plasma on its surface called helmet streamers. However, so far, studies of it have only occurred near Earth, using space-based instruments such as SoHo and Wind. But now, a new paper from Keiichi Ogasawara of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and his team used the joint ESA/NASA mission Solar Orbiter to capture the HCS at only about ⅓ the distance to Earth - before interactions with interstellar space and the solar wind change it. In other words, this paper represents the clearest ever picture of what the solar system’s largest coherent structure is actually made out of.