How a Meteorite Helps Explain Mercury's Chemical Makeup

By Carolyn Collins Petersen - April 29, 2026 09:45 PM UTC | Planetary Science
Mercury is one of the four rocky worlds of the Solar System, yet its chemistry is very different from Earth, Venus, and Mars. Missions to the planet show that it has an iron-poor, but sulfur- and magnesium-rich crust. Furthermore, it's known to planetary scientists as the most reduced planet in the Solar system. It means that the chemical makeup is dominated by sulfides, carbides, and silicides -- as opposed to oxides like we see here on Earth.
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Binary Stars Form Lots Of Exoplanets, But Many Of Them Are Ejected As Rogue Planets

By Evan Gough - April 29, 2026 08:26 PM UTC | Planetary Science
Binary stars are common, but for a long time astronomers have thought that exoplanets would have trouble forming around them. In recent years, powerful telescopes have detected about 50 of these planets. Now, new simulations show that their formation isn't actually rare, it's just that they tend to be on wide orbits, with few opportunities to observe transits. Also, many of them are ejected and become rogue planets.
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Is the Earliest Supermassive Black Hole Mystery Solved?

By Carolyn Collins Petersen - April 29, 2026 06:54 PM UTC | Black Holes
One of the most intriguing puzzles in cosmology is the existence of supermassive black holes that seem to appear very early in the history of the Universe. Astronomers keep finding them at times when, by all that they understand about the infant Universe, they shouldn't be there. The standard theory of black hole formation suggests that they shouldn't have had enough time to grow as massive as they appear to be. Yet, there they are, monster black holes with the mass of at least a billion suns. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a large population of them in early epochs, and they've been observed in very early quasars as well.
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ESA’s Proba 3 is Unlocking Secrets of the Solar Wind

By David Dickinson - April 29, 2026 05:53 PM UTC | Solar Astronomy
It has been a dream of astronomers and solar scientists for ages. A new mission gives solar researchers a powerful new tool in their arsenal: on-demand, total solar eclipses. Launched in 2024, The European Space Agency’s Proba-3 mission has proven the feasibility of a free-flying, space-based coronagraph. Now, first science results from the mission are giving us a view of the origin of space weather. The results were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Laser-Swarm Science at the Proxima Centauri System

By Evan Gough - April 29, 2026 05:14 PM UTC | Missions
The idea of sending a swarm of tiny laser-sail powered spacecraft to our nearest exoplanet won't go away. While complex and punctuated with tough problems, the idea is the only realistic way of reaching another solar system this century, according to researchers. But the scientific benefits would be huge.
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The Last Dance of a Dying Star

By Mark Thompson - April 29, 2026 04:49 PM UTC | Stars
Every star that has ever lived has been slowly spinning down, losing rotational energy across billions of years until, at the end, it collapses. But new research from Kyoto University has revealed that the story is far stranger than that. Some stars, in their final moments, don't slow down at all, they spin up and nobody predicted it.
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The Universe Builds Stars by the Book

By Mark Thompson - April 29, 2026 04:37 PM UTC | Stars
Stars are not born by chance. New research shows that the mass of a star cluster dictates exactly what kinds of stars it will produce from cool, dim dwarfs to blazing stellar giants ten times the mass of our Sun. It is a discovery that rewrites our understanding of how galaxies grow and evolve, and raises questions that astronomers will be grappling with for years to come.
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Your Brain Thinks It Knows Where It Is…. Even When It Doesn’t

By Mark Thompson - April 29, 2026 04:26 PM UTC | Space Exploration
Astronauts take time to adjust how firmly they grip and handle objects when moving between Earth and space, because the brain continues making predictions based on whichever gravitational environment it has most recently adapted to. Research from the Université catholique de Louvain reveals that this adjustment process works in both directions and sheds new light on how the brain anticipates and manages the risk of making mistakes.
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DESI Completes Its Epic 3D Map, Hinting that Dark Energy Might Be Changing

By Andy Tomaswick - April 29, 2026 02:22 PM UTC | Cosmology
On top of Kitt Peak in the Arizona Desert, a robotic surveyor just completed a five year mission to catalogue the positions of tens of millions of galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has now created the largest, most detailed 3D map of our universe ever constructed. And it’s not done yet, its main mission has been extended through 2028.
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Canada Proposes POET Mission to Hunt Earth-Sized Planets

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - April 29, 2026 06:50 AM UTC | Observing
Exoplanet science and the search for life beyond Earth continue to advance at break-neck speeds, with the number of confirmed exoplanets by NASA rapidly approaching 6,300, with 223 of those exoplanets being designated as terrestrial (rocky) exoplanets. With the promise of discovering an increasing number of Earth-sized exoplanets increasing every day, new telescopes from across the world have the opportunity to contribute to this incredible field.
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Designing In Situ Power Stations for Future Mars Missions

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - April 29, 2026 03:16 AM UTC | Space Exploration
You’re in the lab analyzing Martian regolith samples within your cozy Mars habitat serving on fifth human mission to Mars. The power within the habitat has been flowing flawlessly thanks to the MARS-MES (Mars Atmospheric Resource & Multimodal Energy System), including the general habitat lighting, science lab, sleeping quarters, exercise equipment, the virtual reality headsets the crew use for rest & relaxation, oxygen and fuel generation, and water. All this from converting the Martian atmosphere into workable electricity.
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The Sun's Impossible Floating Mountains

By Mark Thompson - April 28, 2026 11:32 PM UTC | Solar Astronomy
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research have produced the most detailed simulations ever of solar prominences. These vast clouds of cooler plasma suspended in the Sun's scorching outer atmosphere have often perplexed solar astronomers. Their research reveals that two separate processes work together to keep these structures alive, and could one day help us predict the violent eruptions that drive dangerous space weather here on Earth.
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Our Galaxy Has a Hot Side and Now We Know Why

By Mark Thompson - April 28, 2026 11:16 PM UTC | Milky Way
Our Galaxy's halo of hot gas is measurably warmer on one side than the other and a team of scientists have found the culprit. The gravitational pull of the Large Magellanic Cloud is drawing the Milky Way slowly southward, compressing the gas in its path and heating it up, much like a piston in an engine. The discovery solves a puzzle that has intrigued astronomers since the temperature difference was first detected in 2024.
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Astronomers Find the Edge of the Milky Way’s Star-Forming Disc

By Andy Tomaswick - April 28, 2026 04:17 PM UTC | Milky Way
Where exactly is the edge of the Milky Way? That question is harder to answer than one might expect. Since we’re inside of the galaxy itself, it’s obviously hard to judge the “edge” to begin with. But it gets even more complicated when defining what the edge even is - the galaxy simply gets less dense the farther away from the center it goes. A new paper by researchers originally at the University of Malta thinks they have an answer though. The “edge” can be defined as the star-forming region, and in their paper, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, they very clearly show that “edge” to be between 11.28 and 12.15 kiloparsecs (or about 40,000 light years) from the center.
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DECam's New Image of the Sombrero Galaxy: A Portrait of Ancient Mergers

By Evan Gough - April 28, 2026 03:26 PM UTC | Extragalactic
The 570 megapixel Dark Energy Camera captured this image of the iconic Sombrero Galaxy. The galaxy has characteristics of both elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies, and is likely the result of multiple mergers and cannibalizations of dwarf galaxies. A faint stellar stream, only fully traced a few years ago, is revealed by DECam's resolving power.
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Tough Fungi Could Survive the Trip to Mars

By Andy Tomaswick - April 28, 2026 02:03 PM UTC | Astrobiology
NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat - fungi.
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Could Light Alone Get Us to Another Star?

By Mark Thompson - April 28, 2026 09:43 AM UTC | Space Exploration
Using nothing but a laser beam, scientists at Texas A&M University have demonstrated that tiny engineered devices can be lifted and steered in three dimensions without any physical contact. This breakthrough could one day form the basis of a propulsion system capable of reaching our nearest neighbouring stars in decades rather than centuries.
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The Ancient Art That Could Transform Space Communication

By Mark Thompson - April 28, 2026 09:36 AM UTC | Space Exploration
Researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo have developed an origami inspired foldable antenna for CubeSat satellites that weighs just 64 grams yet in orbit, it deploys to two and a half times its stowed size. The antenna folds away neatly for launch and deploys automatically in space, achieving high gain communications performance from a package small enough to fit in your pocket and could one day support missions as far away as the Moon.
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Space Travel May Impact Human Fertility and Fertilization

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - April 28, 2026 04:35 AM UTC | Space Exploration
Space travel has taught us valuable lessons for living and working in outer space, specifically regarding how microgravity (often mistakenly called zero-gravity) impacts the human body during short- and long-term spaceflight. This includes decreased muscle and bone mass, fluid shifts, reduced heart rate, psychological health, compromised immune system, and radiation exposure. But with agencies like NASA aspiring to build a lunar base and establish a long-term presence on the Moon, and eventually Mars, how could space travel impact potentially having babies in space?
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Tiny Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxies Reflect The Conditions In The Early Universe

By Evan Gough - April 27, 2026 08:08 PM UTC | Milky Way
The Milky Way has a sizable retinue of dwarf galaxies, and they may hold important clues about conditions in the early Universe. However, they're difficult to observe because many of them are so faint. The tiniest ones are called Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, and a new simulation aimed at how they form is showing how these faint collections of stars and gas mirror the conditions of the early Universe.
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