Space News & Blog Articles

An elusive meteor shower kicks off the skywatching year for 2026.

Size matters when it comes to telescopes. The bigger they are, the farther they can see. Prioritizing constructing large ones is therefore high on the priority list for many observational organizations. But doing so comes at a cost, and not just in terms of money. Finding a suitable site can be a challenge, and that has been particularly true for the effort to build a 30-meter telescope in the Northern hemisphere. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Francesco Coti Zelati of the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona and his co-authors, makes the argument for building it at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma in the Canary Islands.

For decades, scientists have observed the cosmos with radio antennas to visualize the dark, distant regions of the Universe. This includes the gas and dust of the interstellar medium (ISM), planet-forming disks, and objects that cannot be observed in visible light. In this field, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile stands out as one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes. Using its 66 parabolic antennas, ALMA observes the millimeter and submillimeter radiation emitted by cold molecular clouds from which new stars are born.

Hidden behind veils of interstellar dust lies Westerlund 1, the most massive, luminous, and nearby super star cluster in the Milky Way. Despite being a stellar powerhouse just 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Ara, it remains invisible to the naked eye. Yet this stellar congregation has just revealed something remarkable: it’s actively blowing an enormous bubble of gamma rays into the space beneath our galaxy’s disk.

Apollo astronauts discovered an unexpected enemy on the Moon. Fine dust, kicked up by their movements and attracted by static electricity, coated everything. It found its way through seals, scratched visors, and clung to suits despite vigorous brushing. Eugene Cernan described it as one of the most aggravating aspects of lunar operations. More than five decades later, as humanity prepares to return to the Moon with increasingly sophisticated equipment, solving the lunar dust problem has become critical.

When 3I/ATLAS swept past the Sun in late October 2025, it became only the third confirmed visitor from interstellar space ever detected. Unlike the mysterious ‘Oumuamua, which revealed almost nothing about itself during its brief flyby in 2017, or even 2I/Borisov which appeared in 2019, this latest interstellar traveler arrived with perfect timing for detailed study.