Space News & Blog Articles

The International Space Station (ISS), which has been continuously occupied for 26 years, is approaching retirement. By 2030, all participating space agencies will bring their astronauts home for the last time, and the station will be maneuvered so it burns up in Earth's atmosphere. The legacy of this station is unmatched, and its successors (of which several are planned) will have extremely big shoes to fill. Nevertheless, there's no shortage of space programs and commercial interests looking to place new space stations in orbit.

The Milky Way could host billions of free-floating planets (FFP) according to some research estimates. Also called rogue planets, these worlds drift through interstellar space on their own trajectories, unbound to any star. Many of these worlds form around stars like other planets do, and so it's reasonable to think that they also have moons.

Every ounce counts when launching a rocket, which is why considerations for the Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) of every component matters so much. For decades, one of the heaviest and most power-hungry components on a spacecraft has been its optical and communications hardware - specifically the bulky mechanical mirror used for LiDAR and free-space laser communications. But a new paper, published in Nature by researchers at MIT, MITRE, and Sandia National Laboratories, might have just fundamentally changed the SWaP considerations of LiDAR systems. Their technology, which they’re called a “photonic ski-jump” could one day revolutionize how spacecraft communicate.

This is Part 3 of a series on topological defects. Read Parts 1 and 2.

One particularly well known fact about the Moon is that it doesn’t have much of a magnetosphere to speak of. There’s no blanket to protect it from the solar wind ravaging its surface, blowing away its atmosphere and charging the notoriously dangerous dust particles that make up its regolith. However, scientists have also known for around 60 years that some parts of the moon do experience sudden spikes in a magnetic field - some of which are up to 10 times stronger than the background magnetization. Since their discovery, these “lunar external magnetic enhancements” (LEMEs) have puzzled researchers - what was causing them, and why did they reach so high above the lunar surface that spacecraft could see them? A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by Shu-Hua Lai and her colleagues at the National Central University in Taiwan explains for the first time what is likely causing these LEMEs - a novel type of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.

Here is a problem that has been quietly gnawing at astronomers for decades. The standard approach to detecting life on other worlds involves scanning exoplanet atmospheres for oxygen, methane and ozone, whose presence is difficult to explain without biology. It's a clever idea, but it carries a hidden flaw. That entire shopping list was written by studying Earth. It is, inevitably, a search for life like us.

Our Sun is a middle aged, average star sitting in an unremarkable corner of the Milky Way. It fuses hydrogen into helium at its core, bathes its planets in light and heat, and has been doing so for around 4.6 billion years. Nothing about it immediately suggests a dramatic past. But look closer, and the questions start to stack up.

This is Part 2 of a series on topological defects. Read Part 1.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. In a fraction of a second, they can release more energy than the Sun will emit across its entire ten billion year lifetime. Most are over before you've had time to register them, gone in seconds, minutes at most. So when something arrived on 2 July 2025 that kept going for seven hours, fired three distinct bursts spread across an entire day, and then left behind an afterglow lasting months, astronomers knew immediately they were looking at something completely new.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft impacted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits the larger asteroid Didymos, in September 2022. The purpose of this mission was to test the kinetic impactor method, a potential strategy to alter the orbit of asteroids so they don't pose a threat to Earth. The test was a success, as images taken by the Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube (which traveled alongside the DART mission) after the impact showed. Combined with Earth-based observations, these confirmed that the moonlet's orbit changed noticeably.

This is Part 1 of a series on topological defects.

Picture a vast invisible doughnut wrapped around a planet, filled with electrons and protons hurtling around at extraordinary speeds. That's a radiation belt, and if your planet has a magnetic field strong enough to trap particles from the solar wind, chances are it has one.

To understand how stars form, astronomers need to watch the process play out in galaxies. That simple fact is behind PHANGS, the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS survey. It's a large-scale, multiwavelength, multitelescope survey of dozens of nearby spiral galaxies. Its targets are galaxies close enough that star-forming features like giant molecular clouds (GMCs), HII regions, and stellar clusters can be resolved.

This is Part 4 of a series on interstellar comets. Read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

In May 2024, people worldwide witnessed beautiful aurorae that appeared far beyond Earth's polar regions. Even the Aurora Borealis, which is usually confined to the Arctic Circle, was visible as far south as Mexico. This rare event was the result of a massive solar storm, the most powerful recorded in over 20 years. As always, this storm bombarded Earth with charged solar particles that interacted with the planet's magnetosphere. The storm also reached Mars, which was witnessed by two orbiters operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) - the Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO).

Astronomers have found an exoplanet that could serve as a benchmark in future studies. It's a rocky planet orbiting an M-type star, and though these planets are plentiful, this one could serve as a benchmark for understanding other M-dwarf exoplanets and their atmospheres. According to the authors of a new study, this new exoplanet could serve as "a reference system for highly irradiated rocky planets."

Neutron stars are the remnants of supernova explosions. They're known for their extreme density, and it's often said and written that a teaspoon of neutron star weighs as much as the combined weight of all of Earth's approximately 8 billion human beings. The only thing denser than a neutron star is a black hole.

This is Part 3 of a series on interstellar comets. Read Parts 1 and 2.

In its earliest moments, the Universe was hot and dense. A plasma sea of quarks and gluons out of which hydrogen, helium, and humans eventually formed. This early cosmic state is sometimes called the primordial soup, and thanks to new research, we now know just how fitting the term is.

Europa is not supposed to look the way it does. Jupiter's icy moon is scarred by a chaotic patchwork of fractured terrain, criss crossed ridges, and disrupted surface regions that suggest something dynamic is happening beneath its frozen shell. Scientists have long suspected that a vast liquid ocean, kept warm by the gravitational kneading of Jupiter's enormous gravity, lies hidden beneath that ice. Now, a new study using the James Webb Space Telescope is adding a crucial piece to the puzzle, and the implications reach right to the heart of astrobiology.

In addition to being a staple of science fiction, the concept of megastructures has long been the subject of serious scientific studies. As famed physicist Freeman Dyson originally proposed in 1960, "Malthusian pressures will ultimately drive an intelligent species" to occupy an "artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star." In short, he theorized that advanced civilizations would disassemble their planet (or planets) to create a structure (which has since come to be called a "Dyson Sphere" that would harness all the energy from their star and provide immense living space.