During its commissioning phase, NASA's [*Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere*](https://ift.tt/o31gU5H) (PUNCH) mission captured high-resolution images of a [Coronal Mass Ejection](https://ift.tt/Dt5PZUd) (CME) in greater detail than was previously possible.
Monday, June 16, 2025
Saturday, June 14, 2025
A Better Way to Turn Solar Sails
Solar sails are space's ultimate free ride, they get their propulsion from the Sun, so they don't need to carry propellant, but they come with their own challenges. A sail has a large surface area but a low mass, which creates a huge moment of inertia and makes it difficult to control, especially with reaction wheels. A team of engineers have cracked it though with "smart mirrors" that can instantly switch their reflectivity on command, transforming sunlight from an unruly force into a precision steering tool.
Webb Sees the Galaxies that Cleared Out the Cosmic Fog
The early universe was shrouded in darkness. Just hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, a thick fog of hydrogen gas choked the cosmos, blocking light from traveling far. At some point, this gas became ionized, stripped of its electrons. Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have identified the culprit: low-mass starburst galaxies emitting huge amounts of ultraviolet light. In just one patch of sky. They discovered 83 of these galactic powerhouses in one part of the sky at a time when the Universe was only 800 million years old.
Telescopes in Chile Capture Images of the Earliest Galaxies in the Universe
An international team of astronomers using the [*Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor*](https://ift.tt/6tOo2jE) (CLASS) [reported the first-ever measurement](https://ift.tt/O1K8Mhb) announced the first-ever detection of radiation from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) interacting with the first stars in the Universe.
Friday, June 13, 2025
The Universe is Filled With Natural Telescope Lenses. Roman Will Use Them to Study Dark Matter
We don't know what dark matter is, but that doesn't stop astronomers from using it to their advantage. Dark matter is part of what makes gravitational lensing so effective. Astronomers expect the Roman Space Telescope to find 160,000 gravitational lenses, and dark matter makes a crucial contribution to these lenses.
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Distant Galaxy Has Similar Icy Dust to the Milky Way. So, Similar Planets?
For most of us, dust is just something we have to clean up. For astronomers, interstellar dust is a hindrance when they want to study distant objects. However, recent James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations of a distant galaxy are changing that. This infrared-sensitive observatory is letting them find a way to use dust to understand the evolution of early galaxies. In addition, it uncovered a special property of that galaxy's ice-covered dust, indicating it could be similar to the materials that formed our Solar System.
Webb Shows Another Jupiter Forming in Real Time
Astronomers have used JWST to study a fascinating planetary system that's only 16.7 million years old, with two bizarre giant exoplanets. Designated YSES-1, its closer planet, YSES-1b seems to be surrounded by a disk of material that could be the birthplace of moons, similar to what might have happened at Jupiter billions of years ago. The other, YSES-1c, has a layer of silicate particles in its upper atmosphere—clouds of sand.
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Would a Planetary Sunshade Help Cool the Planet? This Mission Could Find Out
As worldwide temperatures continue to rise and conventional solutions aren't working fast enough, governments may turn to geoengineering solutions. One idea is to place a giant sunshade somewhat like an umbrella between the Earth and the Sun to block some of the sunlight that reaches our planet. A new mission proposes sending an 81 m² sail to Earth-Sun L1 to measure the effect of blocking a tiny fraction of solar energy.
Geomagnetic Storms Bring Satellites Down Faster
When the Sun rages and storms in Earth's direction, it changes our planet's atmosphere. The atmosphere puffs up, meaning satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) meet more resistance. This resistance creates orbital decay, dragging satellites to lower altitudes. One researcher says we can change the design of satellites to decrease their susceptibility.
The Galactic Center Struggles to Form Massive Stars
Gas clouds in the Milky Way's Galactic Center contain copious amounts of star-forming gas. But for some reason, few massive stars form there, even though similar gas clouds elsewhere in the galaxy easily form massive stars. The clouds also form fewer stars overall. Are they a new type of molecular cloud?
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
The Sun's Identity Crisis Solved
The Sun's surface has unveiled a new secret: ultra fine magnetic "curtains" that create striking patterns of bright and dark stripes across the solar photosphere. Thanks to groundbreaking observations from the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, scientists have captured the sharpest ever images of these previously unseen structures, revealing magnetic field variations at scales as small as 20 kilometres.
Colliding Galaxies Tearing at Each Other with Gravity and Radiation
Astronomers recently used a pair of powerful telescopes to zero in on a cosmic battle going on some 11 billion light-years away from us. The combatants are a pair of galaxies charging at each other over and over again, at velocities upwards of 500 kilometers per second. According to one of the scientists studying the scene, one galaxy is cutting into the heart of the other with a blast of radiation.
NASA's Top 5 Technical Challenges Countdown: #1: Survive the Lunar Night
Now I know this sounds like a low-budget knockoff of Five Nights at Freddy's, but it's the real deal
Monday, June 9, 2025
The Nuclear Option: Europe's Plan for Faster Space Travel.
Whilst NASA funding has been slashed by the Trump administration with no allocation for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion or and Nuclear Electric Propulsion, scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) have been studying nuclear propulsion.
This Map of the Cosmic Web Reaches Back in Time
The COSMOS scientific collaboration has released the largest map of the Universe ever created. It contains almost 800,000 galaxies, some from the Universe's earliest times. The map challenges some of our ideas about the early Universe.
NASA's Top 5 Technical Challenges Countdown: #2: More Power
What we have now just…isn't going to cut it. Right now if you want power in space you essentially have two options: solar panels, and a kind of nuclear power called radioisotope thermoelectric generators.
Sunday, June 8, 2025
NASA's Top 5 Technical Challenges Countdown: #3: Better Computers
Computers have been involved in spaceflight since almost the very beginning. Just like on the Earth, computers aid in a variety of tasks, like navigation and communication. But unfortunately, space is really, really unkind to electronics.
NASA's Top 5 Technical Challenges Countdown: #4: Improved Navigation
But in space, like on the Moon or Mars, we have…none of that. Zero. No GPS satellites, no globe-spanning networks. Just radio broadcasts from command centers here on Earth to tell our robots and crews what to do.
Saturday, June 7, 2025
NASA's Top 5 Technical Challenges Countdown: #5: High-Powered Robotics
Space is hard. There's no doubt about that. It's completely unlike any environment we have ever faced on the Earth.
Friday, June 6, 2025
We Can Use Black Holes Particle Accelerators
The Large Hadron Collider has changed particle physics, and now scientists are dreaming up even bigger supercolliders. But humanity can't match the raw particle-colliding power of a supermassive black hole. In a new paper, researchers describe how supermassive black holes create a dense environment where particles are spinning at relativistic speeds and crashing into each other, releasing other particles that could be detectable on Earth.
ispace's Resilience Lander Proves the Moon is Still a Tough Customer
Japan's private space company ispace experienced another setback on Thursday 5th June when its Resilience lunar lander crashed into the surface of the Moon, marking the company's second consecutive failed landing attempt in just over two years.
Thursday, June 5, 2025
Astronomers Find a Hidden Planet Partly in the Habitable Zone of its Star
Astronomers have found another super-Earth. It's about 10 times more massive than Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star about 2475 light-years away. These massive Earth-like planets hold key information about how planets form and evolve.
Titan May be the Liveliest Place in the Solar System
Titan has no liquid water whatsoever on its surface. But it does have liquids. Seas, lakes, streams, rivers…of methane and ethane.
A Terrifying Simulation of a Black Hole Gobbling Up a Neutron Stars
Across the universe, some of the most dramatic events occur when a black hole meets a neutron star. A neutron star is the ultra-dense remains of a massive star that exploded—imagine all the mass of our Sun compressed into a sphere just a few tens of kilometres wide. When a black hole and neutron star spiral toward each other, the result is one of nature's most violent spectacles.
Is the Hubble Tension Starting to Go Away?
For years, scientists have been scratching their heads over the "Hubble Tension,” the mismatch between how fast the cosmos expanded in its youth versus how fast it's expanding today. But now, armed with the most precise data ever captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found the perceived gap is staring to narrow!I n fact, the expansion rate measured by Cepheid variables versus the cosmic background has overlapping error bars again. Will the tension mystery finally be resolved?
Wednesday, June 4, 2025
Webb Watches Haze Rise and Fall in Pluto's Atmosphere
When the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto and Charon in 2015, it revealed two amazingly complex worlds and an active atmosphere on Pluto. Those snapshots redefined our understanding of the system. Now, new observations using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) taken over the space of a week, show that Pluto's atmosphere is completely different from any other one in the Solar System.
What Life on Europa Needs
As the years go by the chances of Europa hosting life seem to keep going down. But it's not out of contention yet.
Tuesday, June 3, 2025
Did the Hubble Just Cancel the Milky Way-Andromeda Collision?
The idea that the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) will collide emerged after decades of observations by a host of astronomers. The Hubble played a decisive role in the determination during the early 2000s. It was a triumph of precision astronomy and space telescopes. Now, the Hubble has played an equally important role in cancelling the collision.
Reusable Chinese Rocket Soft-Lands in the Ocean in a New Test
Chinese rocket startup Space Epoch put on a show recently, with a demonstration test launch of their reusable Yanxinghe-1 rocket booster.
Monday, June 2, 2025
Future Telescopes Could Detect Life Managing their Planet Atmospheres
The challenge in the search for habitable worlds is clear. We need to be able to identify habitable worlds and distinguish between biotic and abiotic processes. Ideally, scientists would do this on entire populations of exoplanets rather than on a case-by-case basis. Exoplanets' natural thermostats might provide a way of doing this.
Missions to Mars with the Starship Could Only Take Three Months
In a recent paper, UCSB physicist Jack Kingdom identified a trajectory for a rapid transit (90 days) to Mars using SpaceX's Starship. This proposal offers an alternative to mission architectures that rely on nuclear propulsion to reduce transit times.
The Next Moon Landing Will Be in High-Definition
The grainy videos from the Apollo Moon landings are treasured historical artifacts. For many of us, that footage will be lodged in our minds until our final synaptic spark sputters out. But like all technology since the space race days, video technology has advanced enormously, and the next Moon landings will be captured in high-definition video. The ESA is so focused on getting it right that they're practicing filming lunar landings in a special studio that mimics the conditions on the lunar surface.