Space News & Blog Articles

Here's an observers' guide to the newly discovered Comet 2025 F2 (SWAN), which is visible in northern skies right now.

Space shuttle Discovery may be removed from the Smithsonian and put on display at Space Center Houston, if two senators from Texas get their way.

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Meet Aleš Svoboda— A skilled pilot with over 1500 flight hours, Aleš holds a PhD in aircraft and rocket technology and has commanded Quick Reaction Alerts. From flying high to training underwater, he’s always ready to take on new challenges—now including astronaut reserve training with ESA.

Astronomers have used space-based telescopes, including NASA's Swift X-ray observatory, to watch a monster black hole spring to life with powerful X-ray eruptions.

The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton is playing a crucial role in investigating the longest and most energetic bursts of X-rays seen from a newly awakened black hole. Watching this strange behaviour unfold in real time offers a unique opportunity to learn more about these powerful events and the mysterious behaviour of massive black holes.

Get a huge discount on a great beginner telescope in time for the upcoming Lyrid meteor shower, full moon and other night sky events.

The human perception of stars is that they are largely unchanging although of course in reality stars and their host galaxies do change over time, just very VERY slowly. When galaxies deplete their star forming materials, they traditionally become redder as short lived stars die while long lived dwarf stars persist for trillions of years. However, recent research challenges this understanding.

Image: This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image shows part of one of the world’s natural wonders – the Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea off the east coast of Queensland, Australia.

Random flashes of radiation in the sky are not all that unusual. A few years ago, once such flash was detected coming from a star that at the time, was believed to be from a star consuming a planet! The exact mechanism was unsure though for example; was it the star bloating up as a red giant and engulfing the planet or did the planet spiral in toward the star? The answer was until now, a little elusive. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope showed the environment around the star didn’t match a red giant so it must have been the planet crashing into the star!

The two most prominent satellite galaxies of the Milky Way are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. A team of astronomers have recently tracked the movements of 7,000 stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and found that many of them are being pulled away towards the Large Magellanic Cloud! It seems the SMC is being pulled apart, perhaps leading to its eventual destruction as the tidal forces strip away its stars!

For the first time since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963, a spacecraft will fly with only women aboard. Blue Origin’s all-female crew includes pop star Katy Perry.

A Falcon 9 rocket stands at pad 39A for its planned launch with 21 Starlink satellites. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.

SpaceX scrubbed the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket early Friday for undisclosed reasons. It had been scheduled to loft 21 satellites for the company’s Starlink network.

One of the things about astronomy that captivates me is that for every question we answer, we open up a whole bunch of other questions. Dark matter and dark energy are one such phenomenon that rather continues to confound us. There’s also the mystery of missing infrared light too but a team of astronomers think they may have found it! The team examined a region of sky using the Herschel Space Telescope and, by staking 141 images, found where individual dust-rich galaxies appeared blended together. The galaxies are absorbing starlight and re-emitting infrared radiation, and is this that may well account for the missing light.

China is getting ready to 3D-print bricks on the moon using lunar soil, in what could be a huge step toward building a base on the lunar surface.

Netflix's edgy animated anthology makes a provocative comeback on May 15.

NASA's Juno spacecraft went into safe mode twice on April 4, but everything's okay again.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit captured two amazing videos of the auroras from his unique perch above Earth last week.

The James Webb Space Telescope has revisited a star that swallowed a planet and found that instead of the star subsuming the planet, it was the planet that crashed into the star.

Exploring the Moon with Biologically-Inspired Subsurface Robots

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have, for the first time, directly detected the merger of star clusters at the heart of dwarf galaxies.

Alexander Skarsgård's rogue security unit will be unleashed on May 16, 2025, exclusively on Apple TV+.