Space News & Blog Articles

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How To Use Fusion To Get To Proxima Centauri's Potentially Habitable Exoplanet

Proxima Centauri b is the closest known exoplanet that could be in the habitable zone of its star. Therefore, it has garnered a lot of attention, including several missions designed to visit it and send back information. Unfortunately, due to technological constraints and the gigantic distances involved, most of those missions only weigh a few grams and require massive solar scales or pushing lasers to get anywhere near their target. But why let modern technological levels limit your imagination when there are so many other options, if still theoretical, options to send a larger mission to our nearest potentially habitable neighbor? That was the thought behind the Master’s Thesis of Amelie Lutz at Virginia Tech - she looked at the possibility of using fusion propulsion systems to send a few hundred kilogram probe to the system, and potentially even orbit it.

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Webb Refines the Bullet Cluster's Mass

One of the most iconic cosmic scenes in the Universe lies nearly 3.8 billion light-years away from us in the direction of the constellation Carina. This is where two massive clusters of galaxies have collided. The resulting combined galaxies and other material are now called the Bullet Cluster, after one of the two members that interacted over several billion years. It's one of the hottest-known galaxy clusters, thanks to clouds of gas that were heated by shockwaves during the event. Astronomers have observed this scene with several different telescopes in multiple wavelengths of light, including X-ray and infrared. Those observations and others show that the dark matter makes up the majority of the cluster's mass. Its gravitational effect distorts light from more distant objects and makes it an ideal gravitational lens.

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Reviving SETI with High-Energy Astronomy

What new methods can be developed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? This is what a recent white paper submitted to the 2025 NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) Request for Information (RFI) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the Breakthrough Listen project and Michigan State University discussed how high-energy astronomy could be used for identifying radio signals from an extraterrestrial technological civilization, also called technosignatures. This study has the potential to help SETI and other organizations develop novel techniques for finding intelligent life beyond Earth.

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Space Park Leicester and the ESA are Building a Lab that Could House Extraterrestrial Samples Someday

In the past fifteen years, five missions have returned samples of extraterrestrial material to Earth for analysis. These included missions that rendezvoused with Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), like the Hayabusa 1 and 2 and the OSIRIS-REx missions, and the Chang'e-5 and -6 missions, which brought back samples from the far side of the Moon. In the coming years, China plans to return samples from 469219 Kamoʻoalewa with its Tianwen-2 mission. With all the extraterrestrial materials being returned to Earth for analysis, one could argue that we are entering a "golden age of sample-return missions."

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Old Hubble Space Telescope Photos Unlock the Secret of a Rogue Planet

Astronomers have achieved a first in exoplanet hunting by using the Hubble Space Telescope images to investigate a mysterious event that could reveal the existence of a "rogue planet" drifting through space without a host star.

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Will YR4 Hit the Moon? We Won't Know Until 2028

Why we’ll have to wait a bit to say yay or nay on a 2024 YR4 lunar impact.

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If Dark Energy is Decreasing, is the Big Crunch Back on the Menu?

For generations, humans have gazed at the stars and wondered about the ultimate fate of the Universe. Will it expand forever into the cold emptiness, or meet a more dramatic end? A new study published by physicists from Cornell University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and other institutions suggests we may finally have an answer, and it's surprisingly specific.

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High-Speed Gas Clouds Fuel Star Formation in Depleted Galaxies

Galaxies have an overall internal motion called disk velocity. It's how gas, dust, and stars move around the galactic center. It's not a single value but a velocity profile that varies depending on distance from the center. When astronomers spot something in a galaxy that's not moving according to the disk velocity, it catches their attention. That's what happened with M83.

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Machine Learning is Surprisingly Good at Simulating the Universe

At the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan, the showdown between artificial intelligence and supercomputers has begun. It was here that Riken researchers, along with an international team of colleagues, used machine learning to enhance a simulation of galaxy evolution. The results were compared to direct numerical simulations, like those typically run on supercomputers, and AI won this round! In addition, this approach could shed light on the origins of the Milky Way and the elements essential to life as we know it.

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Peering Into a Starburst Galaxy With the JWST

When it comes to star formation, not all galaxies are the same. Some are quenched, meaning they've depleted their star forming gas and form very few new stars. Some, like the Milky Way, are typical and form stars at an average rate. But some are extremely active, and form stars so readily they're called starburst galaxies.

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A Star Detonated as a Supernova... Twice

All supernovae are massively energetic stellar explosions. The classic supernovae are massive stars that explode near the end of their lives, leaving behind either a neutron star or a black hole, and a remnant made of expanding gas and dust. But supernovae are not all the same. Some occur in binary systems, and they're called Type 1a supernovae. As it turns out, some of these Type 1a SNe can detonate twice.

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In the Search for Earth-like Worlds, We Should Probably Focus on Red Dwarfs

When astronomers first discovered exoplanets, they found massive ones orbiting large stars. The technology to detect smaller planets around low-mass, dim red dwarfs took time to develop. By the mid-2000s, HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) was specifically targeting M dwarfs and in 2009 discovered the least massive exoplanet at the time.

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Weather Satellites Can Even Study the Weather Over on Venus

In 2014 and 2016, the Himawari-8 and -9 satellites were launched into orbit. Owned and operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), these satellites monitor global weather patterns and atmospheric phenomena using their multispectral Advanced Himawari Imagers (AHIs). In a recent study, a team led by the University of Tokyo presented infrared images that capture changes in Venus' atmosphere, revealing unseen temperature patterns in its cloud tops. The results show that meteorological satellites can complement observations of Venus' atmosphere by robotic missions and ground-based telescopes.

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Inbound: Astronomers Discover Third Interstellar Object

Astronomy news always seems to break over coffee, on laptop startup. That was the case Wednesday morning, when word of a curious new object started flashing across the message boards.

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Tianwen-2 Looks Back at the Earth

China's Tianwen-2 probe continues on its journey to rendezvous with a Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) before heading to the Main Asteroid Belt. The second in China's interplanetary exploration program (which translates to "Questions to Heaven"), this mission will obtain samples from asteroid 469219 Kamoʻoalewa and return them to Earth. From there, China plans to send the probe to rendezvous with the Main Belt comet 311P/PANSTARRS to explore it using its 11 onboard instruments. Yesterday, the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) released images the probe took of Earth and the Moon.

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Titan is the Perfect Benchmark for Studying Exoplanet Atmospheres

The NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission explored Saturn and its moons from 2004 to 2017, providing the most detailed images and data on the system ever taken. This included Saturn's largest moon, Titan, which the probe examined closely during its many flybys, and with the deployment of the Huygens lander to its surface. The mission provided new insight into Titan's atmosphere, its methane cycle, and its rich prebiotic environment, and the organic chemistry taking place on its surface. Its findings even led to speculation about the possibility of life on Titan, possibly as methanogenic organisms living in its vast methane lakes.

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Mercury Joins the 4th of July Fireworks Show

July 2025 offers a fine chance to check Mercury off of your skywatcher’s life list.

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Menstrual Cups Tested in Space Flight Conditions for the First Time

Scientists have launched menstrual cups into space for the first time, testing whether these reusable devices can withstand the extreme conditions of space travel. The AstroCup mission represents a key step toward giving female astronauts sustainable menstrual health options during long duration missions to the Moon and Mars.

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Tracking Macroplastics Leeching Into Rivers from Space

Scientists have developed a new method to identify and map plastic waste in urban areas using satellite imagery, offering new hope for tracking pollution and improving waste management in cities worldwide. The team of researchers led by Elena Aguilar from the San Diego State University, discovered that common plastic materials have unique "fingerprints" when viewed through special infrared light sensors. Just as different materials reflect sunlight differently to our eyes, plastics reflect infrared light in distinctive patterns that satellites can detect. The WorldView-3 satellite, orbiting high above Earth, captures these invisible signatures with remarkable precision, down to areas as small as 4 meters across. This breakthrough could revolutionise how we monitor urban waste, particularly in areas where traditional ground based surveys are difficult or dangerous to conduct.

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A Spacecraft Carrying Human Remains and Cannabis Crashes into the Ocean

We've sent some pretty interesting payloads to space since the first satellite (Sputnik 1) launched on October 4th, 1957. As access to space has increased, thanks largely to the commercial space industry, so too have the types of payloads we are sending. Consider the Nyx capsule created by German aerospace startup The Exploration Company, which launched on June 23rd from the Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a Falcon-9 rocket as part of a rideshare mission (Transporter-14). The payload for this flight (dubbed "Mission Possible") included the ashes and DNA of more than 166 deceased people provided by Celestis, a Texas-based memorial spaceflight company.

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Galaxy Clusters Have Been Surrounded by High-Energy Particles for Almost Their Entire History

If you could see the Universe through a radio-wave "eye", you'd detect mini-halos of relativistic particles creating radio emissions around some galaxy clusters. Astronomers long figured those halos are relative "recent" happenings in the nearby Universe and didn't occur in the early epochs of cosmic history. That's all changed now that the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) radio observatory in Europe has revealed newborn galaxies in the early Universe already surrounded by a halo of particles. It's a rare look at what such clusters were like soon after they formed.

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