A Tether Covered in Solar Panels Could Boost the ISS’s Orbit

The ISS’s orbit is slowly decaying. While it might seem a permanent fixture in the sky, the orbiting space laboratory is only about 400 km above the planet. There might not be a lot of atmosphere at that altitude. However, there is still some, and interacting with that is gradually slowing the orbital speed of the station, decreasing its orbit, and, eventually, pulling it back to Earth. That is, if we didn’t do anything to stop it. Over the 25-year lifespan of the station, hundreds of tons of hydrazine rocket fuel have been carried to it to enable rocket-propelled orbital maneuvers to keep its orbit from decaying. But what if there was a better way – one that was self-powered, inexpensive, and didn’t require constant refueling?

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Habitable Worlds Could Have Formed Before the First Galaxies

This artist’s impression shows the planet K2-18b, it’s host star and an accompanying planet in this system. K2-18b is now the only super-Earth exoplanet known to host both water and temperatures that could support life. Could habitable worlds like this have formed before galaxies formed? Image Credit: ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

What came first, galaxies or planets? The answer has always been galaxies, but new research is changing that idea.

Could habitable planets really have formed before there were galaxies?

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Hubble Takes a 2.5 Gigapixel Image of Andromeda

This the largest photomosaic ever assembled from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, B. Williams (University of Washington)

The Andromeda galaxy is our closest galactic neighbour, barring dwarf galaxies that are gravitationally bound to the Milky Way. When conditions are right, we can see it with the naked eye, though it appears as a grey smudge. It’s the furthest object in the Universe that we can see without telescopic help.

The Hubble Space Telescope has created a massive 2.5-gigapixel panorama of Andromeda. It took 10 years and more than 1,000 orbits to capture all of the images.

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Black Holes are Spinning Faster Than Expected

A typical spiral galaxy grows by mergers and acquisitions. The central supermassive black holes in galaxies likely spent their early formative epochs feasting on a smooth diet of stars and gas. That history is reflected in their spin rates. AdobeStock image.
A typical spiral galaxy grows by mergers and acquisitions. The central supermassive black holes in galaxies likely spent their early formative epochs feasting on a smooth diet of stars and gas. That history is reflected in their spin rates. AdobeStock image.

There’s a Universe full of black holes out there, spinning merrily away—some fast, others more slowly. A recent survey of supermassive black holes reveals that their spin rates reveal something about their formation history.

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Webb Sees Light Echoes in a Supernova Remnant

Supernovae are one of the most useful events in all of astronomy. Scientists can directly measure their power, their spin, and their eventual fallout, whether that’s turning into a black hole or a neutron star in some cases or just a much smaller stellar remnant. One of these events happened around 350 years ago (or around 11,000 years ago from the star’s perspective) in the constellation Cassiopeia. The James Webb Space Telescope recently caught a glimpse of the aftereffects of the explosion, and it happened to shed light (literally) on a familiar area of study – interstellar gas.

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NASA is Building a Space Telescope to Observe Exoplanet Atmospheres

Artist's impression of the Pandora mission observing a transiting exoplanet. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab

The exoplanet census continues to grow. Currently, 5,819 exoplanets have been confirmed in 4,346 star systems, while thousands more await confirmation. The vast majority of these planets were detected in the past twenty years, owing to missions like the Kepler Space Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the venerable Hubble, the Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits (CoRoT) mission, and more. Thousands more are expected as the James Webb Space Telescope continues its mission and is joined by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST).

In the meantime, astronomers will soon have another advanced observatory to help search for potentially habitable exoplanets. It’s called Pandora, a small satellite that was selected in 2021 as part of NASA’s call for Pioneer mission concepts. This observatory is designed to study planets detected by other missions by studying these planets’ atmospheres of exoplanets and the activity of their host stars with long-duration multiwavelength observations. The mission is one step closer to launch with the completion of the spacecraft bus, which provides the structure, power, and other systems.

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New Glenn Reaches Orbit, but Doesn't Recover the Booster

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket launching on January 16th, 2025. Credit: Blue Origin

On Thursday, January 16th, at 02:03 AM EST, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket took off on its maiden flight from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This was a momentous event for the company, as the two-stage heavy-lift rocket has been in development for many years, features a partially reusable design, and is vital to Bezos’ plan of “building a road to space.” While the company failed to retrieve the first-stage booster during the flight test, the rocket made it to orbit and successfully deployed its payload -the Blue Ring Pathfinder – to orbit (which has since begun gathering data).

According to the most recent statement by Blue Origin, the second stage reached its final orbit following two successful burns of its two BE-3U engines. The successful launch of NG-1 means that Blue Origin can now launch payloads to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), a huge milestone for the commercial space company. “I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt,” said Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp in a company statement. “We knew landing our booster, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone.”  

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Astronomers are Watching a Newly Forming Super Star Cluster

An artist impression of young star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Massive and low-mass stars appear within nebulous gas within which they are born. Credit: NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/S.Dagnello

Six or seven billion years ago, most stars formed in super star clusters. That type of star formation has largely died out now. Astronomers know of two of these SSCs in the modern Milky Way and one in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and all three of them are millions of years old.

New JWST observations have found another SSC forming in the LMC, and it’s only 100,000 years old. What can astronomers learn from it?

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Sticks and Stones: The Molecular Clouds in the Heart of the Milky Way

Astronomers have created 3D maps of two giant molecular clouds in the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). What happens to them in such an extreme environment? Image Credit: Alboslani et al. 2025.

The Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) at the heart of the Milky Way holds a lot of gas. It contains about 60 million solar masses of molecular gas in complexes of giant molecular clouds (GMCs), structures where stars usually form. Because of the presence of Sag. A*, the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole (SMBH), the CMZ is an extreme environment. The gas in the CMZ is ten times more dense, turbulent, and heated than gas elsewhere in the galaxy.

How do star-forming GMCs behave in such an extreme environment?

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Review: Dwarf Lab’s New Dwarf 3 Smartscope

DwarfLab’s new Dwarf 3 smartscope packs a powerful punch in a small unit.

Dwarf 3
Dwarf Lab’s Dwarf 3 smartscope.

In the past decade, amateur astronomy has witnessed nothing short of a revolution, as smartscopes have come to the fore. In half a century of skywatching, we’ve used just about every iteration of GoTo system available, starting with the now almost prehistoric ‘push-and-point’ AstroMaster units of the 90s. Strange to think, these were the hot new thing for telescopes in the 90s… though you still often had to perform a visual spiral search to actually find the target.

We recently had a chance to put Dwarf Lab’s new Dwarf 3 smartscope through its paces, and were impressed with what we’ve seen thus far. The small telescope even has personality: my wife said it actually looked like Johnny 5 from the 80s movie Short Circuit on start up (!)

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