Space News & Blog Articles

New Space is a term now commonly used around the rocketry and satellite industries to indicate a new, speed focused model of development that takes its cue from the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and (hopefully don’t) break things.” Given that several of the founders of rocketry and satellite companies have a Silicon Valley background, that probably shouldn’t be a surprise, but the mindset has resulted in an exponential growth in the number of satellites in orbit, and also an exponential decrease in the cost of getting them to orbit. A new paper, recently published in pre-print form in arXiv from researchers at Schmidt Space and a variety of research institutes, lays out plans for the Lazuli Space Observatory, which hopes to apply that same mindset to flagship-level space observatory missions.

Bit by bit, scientists are piecing together Mars' climate history. Thanks to orbiters armed with powerful cameras and rovers carrying suites of scientific instruments, the red planet's history is becoming clearer year-by-year. In the past decade or so, evidence of Mars' ancient habitability is becoming more and more convincing.

Betelgeuse is the star that everybody can't wait to see blow up, preferably sooner than later. That's because it's a red supergiant on the verge of becoming a supernova and there hasn't been one explode this close in recorded human history. It's been changing its brightness and showing strange surface behavior, which is why astronomers track its activity closely. Are these changes due to its aging process? Do they mean it's about to blow up? Probably not.

Supernovae play a central role in the birth of new stars. They provide a rich source of gas and dust to form stellar nurseries, and their explosions can trigger shockwaves that trigger the birth of new stars. But it all depends on where supernovae occur. A supernova that happens within a dense cloud of gas will have a very different effect than one that occurs in a large void. Understanding these effects is a challenge. It is much easier to observe a supernova while it happens rather than long before or after. But a new radio study of the Andromeda Galaxy explores these interactions.

Warmer oceans are not good. Shallow, glib commentators might try to laugh it off, but their laughter reveals an infantile lack of seriousness in their thinking. Earth is one big, life-supporting system, and we know from the geological record that when the system falters, life pays the price.

It's a well-known fact that Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH) play a vital role in the evolution of galaxies. Their powerful gravity and the way it accelerates matter in its vicinity causes so much radiation to be released from the core region - aka. an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) - that it will periodically outshine all the stars in the disk combined. In addition, some SMBHs accelerate infalling dust and gas into jets that emanate from the poles, sending streams of super-heated material millions of light-years at close to the speed of light.

This is Part 4 in a series on the mathematical universe hypothesis. Check out Parts 1, 2, and 3.

Our Solar System, it turns out, is something of an oddball. While we have rocky planets close to the Sun and gas giants further out, most stars in the Milky Way harbour something entirely different. They are worlds between the sizes of Earth and Neptune and orbit closer to their stars than Mercury does to ours. These super Earths and sub Neptunes are the Galaxy’s most common planets, found around nearly every Sun like star ever have studied. Until now that is.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has discovered the fastest-spinning asteroid ever over 500 meters in size.

All across the Universe, black holes devour stars that stray too close. Often it's a supermassive black hole that tears a star apart in what's known as a tidal disruption event. But sometimes, it's a stellar mass black hole, and its victim is its binary star partner.

Stars are known for their stellar winds, streams of gas and charged particles from their upper atmospheres that collide with the interstellar medium. These winds can create bow shocks in the surrounding gas. But astronomers were surprised to find a bow shock near a white dwarf star, which are sometimes called dead stars or zombie stars.

Combining data from different telescopes is one of the best ways to get a fuller picture of far-off objects. Because telescopes such as Hubble (visible light), the James Webb Space Telescope (infrared), and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (radio) each collect data in different wavelengths, they are able to capture distinct features of objects like galaxies that other telescopes cannot observe. A new paper by a large group of authors, headed by Andreas Faisst of Caltech, presented at the American Astronomical Society Meeting last week and published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement tracks eighteen early galaxies in as broad of a spectrum as those instruments can collect, and most significantly found that they seem to “grow up” faster than expected.

On Jan. 8th, 2026, NASA announced its decision to return the SpaceX Crew-11 mission to Earth from the International Space Station earlier than originally planned. This unprecedented move came after one of the crew members reportedly experienced a health-related issue that required full medical services. While the crew member (who has not been identified for privacy reasons) was reported to be in stable condition, NASA will go ahead with the early return mission. According to the latest updates, the Crew-11 mission team will splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on Thursday, Jan.15th. at approximately 3:40 a.m. EST (Jan. 14th, 12:40 pm PST).

This is Part 3 in a series on the mathematical universe hypothesis. Check out Parts 1 and 2.

Scientists continue to push the boundaries of astronomy and cosmology, thanks to next-generation instruments that can see farther and clearer than ever before. Through these efforts, astronomers have observed some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. In turn, this has led to refined theories and timelines of galactic formation and evolution. In a recent study, a team of astronomers led by the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt) uncovered what could be the earliest barred spiral galaxy ever observed. This finding helps constrain the timeframe in which bars first emerged in the Universe.

This is Part 2 in a series on the mathematical universe hypothesis. Check out Part 1.

One of the best things about being able to see thousands of exoplanetary systems is that we’re able to track them in different stages of development. Scientists still have so many questions about how planets form, and comparing notes between systems of different ages is one way to answer them. A new paper recently published in Nature by John Livingston of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and his co-authors details one particularly interesting system, known as V1298, which is only around 30 million years old, and hosts an array of four “cotton candy” planets, which represent some of the earliest stages of planet formation yet seen.

Time again for a tale of things dark and mysterious. A tale of dark matter. It's a well-told tale, but this time it involves an interactive dance between dark matter and neutrinos.

This is Part 1 in a series on the mathematical universe hypothesis.

This is Part 4 in a series on the physics of free will. Check out Parts 1, 2, and 3.

The closest planet to the Sun is Mercury. It's a tiny world, even smaller than Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's moon Ganymede. That's unusual for a planetary system. Most star systems have a large world between the size of Earth and Neptune orbiting much closer than Mercury. A new study has figured out how these close-orbiting super-Earths form and clues about why they are so common.