SpaceX Launches Starship But Passes Up Booster Catch for Safety's Sake

SpaceX sent its Starship on a flight that was meant to feature a first-ever retrieval of both rocket stages, but a launch-pad catch of the first-stage booster had to be canceled due to safety concerns.

LOFAR Takes the Deepest Image of the Low-Frequency Radio Sky to Date

Using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), an international team led by Leiden University has produced the sharpest and most sensitive radio image of the sky ever made at low radio frequencies.

Dense Galaxy Clusters Foster Mechanisms That Throttle Star Formation

The Cosmic Noon was when the Universe's Stelliferous Era Began, and star formation was prodigious during that epoch. But since then, star formation has slowed to a relative crawl, despite the fact that we can watch them forming in regions throughout the Milky Way. What happened to the hydrogen gas that forms stars? New research found clues in a particulary dense galaxy cluster.

Euclid's First Data Release: A Stepping Stone to its 3D Map of the Sky

The ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has released its first huge batch of data. It's all part of the telescope's mission to study dark energy and dark matter. The telescope is busy creating the largest ever 3D map of the Universe with its huge 600 megapixel camera, and new images give us some highlights.

A Brief-ish History of METI. Part III: The Legacy of Frank Drake & Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan and Frank Drake were pivotal to the development of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), as exemplified by the Pioneer Plaques and Voyager Golden Records.

Asteroid Bennu's Sample Delivers Another Surprise

Researchers compared the samples from asteroid Bennu with the Murchison meteorite and measured the amino acid β-alanine in both. Using new techniques, they were able to measure not only their isotopic compositions, but isotopic differences between individual atoms in the same molecule. The results show that some of the same pre-cursors to life formed in different conditions and positions in the protoplanetary disk.

Solving the Space Junk Crisis Isn't Just About Counting Trash—It’s About Control and Economics

If people ever think about cleaning up space debris, they typically think of something equivalent to a giant garbage truck in the sky, collecting lost astronaut tools and dead satellites then hauling them back down to Earth to be deposited in a landfill. But dealing with space debris doesn’t work that way, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who we typically cover for his work on the Solar Gravitational Lens idea, makes a good argument as to why.

Astrophysicists Want to Forecast When a Black Hole Launches Its Jets

Astrophysical jets are enormously powerful and energetic phenomena. Black holes launch them from their poles and they can extend enormous distances into space, disrupting star formation in adjacent regions. Astrophysicists want to be able to forecast when they're launched so they can understand theire extreme physics better. New research is making progress in understanding when they are triggered.

The Ice Giants' Magnetic Fields are Very Strange Compared to Earth's

Uranus and Neptune, the Solar System's ice giants, have interiors unlike the other planets. As a result, they also have magnetic fields unlike the others. They're messy and tilted, and Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to even flyby them, showed us how messy they are. New research uses models to try to understand what's going on with the pair of planets and their weird fields, and found that it's likely they change on very short timescales. They could already be much different than when Voyager 2 visited in the late 1980s.

Planets Don't Just Disappear, But They Can Wobble Out of Sight if Their Neighbour is Close Enough

TESS watched an exoplanet about 1,000 light years away as it repeatedly transited in front of its star for seven years. But astronomers were surprised to find that the hot Jupiter disappeared. Of course, planets don't just disappear. Something interrupted its transits from our point of view, and astronomers think they've figured out what happened. An unseen, nearby giant planet companion tugged on it until TESS couldn't see it anymore.

ALMA Reveals a Jet of Cool Gas from a Microquasar

There's a strange gamma-ray emitter in the Large Magellanic Cloud that has astronomers stumped about its source. It lies within the ashes left behind by a supernova that created a compact object that's part of the system. The supernova remnant provides some evidence for the emissions, but not the whole story.

Breakthrough cosmic hydrogen measurement could transform our view of the Universe

The MeerKLASS international collaboration achieves the first direct measurement of the large-scale clustering of cosmic hydrogen in the Universe.

An Artificial CORTEX to Guide Satellite Rescue Missions

Thousands of so-called zombie satellites orbit Earth in the critical Low-Earth Orbit regime. They're either inactive or have stopped alerting other satellites to their presence. Researchers are building a system called CORTEX that can guide a repair satellite to autonomously dock with these zombies.

A Common Food Emulsifier Could Solve One of Rocketry’s Oldest Fuel Problems

In propulsion system design, engineers have long faced a trade-off between solid and liquid rocket fuels. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and in an effort to try to min/max the efficacy of different types of fuel, researchers have long placed an emphasis on a hybrid between solids and liquids - in other words they’ve been working with gels. Unfortunately, gels have their own sets of problems to deal with. But a new paper published by Pranay Mudaliar and Jerin John of Concordia in the journal Langmuir uses an uncommon ingredient to elegantly solve some of those problems, but which is typically used in a completely different area of human activity - lecithin.

A Stellar Odd Couple at an Unusual Stage of Evolution

Millisecond pulsars are fascinating objects that serve as natural clocks in the Universe. They form by drawing material and angular momentum from a companion. This mass transfer can rapidly accelerate the companion's evolution to a white dwarf. Astronomers have detected a millisecond pulsar's white dwarf companion that appears to be observed just as the mass transfer completed. They can still see some of the debris.

Nearby Dwarf Galaxies Show Surprising Lack Of Oxygen, Says Paper

A new study of more than three dozen dwarf galaxies has surprised researchers with just how little oxygen they have been able to retain over cosmic time. The results reveal that we still have major gaps in our understanding of galaxy evolution.

Our Sun’s Undiscovered Stellar Nemesis Is Still Out There, Says Physicist

The decades old idea that our solar system’s Oort Cloud is continually perturbed by a heretofore undetected low mass Red Dwarf star remains the best explanation for periodicities found in Earth’s impact record. Or so says a well known physicist who has long championed this idea.

The ELT Can Probe Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies and Their Dark Matter Mysteries

Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies are strange because they're as large as the Milky Way, but have far fewer stars. It's as if they're puffed up for some reason. Determining what's going on with them could help confirm the Lambda-CDM model. A new proposed instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope could give astronomers their best look yet at these strange galaxies.

NASA's Twin Spacecraft Will Execute Powered Slingshot Maneuvers on Their Way to Mars

NASA's ESCAPADE mission features a pair of identical spacecraft on their way to Mars. They launched outside of the normal launch window, so they'll perform powered slingshot maneuvers to boost their speed. Once there, they'll "fly" in formation and study how the solar wind interacts with what remains of Mars ancient magnetosphere.

Earth's Gravity May Have Kept the Early Moon's Volcanic Heart Beating

We typically think of the Moon as a static, floating object that has remained the same for basically its entire lifetime, with an occasional asteroid impact serving as an exception. That understanding is grounded in physics - the Moon should have cooled rapidly after forming when a huge protoplanet hit the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. But, some lunar material returned from the Chang’e-5 mission was notably formed only around two billion years ago, yet appeared to be volcanic in origin. So how did a world that was supposed to have settled down without volcanism remain hot enough to create these materials more than two billion years after its violent birth? A new paper from Miao Chen of the Chengdu University of Technology and his colleagues, and recently published in the journal Planet, offers an explanation - tidal heating.