JAXA successfully launched its Martian Moon eXplorer on its way to Mars and Phobos. It'll reach Mars in about six months, and will orbit the planet for about a month before transferring to an orbit around Phobos. It will deploy a small lander, which will help select a sample-gathering location for the main part of the mission. By 2031, the regolith sample from Phobos should be back on Earth.
The region near Sagittarius A-star, the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, is enriched in metals, although only modestly. The likely cause is supernovae explosions, which synthesize elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Over time, this metal-rich gas found its way towards the SMBH. The increased metallicity and heat from the supernova affect how fast gas flows into the SMBH.
When picturing a star, typically people think of giant balls of burning gas in the sky that emit enough light they are hard to miss. Planets, on the other hand, come in one of two general categories - rocky worlds like Earth or gas giants similar to Jupiter. But there is a third category of astronomical object that doesn’t really fit either of those descriptions, and also doesn’t exist in our own solar system. Known as a brown dwarf, they are sometimes called a “failed star” as they form the same way stars do, but never reach the critical mass of material to create active fusion in the cores. They are also much too massive to be considered a regular planet. But a new paper from researchers led by Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona describes one similarity between the coldest known brown dwarf and some of the planets in our solar system - it has water-ice clouds.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features the brilliant golden galaxies belonging to the MACS J0454.1-0300 galaxy cluster.
The ESA's Euclid space telescope was launched in July, 2026, and its mission is to observe billions of galaxies. The goal is to measure their redshifts over 10 billion years of Universal expansion, to better understand dark matter and dark energy. Surprisingly, the telescope has discovered a brand new comet, now named C/2026 S1 (Euclid).
Researchers have confirmed the existence of the first microblazar. Unlike blazars, which are extragalctic and powered by supermassive black holes, microblazars are inside the Milky Way, and are powered by stellar mass black holes. The microblazar may be the source for the most energetic particles in the galaxy.
A new study in Science Advances addresses the pressing questions about how long-duration exposure to microgravity affects the human genome.
