Space News & Blog Articles

At 06:25 p.m. EDT (03:25 p.m. PDT) on April 1st, the Artemis II mission lifted off from the historic Launch Pad-39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The four-person crew - consisting of Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), and mission specialists Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen - began the ten-day journey that would take them around the Moon and back to Earth. This mission is the first time astronauts will travel beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and will serve as a "dress rehearsal" for future missions to the lunar surface.

Astronomers have long argued that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding that holds galaxies together. Without its immense gravitational pull, the rotational spins of galaxies would force them to simply fly apart. But now, scientists have found a string of galaxies that seem to be missing their dark matter entirely. The latest in this string, known as NGC 1052-DF9, is described in a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Michael Keim, Pieter van Dokkum and their team from Yale. It lends credence to a radical theory of galaxy formation known as the “Bullet Dwarf” collision scenario, which has been a controversial idea for the last decade.

The early universe is absolutely so far outside our understanding of how the world works it's hard to describe in words. Back then, the cosmos wasn’t filled with stars and galaxies but with a boiling soup of quarks and gluons, with a few microscopic black holes thrown in, occasionally detonating like depth charges. That’s the early universe theorized by a new paper, available in pre-print from arXiv, from researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and MIT anyway.

It's not often that astronomers can observe huge changes in a galaxy's brightness over the course of a few years. Most galaxies change in brightness (and other characteristics) over millions or billions of years. So, when images of the 10-billion-light-year distant galaxy J0218-0036 showed that it dimmed down by a twentieth of its previous brightness in just 20 years, observers were surprised. What could cause it to do that? That's not "normal" for AGN.

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine looking at Earth from a distant star system, armed with a powerful telescope capable of capturing its reflected light. Could you tell the planet was alive? The answer, remarkably, might be yes and the clue would come from the colour of the plants.

The liver plays a vital role in human health, regulating metabolism and blood nutrient levels, filtering toxins, and synthesizing important proteins for blood clotting. It is also sensitive to changes in diet, behavior, and environmental factors, meaning it will also respond to changes in gravity. Despite considerable research into liver metabolism and function aboard the International Space Station (ISS), unanswered questions remain about how liver cells sense gravity and convert mechanical stress into metabolic responses.

As the number of exoplanet detections has breached 6,000 and continues to grow, scientists are finding a wide variety of different solar system architectures. Critical to understanding how these architectures take shape is finding young planets forming around very young stars. In 2025 a team of astronomers announced the discovery of a planet about 5 times more massive than Jupiter around a star that's very much a younger version of our Sun.

After more than thirty years of service, the International Space Station (ISS) is set to retire in 2030. To fill the vacuum this will create in terms of space science, research, innovation, and biological studies, multiple space agencies are planning successor stations. As addressed in the first installment, this includes NASA's Lunar Gateway, China's expansion of its Tiangong space station, India's proposed Bharatiya Antariksh Station (BAS), and Roscosmos' plans to recycle the modules that make up the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS) of the ISS.

NASA is serving up a double scoop of delicious Saturn imagery in two flavors — near-infrared and visible light. The subtle differences between the James Webb Space Telescope’s infrared view and the Hubble Space Telescope’s visible-light view can help scientists dig deeper into the workings of the ringed planet’s atmosphere.

We’re getting close to launch day for Dragonfly! Engineers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, have officially kicked off the integration and testing stage for the car-sized, nuclear-powered helicopter bound for Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. According to a press release for APL, after years of designing, tweaking, and testing individual components in laboratories and on computer simulations, various organizations have started testing actual hardware ahead of the mission’s planned 2028 launch.

This is a cool fact to impress your friends. The length of a day on Earth changes constantly, nudged by the Moon's gravitational pull, shifting winds in the atmosphere, and slow churning movements deep within the planet. It always has. Day length is, in a sense, a living measurement and one that ebbs and flows with the rhythms of a restless, dynamic world. But something new is happening.

When we think of asteroids, we almost immediately think of giant rocks bouncing around like the iconic chase scene in Empire Strikes Back, and we often hear how they are remnants from the birth of the solar system. While the asteroids that comprise the Main Asteroid Belt of our solar system are not only spread far apart from each other, they are also not all made of rock. One asteroid approximately the size of the State of Massachusetts called 16 Psyche is made of metal, which planetary scientists hypothesize could be the remnants of a protoplanet’s core that didn’t build into a full-fledged planet. But how did such a unique asteroid form?

NASA and the China National Space Agency (CNSA) plan to send astronauts to Mars as early as the next decade. Naturally, this ambitious goal requires a great deal of planning, research, and the anticipation and preparation for all potential challenges in advance. Among them, astronaut health and safety are paramount. In addition to the hazards associated with the long transit times - radiation and the effects of long periods in microgravity - there's the issue of Mars itself. Aside from exposure to elevated radiation levels, Martian gravity is about 38% of Earth's.

You just established a settlement on an Earth-like planetary body far from our solar system. You did your evening chores after eating dinner, and you want to go out for the evening view, which consists of two setting stars, reminiscent of the infamous scene in Star Wars. However, there’s one major difference: a large planetary body is in the sky. As you were aware before arriving, you’re on an exomoon orbiting a Saturn-sized exoplanet, both of which orbits two stars.

Binary stars are known to transfer mass to one another. In extreme cases, mass transfer can even cause a supernova explosion. That happens when a white dwarf draws matter from a companion.

There are some strange types of exoplanets out there with no counterparts in our Solar System. One of those types is super-puff planets. These oddballs have radii larger than Neptune, but only have a few Earth masses. This means they have large volumes and low density. How this peculiar type of exoplanet forms is unclear, and current models of gas giant formation can't account for them.

Space weather is a fascinating subject, but one we still have a lot to learn about. One of the main components of it is the active regions (ARs) of the Sun. These huge concentrations of magnetic fields show up throughout the Sun’s photosphere and are the primary source of solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). They can be simple pairings of magnetic flux or huge, magnetically complex tangles that spend weeks creating massive solar storms before dissipating. But tracking the longest lived of these ARs has been a headache for solar physicists, and a recent paper by Emily Mason and Kara Kniezewski, published in The Astrophysical Journal, both dives into this tracking problem and uncovers some interesting features of the Sun’s most persistent ARs.

Most objects that astronomers and astrophysicists study have existed for billions of years. Things like supermassive black holes, the Milky Way galaxy, even the Sun and the Earth predate humanity by billions of years.

In a recent statement, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that the federal government is investing $200 million towards Canada's first launch pad in Nova Scotia. The site is owned by Maritime Launch Services, a Canadian commercial space company founded in 2016 and headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This investment reflects the federal government's recently released Defense Industrial Strategy, issued by the Defense Industrial Agency (DIA). This document establishes aerospace and aerospace platforms as one of Canada's "key sovereign capabilities."

Some observations are the result of years of meticulous planning and cooperation between astronomers, different telescopes and observatories, and even different governments. Others are more serendipitous, and are little more than happy accidents. That's the case with the Hubble's recent observation of Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) as it fragmented.

In 1959, the Luna 2 probe from the Soviet Union became the very first human-made object to reach our closest celestial neighbor. In the decades since, we have been leaving footprints - both literally and figuratively - all over the Moon. Today, there are over 100 metric tons of human-made material resting on the Moon’s surface - everything from advanced cameras and sensors to literal human waste. But that’s nothing compared to what’s to come. NASA predicts the next decade will see over 100 new lunar missions, equaling or exceeding all the missions previously flown. Which brings up a pressing question about all the stuff that’s already there - how do we protect that history? A new paper by Teasel Muir-Harmony, the Curator of the Space History Department of the Smithsonian and Todd Mosher, a Scholar in Residence at University of Colorado, Boulder, reports on a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Summit on Outer Space Heritage that dives into the legal, scientific, and engineering hurdles of preserving these historic sites.