Space News & Blog Articles

A few years ago, astronomers discovered an exoplanet orbiting the white dwarf 1856+534 b. Now they've used the mighty JWST to do follow-up observations and made some exciting discoveries. It's definitely a planet and not a brown dwarf, with a temperature of 186 K (-87°C/-125°F) and about 6 times the mass of Jupiter. This makes it the coldest exoplanet ever detected, and it's orbiting in the "forbidden zone," which should have been engulfed during the red giant phase.

Magnetars are among the rarest - and weirdest - denizens of the galactic zoo. They have powerful magnetic fields and may be the source of fast radio bursts (FRBs). A team of astronomers led by European Space Agency researcher Ashley Chrimes recently used the Hubble Space Telescope to track one of these monsters called SGR 0501+4516 (SGR0501, for short, and SGR stands for Soft Gamma Repeater). It's whipping through the Milky Way at a rate that could be as high as 65 kilometers per second. The big challenge was to find its birthplace and figure out its origin.

Veteran creature artists Stephen Love and Rob Strange share the rigors of having zero vision and taking tumbles while playing retro robots.

NASA's pioneering Dragonfly mission has passed its critical design review, keeping it on track for a 2028 launch to the potentially life-hosting Saturn moon Titan.

File: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands at Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) ahead of the launch of the Starlink 12-21 mission. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

SpaceX is preparing to launch back-to-back Falcon 9 rockets on Sunday from both California and Florida. The Starlink 12-23 mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is set to follow the Starlink 11-9 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The Doctor may not realise it at first, but he's been to Planet 6767 before…

File: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands ready to launch the Starlink 7-14 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base. Image: SpaceX

SpaceX is preparing to launch back-to-back Falcon 9 rockets on Sunday from both California and Florida. Up first is the Starlink 11-9 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base with 27 Starlink V2 Mini satellites onboard.

On Episode 158 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik are joined by John Grunsfeld to talk about the Hubble Space Telescope on its 35th anniversary.

Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket stands at Space Launch Complex 2 West at Vandenberg Space Force Base ahead of the launch of the ‘Message in a Booster’ mission. Image: Trevor Mahlamann / Firefly Aerospace

A perfect storm of range restrictions and suboptimal weather seems to finally be clearing for Firefly Aerospace. After delaying the flight of their sixth Alpha rocket for more than a month, the company announced a new launch window, which opens on Sunday.

Celebrate International Dark Sky Week by tracking down 10 astronomy targets.

Firefly Aerospace's CEO Jason Kim says the company's successful Blue Ghost moon lander mission revealed 'so much that we didn't know' about the lunar surface.

Since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1992 astronomers have now found over 5,000 alien worlds around other stars. With the discoveries of exoplanets came an entirely new classification of worlds known as the super-Earth; terrestrial planets more massive than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Sadly we don’t have any such planets in our Solar System but a new report suggests planets like this are surprisingly common with at least as many as there are Neptune sized planets.

In a recent paper, a team of engineers from Purdue University describes how sandbox video games that offer players a high degree of freedom and creativity, like the popular Kerbal Space Program (KSP), could be used by space agencies to assist the early-mission development process.

Images of Mars never cease to amaze. This latest image of NASA’s Curiosity Rover captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the rover as a dark speck and the end of a long trail of tracks. It was rattling along at a speed of 0.16 km/h across the Gediz Vallis Channel and was headed towards a region that could have been formed by water billions of years ago. The weather on Mars won’t allow the tracks to persist though so they are likely to last for only a few months.

Multiple Democratic senators have expressed concern about the business relationship between Jared Isaacman, President Trump's pick for NASA administrator, and SpaceX chief Elon Musk.

DC Studios reveals a superb look at the making of "Superman" for Superman Day.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope and an array of other instruments, astronomers have probed supernova wreckage in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the galaxy next door.

Lately, there's been plenty of progress in 3D printing objects from the lunar regolith. We've reported on several projects that have attempted to do so, with varying degrees of success. However, most of them require some additive, such as a polymer or salt water, as a binding agent. Recently, a paper from Julien Garnier and their co-authors at the University of Toulouse attempted to make compression-hardened 3D-printed objects using nothing but the regolith itself.

How has the Hubble Telescope lasted so long? One of the astronauts who helped repair it explains.

After two years, Lego Star Wars helmets are back, and the AT-AT Driver might be our favorite yet.

There's no better word for this image of the Sun than Spectacular, which means something impressive, dramatic, or remarkable that creates a spectacle or visual impact. It comes from the Latin word spectaculum, which means a show, spectacle, or public exhibition. Ancient Romans would agree with the word choice if you could somehow show it to them.