Space News & Blog Articles

The James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) picture of the month shows Tau 042021 (left) and Oph 163131 (right), two protoplanetary disks located about 450 and 480 light-years from Earth in the constellations Taurus and Ophiuchus (respectively). These disks are composed of material left over from the formation of new stars, which coalesce into planetesimals that can eventually form a planetary system. The gas that remains is blown away by solar radiation while smaller objects (asteroids and iceteroids) settle into belts or follow the orbit of planets.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering have reached a milestone with the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment. Located deep underground at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Laboratory (SNOLAB) in Canada, the world's deepest underground laboratory, this experiment is designed to detect the Universe's unseen mass, aka. Dark Matter. The SuperCDMS team recently announced that they had successfully cooled the experiment to its operational temperature, hundreds of times colder than outer space.

If you thought the current crop of satellite megaconstellations was bad, you’re going to be horribly disappointed by new proposals from both SpaceX and a company called Reflect Orbital. Their combined plans would fundamentally alter the night sky as we know it, and the global astronomical community is sounding the alarm - most notably letters from the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) strongly opposing the plan, which currently sits with America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for approval.

Early April could be an exciting time for sky watchers, as two comets take center stage: R3 Pan-STARRS and sungrazer A1 MAPS.

Modern cosmology is built upon three theoretical pillars: special relativity, Newtonian gravity, and quantum mechanics. Each is supported by a wealth of experimental evidence, but each describes the physical world in a way that contradicts the other two.

With tomorrow’s launch of the Artemis II mission to the moon, NASA’s focus on our natural satellite is again gaining traction. To that end, two recent papers in the journals Earth and Space Science* and Icarus* point out how ordinary fiber optic technology could be deployed on the lunar surface to detect our ancient neighbor’s seismic activity.

The planet Venus is often called “Earth’s twin” due to the similar sizes, but the reality couldn’t be farther from the truth. Unlike Earth, which is hospitable to an estimated billions of lifeforms, Venus is not hospitable to life as we know it, at least on its surface. This is because the surface of Venus not only experiences an average temperature of 464 degrees Celsius (867 degrees Fahrenheit), but it also has crushing pressures approximately 92 times of Earth, or equivalent to approximately 1 kilometer (3,000 feet) below the ocean. These extreme surface conditions are why the longest spacecraft to survive on the Venusian surface is just over two hours.

The planet Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, and also the most difficult for spacecraft to visit and explore. This is because as spacecraft get closer to Mercury, the Sun’s enormous gravity pulls in the spacecraft, greatly increasing its speed and making it hard to slow down without large amounts of fuel. But what if a spacecraft could both travel to and explore Mercury without fuel? This could drastically reduce mission costs while delivering impactful science.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are making a growing contribution to astronomy. As powerful telescopes and large automated surveys become more commonplace, the vast quantities of data they generate demand equally powerful diagnostic tools. The Vera Rubin Observatory and its enormous data-generating capacity drive the point home. The observatory's Legacy Survey of Time and Space generates up to 20 terabytes of data each night, and that data is processed at a dedicated facility.

For some time, astronomers have theorized that there is a connection between planetary mass and rotation. In the Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn both rotate rapidly, completing a rotation in roughly ten hours, while accounting for a significant fraction of the Solar System's rotational energy. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai'i, a team of astronomers tested this predicted relationship by studying 32 gas giants and brown dwarfs in distant star systems - 6 giant planets larger than Jupiter and 25 brown dwarf companions

As our powerful infrared telescopes allow astronomers to peer further and further back in time, they've discovered some puzzling things. One of them concerns supermassive black holes (SMBH), the physics-challenging behemoths at the center of large galaxies like the Milky Way. As it turns out, SMBH grew much more rapidly at high redshifts than they do in the contemporary Universe.

We’re getting closer and closer to finding a real Earth-like exoplanet. But finding one is only half the battle. To truly know if we’re looking at an Earth analog somewhere else in the galaxy, we have to directly image it too. That’s a job for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a planned space-based telescope whose primary job is to do precisely that. But even capturing a picture and a planet and getting spectral readings of its atmospheric chemistry still isn’t enough, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv by Kaz Gary of Ohio State and their co-authors. HWO will need to figure out how much a planet weighs first.

In Dante's "Divine Comedy," Hell is described as an "Inferno" with nine concentric circles, the entrance of which has a sign that reads "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."For the planets of the Solar System, Venus is about as close to this description as one can get. On the surface, temperatures are hot enough to melt lead (464 °C; 872 °F), while the atmosphere is dense enough to crush a human skull (over 90 times Earth's atmospheric density). However, above the cloud deck, roughly 47-70 km (29–43 mi) above the surface, temperatures are stable, and the atmospheric pressure is roughly equivalent to Earth's.

The theory of Panspermia holds that life is spread through the cosmos via asteroids, comets, and other objects. When the building blocks of life emerge on one planet, impacts can eject surface material into space, which then carries these seeds to other worlds. For decades, scientists have debated whether this could have occurred between Earth and Mars (in both directions). However, the recent controversy over the possible existence of microbial life in Venus' dense clouds has sparked discussions of interplanetary transfers between Venus, Earth, and Mars.

On April 1st, 2026, the Artemis II mission launched from Earth, carrying its four-person crew on a journey that will take them around the Moon. Since then, mission control has performed the Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI), while the crew has been performing proximity operations, testing flight instruments, and troubleshooting the Orion's systems (including the zero-g toilet). They've also taken the time to snap some candid photos of Earth to show how far they've traveled.

The water locked up in the Permanently Shadowed Regions (PSRs) of the Moon’s south pole is a critical resource if we are ever going to get a permanent lunar presence off the ground. But while we know the water ice there exists, we don’t really know how much. We have to move from general estimates to mineable-scale prospecting data. That is what Oasis-1, the newly proposed lunar prospecting mission from Blue Origin that was recently introduced at the 2026 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) is meant to do.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, has been knocking it out of the park with small-body exploration missions for decades. They had historic successes with both Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, and they are going to visit the Martian Moons soon with the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. But after that, they are aiming for something much more pristine and arguably more difficult - a comet. The Next Generation Small-Body Return (NGSR) was recently described in a paper at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), and is under assessment as a large-class mission for the 2030s.

Star formation is a dramatic and complex process that erupts throughout the Universe. Yet, a lot of that action gets hidden by clouds of gas and dust. That's where observatories such as the James Webb Telescope JWST and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) come in handy. They use infrared light and radio waves respectively, to pierce the veil surrounding the process of starbirth.

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.