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 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.
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.
During the deployment of new space telescopes that are several critical steps each has to go through. Launch is probably the one most commonly thought of, another is “first light” of all of the instruments on the telescope. Ultimately, they’re responsible for the data the telescope is intended to collect - if they don’t work properly then the mission itself it a failure. Luckily, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) recently collected first light on its 10 primary instruments, and everything seems to be in working order, according to a press release from the Southwest Research Institute who was responsible for ensuring the delivery of all 10 instruments went off without a hitch.
Our middle-aged Solar System is mostly calm and stable, with fully-formed planets staying in their lanes while placidly orbiting the Sun. But it wasn't always this way. The Solar System had a tempestuous youth, full of collisions that shattered many bodies into tiny pieces. The debris-strewn main asteroid belt is evidence of this.
Do you know what time it is? It's an easy question, right? Just look at your phone or watch. But is that really the exact time? Oh, well, for that you can look to Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. It's what your phone clock is synced to, give or take, but you can get a more accurate measure of UTC with a device that can pick up the UTC radio time signal. Of course, UTC is only an agreed-upon standard that tries to stay in sync with Earth's rotation. It, in turn, is based upon International Atomic Time (TAI), which is a weighted average of 450 atomic clocks located all over the world.
Getting close to things is one way for scientists to collect better data about them. But that's been hard to do for the Sun, since getting close to it typically entails getting burnt to a crisp. Just ask Icarus. But if Icarus had survived his close encounter with the Sun, he might have been able to see massive magnetic “tadpoles” tens of thousands of kilometers wide reconnecting back down to the surface of our star. Or maybe not, because he had human eyes, not the exceptionally sensitive Wide-Field imagers the Parker Solar Probe used to look at the Sun while it made its closest ever pass to our closest star. A new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters from Angelos Vourlidas of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors describes what they say on humanity’s closest brush with the Sun so far.
Long before scientists discovered that other stars in the Universe host their own planetary systems, humanity had contemplated the existence of life beyond Earth. As our technology matured and we began monitoring the night sky in multiple wavelengths (i.e., radio waves), this curiosity became a genuine scientific pursuit. By the 1960s, a scientific field dedicated to the search for advanced life (similar to ours) emerged: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Since then, multiple SETI surveys have been conducted to search for potential signs of technological activity (aka. "technosignatures").
Astronomers may have just seen the first ever ‘superkilonova,’ a combination of a supernova and a kilonova. These are two very different kinds of stellar explosions, and if this discovery stands, it could change the way scientists understand stellar birth and death.
Nature sends us its signals in the form of light. Astrophysical phenomena emit light in all its forms, from harmless radio waves to deadly gamma-rays, and its up to us to build the facilities that can sense and dissect this light, and to understand the phenomena behind it all.
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