NASA's Psyche mission used a gravity assist maneuver at Mars to gain velocity and adjust its trajectory to its eventual target. The asteroid 16 Psyche is a metal-rich asteroid that may be the remnant rocky core of a protoplanet. The flyby not only shepherded the spacecraft on to its target, it was also an opportunity to test Psyche's science instruments and cameras. NASA has released a timelapse of the flyby.
Spiral galaxies, including grand spirals like the Whirlpool galaxy, are plentiful. But it's still a mystery how their spiral arms form and persist for hundreds of millions of years, and why some galaxies have one, two, or three or more arms. New research based on Euclid data finds links between galaxy mass, star formation rate, and number of arms, and hints at their formation.
Our ability to track and visualize small rocks in space is still improving. And occasionally we’ll find a space rock that will remind us of that fact. One such rock is detailed in a new paper, led by Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and recently published in Nature Astronomy, where the research team discovered what they thought was a normal, run of the mill asteroid, was actually a “dark comet”.
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Scientists have painted the most detailed portrait yet of the planetary system orbiting Barnard’s Star. Unfortunately, the picture is not encouraging, as all four planets appear to be "extremely uninhabitable."
Astronomers have found four new white dwarfs within about 65 light years. Even though the sky has been studied thoroughly, these escaped detection. That's because they're tight binaries with red dwarf partners, and the much brighter red dwarfs hide the white dwarfs. The binaries used to share common envelopes.
A Sun-like star orbits the supermassive black hole in our Milky Way so closely that it comes within the distance of Neptune's orbit of the Sun. It has a top speed of more than 8% of light speed. With such extreme motion the star gives astronomers the opportunity to test the limits of general relativity.
The story of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who as a teenager on an ocean voyage worked out that white dwarf stars have a maximum mass of 1.4 Suns. A tour of degeneracy pressure, the relativistic insight everyone else missed, and the number that would define his life.
Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky planet in another star's habitable zone for the very first time. It’s a milestone that brings us a step closer to answering whether life could exist beyond our Solar System. Predicted by a mathematical model before it was ever observed, and confirmed using a rare planetary alignment 48 light years away, this discovery does more than identify one intriguing world, it provides us with a whole new way to search for others like it.
Old rocks exposed on the rim of Jezero Crater preserve a roughly 4-billion-year-old cosmic “weather report” from the solar system’s most dynamic era.
Before Artemis astronauts land on the Moon’s surface in 2028, NASA will conduct the Artemis III demonstration mission in 2027, allowing teams on Earth and in orbit to practice rendezvous and docking operations between commercial human landing systems and the Orion spacecraft. Data from that mission, along with future uncrewed demonstration missions at the Moon,
The Submillimeter Array's (SMA) new semi-automated alert system demonstrates how the radio interferometer quickly responds to discoveries from space-based telescopes.
Finding microfossils of Earth’s oldest complex life is a bit like chasing an astrobiological rainbow. The eukaryotic pot of gold at rainbow’s end always seems just a bit out of reach.
The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) has a massive 570 megapixel camera, and its new image is of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud. Corona Australis is one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth. It's not as well-studied as the Orion Molecular Cloud or Ophiuchus, but as DECam's new iage of Corona Australis shows, it's just as fascinating.
An accelerating observer finds their empty vacuum glowing with real particles, a bizarre effect called Unruh radiation. It's a cousin to Hawking radiation, but with no black hole required, just a rocket and its throttle.
Space Telescope Maps Magnetic Fields of "Lighthouse" Pulsar kerryhensley45577 Mon, 07/13/2026 - 10:49 Space Telescope Maps Magnetic Fields of "Lighthouse" Pulsar https://science.nasa.gov/missions/ixpe/nasa-space-telescope-maps-magnetic-fields-of-lighthouse-pulsar/
The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently approved the first test launch of Reflect Orbital’s Eärendil-1 satellite. Sporting an 18 by 18 meter-wide reflector once unfurled, the satellite will test the ability to reflect sunlight back to Earth, on demand. The company envisions more than 50,000 reflectors girding the Earth in low Earth orbit by 2035, while many in the astronomical community have raised concerns on the project's impact.
Researchers utilized 30 years of Landsat satellite imagery to analyze the color and spectral signatures of Adélie penguin guano across Antarctica, marking the first time space-based observations have captured food-web and population dynamics at a continental scale.
A team of astronomers have discovered a third planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. The new planet, Beta Pictoris d, is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b — the first planet discovered in the same system — and is among the lightest exoplanets ever to be imaged from the ground. After spotting the planet using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), the team found it had been hiding in archive observations spanning more than a decade.
Move fast enough and the entire universe compresses into a searing, blueshifted cone of light aimed at your face. How relativistic aberration and the Doppler effect warp your view of the cosmos as you approach lightspeed.
After chasing a small asteroid across a billion kilometres of space, China's Tianwen-2 probe has finally caught up, closing to within twenty kilometres of its target and beginning detailed scientific study. What it uncovers next could help settle a genuinely intriguing question, whether this quiet companion of Earth is simply another asteroid, or a long lost piece of the Moon itself.
Astronomers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array (NSF VLA) have detected an extraordinary burst of radio light from a rare cosmic event in which an intermediate-mass black hole tears apart a star, revealing what appears to be the off-axis afterglow of a powerful jet.
Astronomers have measured the ages of over a hundred and fifty thousand ancient stars scattered across our Galaxy, and found the oldest of them is just the age it should be if the standard picture of the universe is correct. That simple agreement quietly undermines one of the leading attempts to explain a stubborn mystery, and hints that the real answer to the Hubble tension may lie somewhere else entirely.
AI is a powerful tool in scientific research. It can be used to find patterns in vast quantities of data. But it also generates false positives, as most of us know. This is an "Achilles Heel" according to researchers who tested a neural network's ability to detect life.
Engineers have just upgraded the software running a spacecraft 140 million kilometres away, then held their breath through two full reboots with an eight minute delay on every command. The prize for getting it right is a close up look at an asteroid humanity has already changed forever, and the answer to a question nobody has been able to answer since 2022, what did we actually do to it?
There are parts of the universe that are extremely hard to see, even for our most advanced telescopes. Gas and dust don’t emit any light, and are only visible by the light that they happen to block from stars and galaxies. Magnetic fields are even harder since regular light typically passes right through them. However, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv, by Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney and their co-authors, we’re currently commissioning a potentially game-changing new tool that could use a particularly violent astronomical phenomenon to provide new insight into these hard to see places.
Astrobiology has long been split into two camps: a search for "biosignatures" and a search for "intelligence." These look for very different things, but they also leave a huge gap in between. It took 3.5 billion years for us to go from the first microbe to a civilization that sent radio waves out into the cosmos. Detecting life in between those stages is a relatively untouched aspect of astrobiology—which is also the focal point of a new paper, "Signs and Signatures of Intelligence", available in pre-print on arXiv, by astrobiologist Julia DeMarines.
Buried a kilometre underground in Japan, one of the world's most sensitive detectors may have caught its first faint trace of a sound scientists have been straining to hear for decades, the combined whisper of every supernova that has ever exploded across the universe. It is not yet a confirmed discovery, but if it holds up, it could rewrite how we trace the life and death of stars.
Aside from an unknown quantity of water in the Moon’s permanently shaded polar craters, the lion’s share of what water the Moon may have is likely chemically bound in its deep interior.
On Friday, July 10th, China achieved a major milestone as its Long March-10B completed a its maiden test flight, which included the retrieval of its first stage booster.
Wally Funk, an aviation pioneer who was the oldest woman to launch into space, has died. She was 87.
The black hole at the centre of a nearby galaxy is growing exceptionally fast, and is producing a burst of radio emission that has never been observed before. With characteristics that are expected in the early Universe, this unique galaxy provides important insights into the processes that governed the growth of the first black holes.
When a massive star reaches the end of its life, it explodes as a supernova that can light up the sky for months. But some supernovae stay luminous for much longer, and astrophysicists have wondered what causes their extended brightness. New research points to binary stars, where one star expels material right before the explosion that creates a cocoon of circumstellar medium.
How do you capture the mood of the 1960s space race in a fictional universe where the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon? The production team for Apple TV's "Star City" series rose to the challenge.
Ptolemy and al-Sufi were keen ancient astronomers, one in Greece and one in Persia, whose observations were separated by almost a thousand years. They both noted that the star Theta Eridani was far brighter than it is today. Now we know why.
Astrophysicists working tirelessly to tackle the growing impact of satellite constellations have pioneered a new ultra-black coating as one possible way to mitigate the problem.
A five year survey by the South Pole Telescope has produced a catalogue of more than seven thousand galaxy clusters, some dating back nearly eight billion years, giving astronomers their most detailed map yet of the universe's largest structures. Hidden inside the data is something even the researchers did not expect, a discovery that is quietly reshaping how we think star formation unfolded across the history of the universe.
The Outer Space Treaty from 1967 prohibits weapons in space. But a satellite launched by Russia has generated suspicion. Despite claims that it's a normal satellite, some things about it suggest otherwise. New research proposes a way to detect atomic weapons in space, helping enforce the treaty.
A new result using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that the outer spiral arms in the Milky Way galaxy may reach wider than previously thought. This finding may lead astronomers to adjust their understanding of our home galaxy’s structure.
With its ability to observe the red-shifted light from early galaxies, the JWST has revealed some surprises. Many massive galaxies in the early Universe had ceased star formation and were already quenched hundreds of millions of years sooner than thought. By examining their morphology, new research shows that mergers that were previously hidden from view are responsible.
JAXA's Hayabusa 2 has completed its flyby of asteroid Torifune. The spacecraft came within about 800 meters of the asteroid's surface. Though the spacecraft is travelling very rapidly, making navigation challenging, it was still able to capture clear images of the asteroid's boulder-strewn surface. Based on ground-based observations, scientists suspected that Torifune was a contact binary asteroid, and these images confirm it.
Euclid is only 1.5 years into its Euclid Wide Survey and has found 31 new quasars from the Universe's first 800 million years. Though the Survey isn't specifically aimed at finding ancient quasars, it's proving to be remarkably effective at it. This large sample of quasars will help with the study of ancient galaxies and supermassive black holes.
Combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory with advanced image-processing techniques to produce the sharpest X-ray view yet of the relativistic jet from M87's supermassive black hole.
Mergers are a part of a galaxy's life in this Universe. Though clear signs of these mergers fade over hundreds of millions of years, evidence is still present, yet obscured, in the galaxies that experience them. The powerful JWST has made it possible to find this evidence, and it did so recently for Centaurus A.
 *System Concept of Operations for the HATCH concept. Credit: BLiSS team/NTRS*](https://www.universetoday.com/article_images/Screenshot_2026-07-04_at_18-23-20_UMich_BLiSS_XHab_LATCH_Final_Rpt_1.pdf_20260706_232357.png)
As part of NASA's Moon to Mars eXploration Systems and Habitation (M2M X-Hab) 2026 Academic Innovation Challenge, a University of Michigan team proposed an actuated, pressurized tunnel system that would save countless hours of work and preparation by connecting the astronaut's habitat with other surface elements.
Astronomers have discovered an extremely low-mass and dim dwarf galaxy around Andromeda. Called And 35, it's an Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy (UFDG) and so far, the researchers have detected only 46 of its stars. Lambda-CDM predicts that there should be many UFDGs around galaxies like Andromeda and the Milky Way, so finding more of them is important.
Where does the Solar System end and interstellar space begin? That's a question scientists have been working to answer using spacecraft traveling out beyond the Sun's influence. A team of researchers from the Southwest Research Institute led by Heather Elliott, is using the Solar Wind around Pluto instrument onboard New Horizons to track the solar wind in the outer reachers of the Solar System.
We’ve reported on all kinds of wacky ideas for capturing and deorbiting space debris safely. From electric tethers to lasers, engineers and scientists have been trying everything they can think of to deal with the ever-increasing orbital debris problem. But one simple design keeps popping up over and over again - a net. A new paper from researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China details one of the most advanced net concepts yet - but whether we can actually build one remains to be seen.
With new technologies come new opportunities. And that is especially true in astronomy - with every new advanced telescope we have the potential to see (or in some cases, listen) further and more clearly than we ever have before. That is certainly the case for the new Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which is currently undergoing a multi-year roll out phase. Despite that drawn out process, astronomers are already excited about its potential, and a new book chapter from Dr. Chenoa Tremblay and her co-authors details how this new technology could be used to answer one of the most fundamental questions - are we alone?
Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory, astronomers have taken a closer look at a nearby exoplanet and discovered it may be more Earth-like than previously thought.Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory, astronomers have taken a closer look at a nearby exoplanet and discovered it may be more Earth-like than previously thought.
An international team involving over ten institutions, with a strong participation from ESO and INAF, has characterised TOI-201 c, the transiting brown dwarf with the longest period for which mass has been measured. The study, published today in Nature, reveals a compact, coplanar system in which the presence of a massive, eccentric object redefines the stability boundaries for the inner planets
