Space News & Blog Articles

Many stars die spectacularly when they explode as supernovae. During these violent explosions, they leave behind thick, chaotic clouds of debris shaped like cauliflowers. But supernova remnant Pa 30 looks nothing like that.

Four mice went to space as astronauts. One came back and became a mother. And that simple fact might matter more than you’d think for humanity’s future beyond Earth.

How did hot Jupiters end up orbiting so close to their stars, thus earning their moniker? This is what a recent study published in *The Astronomical Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers from The University of Tokyo investigated the orbital evolution of hot Jupiters ended, specifically regarding where their orbits started before orbiting so close to their stars. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.

Forty light years away, seven Earth sized planets orbit around a dim red dwarf star in one of the most tightly packed planetary systems ever discovered. The TRAPPIST-1 system has captivated astronomers since 2017, with three of its planets orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water might exist. But there’s been a lingering question whether any of these worlds could hold onto moons?

Researchers have been trying to look at interstellar object 3I/ATLAS from every conceivable angle. That includes very unconventional ones. Recently, while 3I/ATLAS passed out of view of the Earth, it moved into a great vantage point for one of our interplanetary probes. Europa Clipper, whose main mission is to explore Jupiter’s active moon, turned its gaze during its six year journey back towards the center of the solar system and observed 3I/ATLAS as it was reaching its perihelion, and out of sight from the Earth.

A few years ago, asteroid mining was all the rage. With the commercial space sector rapidly growing, the dream of commercializing space seemed almost imminent. Basically, the notion of having platforms and spacecraft that could rendezvous and mine Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), then return them to space-based foundries, was right up there with sending commercial crews to Mars. After a great deal of speculation and ventures going under, these plans were placed on the back burner until the technology matured and other milestones could be accomplished first.

Black holes are often referred to as cosmic vacuum cleaners, indiscriminately swallowing everything that strays too close. The bigger they are, the hungrier they should be. But observations of seven nearby galaxy mergers have revealed something strange: even when presented with gas clouds, supermassive black holes often ‘refuse to eat.’

Beneath the Moon’s cratered surface lie networks of lava tubes and deep pits, natural caves that could shelter future lunar bases from cosmic radiation and wild temperature swings. These underground structures represent some of the most scientifically valuable areas in the Solar System, but they come with the very real challenge of simply getting there!

A thousand light years from Earth, something enormous is happening. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed, a swirling mass of gas and dust that spans nearly 640 billion km. To put that in perspective, it’s 40 times wider than our entire Solar System, from the Sun to the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt where comets drift in the darkness.

At the end of their lives, most satellites fall to their death. Many of the smaller ones, including most of those going up as part of the “mega-constellations” currently under construction, are intended to burn up in the atmosphere. This Design for Demise (D4D) principle has unintended consequences, according to a paper by Antoinette Ott and Christophe Bonnal, both of whom work for MaiaSpace, a company designing reusable launch vehicles for the small satellite market.

The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), which launched back in May, was designed to explore the cosmos in optical and near-infrared light. Over its planned two-year mission, this observatory will observe the entire sky using a triple-mirror telescope and mercury-cadmium-telluride photodetector arrays, allowing it to gather data on more than 450 million galaxies, including the 100 million stars in the Milky Way, to explore the origins of the Universe.

Solar sails have some major advantages over traditional propulsion methods - most notably they don’t use any propellant. But, how exactly do they turn? In traditional sailing, a ship’s captain can simply adjust the angle of the sail itself to catch the wind at a different angle. But they also have the added advantage of a rudder, which doesn’t work when sailing on light. This has been a long-standing challenge, but a new paper available in pre-print from arXiv, by Gulzhan Aldan and Igor Bargatin at the University of Pennsylvania describes a new technique to turn solar sails - kirigami.

Even most rocket scientists would rather avoid hard math when they don’t have to do it. So when it comes to figuring out orbits in complex three-body systems, like those in Cis-lunar space, which is between the Earth and the Moon, they’d rather someone else do the work for them. Luckily, some scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seems to have a masochistic streak - or enough of an altruistic one that it overwhelmed the unpleasantness of doing the hard math - to come up with an open-source dataset and software package that maps out 1,000,000 cis-lunar orbits.

The coming year offers eclipses, occultations and much more.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was involved in yet another first discovery recently available in pre-print form on arXiv from Cicero Lu at the Gemini Observatory and his co-authors. This time, humanity’s most advanced space telescope found UV-fluorescent carbon monoxide in a protoplanetary debris disc for the first time ever. It also discovered some features of that disc that have considerable implications for planetary formation theory.

With the International Space Station (ISS) set to retire in 2030, several nations and commercial space companies have plans to deploy their own successor stations. This includes China, which plans to double the size of its Tiangong space station in the coming years, and the Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) proposed Bharatiya Antariksh Station (BAS), with the first module targeted for launch by 2028. Then you have private ventures like Blue Origin's Orbital Reef, Airbus' LOOP, the Axiom Station, Vast's Haven-1, and Starlab Space's station.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, may not have a subsurface ocean after all.

One of the primary goals of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to detect atmospheres around exoplanets, to try to suss out whether or not they could potentially support life. But, in order to do that, scientists have to know where to look, and the exoplanet has to actually have an atmosphere. While scientists know the location of about 6000 exoplanets currently, they also believe that many of them don’t have atmospheres and that, of the ones that do, many aren’t really Earth-sized. And of those, many are around stars that are too bright for our current crop of telescopes to see their atmosphere. All those restrictions mean, ultimately, even with 6000 potential candidates, the number of Earth-sized ones that we could find an atmosphere for is relatively small. So a new paper available on arXiv from Jonathan Barrientos of Cal Tech and his co-authors that describes five new exoplanets around M-dwarf stars - two of which may have an atmosphere - is big news for astrobiologists and exoplanet hunters alike.

In November 2025, the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS emerged from behind the Sun and began making its way towards the outer Solar System. This was a momentous occasion, as the comet was experiencing increased activity following its closest approach to the Sun and was once again visible to our telescopes and robotic space missions. One such mission is the European Space Agency's (ESA) JUpiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE), which captured the above image of 3I/ATLAS using its Navigation Camera (NavCam).

Engineers need good data to build lasting things. Even the designers of the Great Pyramids knew the limestone they used to build these massive structures would be steady when stacked on top of one another, even if they didn’t have tables of the compressive strength of those stones. But when attempting to build structures on other worlds, such as the Moon, engineers don’t yet know much about the local materials. Still, due to the costs of getting large amounts of materials off of Earth, they will need to learn to use those materials even for critical applications like a landing pad to support the landing / ascent of massive rockets used in re-supply operations. A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Shirley Dyke and her team at Purdue University describes how to build a lunar landing pad with just a minimal amount of prior knowledge of the material properties of the regolith used to build it.

One of the greatest mysteries the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was developed to investigate was the birth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). For more than twenty years, astronomers have puzzled over how these gravitational behemoths - weighing millions to billions of solar masses - could exist less than a billion years after the Big Bang. According to the most widely accepted cosmological models, massive black holes did not have enough time to form through the usual processes of black hole formation and mergers.