Space News & Blog Articles

Here's one less thing to worry about — or to look forward to: NASA has ruled out any chance that an asteroid called 2024 YR4 will hit the moon in 2032. Last year, the uncertainty surrounding the space rock's orbital path held out a slight chance of impact, but fresh observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope confirm that it'll be a miss.

Back in February 2025, a SpaceX rocket that had delivered 22 Starlink satellites to orbit had a malfunction. It failed to execute a planned deorbit burn and drifted for 18 days in orbit before beginning an uncontrolled descent about 100km off the west coast of Ireland. Some parts of the rocket landed in Poland, and while they didn’t injure anybody, there was enough concern about the lack of communication that Poland dismissed the head of its space agency. But that wasn't the only lasting impact of this failure. A new paper from Robin Wing and her colleagues at the Leibniz Institute for Atmospheric Physics, published in Communications Earth & Environment ties that specific rocket reentry to a massive plume of pollution for the first time.

For about a century, scientists have known that the Universe is in a state of constant expansion. In honor of the scientists who definitively showed this, this expansion has come to be known as the Hubble Constant (or Hubble-Lemaitre Constant). Today, scientists use two main techniques to measure the rate of expansion: the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and the Cosmic Distance Ladder. The former relies on redshift measurements of the CMB, the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang, while the latter relies on parallax and redshift measurements using variable stars and supernovae (aka "standard candles").

When most people think of a supernova, they're thinking of a Type II core-collapse supernova. These are massive stars that have reached the end of their time on the main sequence. They've used up their supply of hydrogen and continue fusing heavier elements until the star can't support its own mass. The core collapses and they explode, outshining their entire host galaxy for months.

On April 8th, 2024, people across the world witnessed a solar eclipse, a relatively rare event in which the Moon occults (blocks out) light from the Sun. To capture this event, volunteers at 143 observatories across the U.S. trained their equipment on it as part of NASA's Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project. The images they took were groundbreaking and provided some of the most detailed images to date of the Sun's corona. After nearly two years of production and editing, the Eclipse Megamovie team has released the dataset from this project.