Space News & Blog Articles

China has achieved several impressive milestones in its space program in recent years. As part of their plan to build an outpost on the Moon that will compete with NASA's Artemis Program - the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) - they are busy developing a super-heavy launch system and a crew-capable spacecraft that will take taikonauts to the Moon by the end of the decade. That is the plan, at any rate, and recent tests indicate that they are on track to achieve that goal. On Wednesday, Feb. 11th, the China Manned Spaceflight Agency (CMSA) completed a major test of its Long March-10 rocket and the Mengzhou spacecraft.

Scientists have been making some incredible discoveries in space that are shedding new light on the origins of life. In addition to finding amino acids in asteroids, scientists have also found fatty acids found on Mars, sulfur-bearing molecules in interstellar space, and that peptides form spontaneously in space. Most recently, research based on data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found an abundance of small organic molecules in a nearby galaxy.

When you look at a volcano, you’re seeing the tip of a vastly more complicated system. The mountain itself is just the exit point for processes that have been happening deep underground, perhaps for millions of years. Magma doesn’t simply appear at the surface ready to erupt it rises, stalls, cools, changes, and evolves in underground chambers before finally breaking through.

Imagine a star that’s been shining steadily for decades, and then suddenly it dims to just 3% of its normal brightness. Not for a few days or weeks, but for more than nine months. That’s exactly what happened to ASASSN-24fw, a star sitting 3,200 light years away in the constellation Monoceros.

The universe was supposed to take its time building the largest structures in existence. Galaxy clusters, containing hundreds or thousands of individual galaxies bound together by gravity and immersed in enormous pools of superheated gas, should require billions of years to assemble. Standard models predict these monsters couldn’t possibly form in the universe’s early childhood.

Ten years ago, humanity detected its first gravitational wave. On 14 January 2025, we detected the clearest one yet and it’s teaching us new things about the fundamental laws governing our universe.

An annular eclipse crosses windswept remote Antarctica, heralding the first eclipse season of 2026.

The universe is a big place, and tracking down some of the more interesting parts of it is tricky. Some of the most interesting parts of it, at least from a physics perspective, are merging black holes, so scientists spend a lot of time trying to track those down. One of the most recent attempts to do so was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration. While they didn’t find any clear-cut evidence of continuous gravitational waves from merging black hole systems, they did manage to point out plenty of false alarms, and even disprove some myths about ones we thought actually existed.

Cosmic rays, or astroparticles, are a means through which astronomers can explore the Universe. These charged particles, which are mostly protons and the nuclei of atoms stripped of their electrons, travel through space at close to the speed of light. By tracing them back to their sources, scientists can learn more about the forces that have shaped the Solar System and the Milky Way galaxy at large. When cosmic rays reach Earth, most are deflected by Earth's magnetosphere, but some manage to penetrate our atmosphere and reach the surface.

In 2004, the ESA's Mars Express orbiter detected methane in Mars' atmosphere. This was followed in 2013 and 2014 when the Curiosity rover detected a methane spike and organic molecules while exploring the floor of the Gale Crater on Mars. Curiosity detected an even larger spike in 2019 while exploring an outcropping of layered bedrock, which is part of the larger formation known as "Teal Ridge." Since that time, scientists have looked for possible explanations for the sudden detections of this organic molecule, which generally favored non-biological processes.

Every so often (in geologic time) Earth's magnetic field does a flip. The north and south magnetic poles gradually trade places in a phenomenon called a geomagnetic reversal. Scientists long thought this happened every ten thousand years or so. However, new evidence from deep ocean cores show that at least two ancient reversals didn't follow that script. One took about 18,000 years to flip and the other took 70,000 years. Such lengthy time lapses could have seriously affected Earth's atmospheric chemistry, climate, and evolution of life forms during the Eocene period of geologic history.

Somewhere around the year 774 CE, the Sun erupted with extraordinary violence. High energy particles slammed into Earth’s atmosphere, triggering nuclear reactions that produced radioactive carbon-14. Trees across the planet absorbed this carbon and locked it into their wood, preserving a record of that ancient solar storm that scientists can still read today.

The atmospheres of exoplanets have been a focal point of the field lately, with the James Webb Space Telescope taking a look at as many as it can manage. But time on the world’s most powerful space telescope is valuable, and getting a complete picture of any such atmosphere is difficult without that significant time commitment. So a multidisciplinary team of researchers have come up with an alternative mission that is very specialized at capturing as much information as they can about exoplanet atmospheres, but also with a fraction of the budget of flagship missions like JWST. The mission, known as the EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope (EXCITE), has one feature the JWST doesn’t though - a gondola.

Astronomers want to collect as much data as possible using as many systems as possible. Sometimes that requires coordination between instruments. The teams that run the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the upcoming Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (Ariel) missions will have plenty of opportunity for that once both telescopes are online in the early 2030s. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from the Ariel-JWST Synergy Working Group details just how exactly the two systems can work together to better analyze exoplanets.

Four years ago, astronomers spotted a distant supermassive black hole swallowing an entire star. The star had wandered to close to the SMBH, and the black hole's powerful gravity prevented its escape. It was a tidal disruption event (TDE), and now, four years later, the energy output from the TDE is still rising.

It's finally happened: Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX, the company he founded in 2002 with the goal of creating the first self-sustaining city on Mars, will no longer be focusing on Mars. As he announced on Feb. 8th via X, the social media platform he acquired in 2023, the company will now focus on creating a self-sustaining city on the Moon. Musk cited several reasons for this pivot, including a shorter development timeline ("less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years"), faster transit times, and more regular launch windows.

Data from NASA’s long defunct Magellan radar-imaging mission to Venus has made the first indirect detection of a large lava tube (pyroduct) on the Western flank of our sister planet’s massive Nyx Mons shield volcano.

New sungrazing comet C/2026 A1 MAPS could put on a fine show in April… but it will have to survive a blazing close passage near the Sun first.

Sending a mission to the Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) is the most effective way of actually directly imaging a potentially habitable planet, as well as its atmosphere, and even possibly some of its cities. But, the SGL is somewhere around 650-900 AU away, making it almost 4 times farther than even Voyager 1 has traveled - and that’s the farthest anything human has made it so far. It will take Voyager 1 another 130+ years to reach the SGL, so obviously traditional propulsion methods won’t work to get any reasonably sized craft there in any reasonable timeframe. A new paper by an SGL mission’s most vocal proponent, Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, walks through the different types of propulsion methods that might eventually get us there - and it looks like we would have a lot of work to do if we plan to do it anytime soon.

Free-Floating Planets, or as they are more commonly known, Rogue Planets, wander interstellar space completely alone. Saying there might be a lot of them is a bit of an understatement. Recent estimates put the number of Rogue Planets at something equivalent to the number of stars in our galaxy. Some of them, undoubtedly, are accompanied by moons - and some of those might even be the size of Earth. A new paper, accepted for publication into the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and also available in pre-print on arXiv, by David Dahlbüdding of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and his co-authors, describes how some of those rogue exo-moons might even have liquid water on their surfaces.

Most evidence shows that supermassive black holes (SMBH) sit in the center of massive galaxies like ours. Their masses can be extraordinary; many billions of times more massive than the Sun. All that concentrated mass has a powerful effect on their surroundings.