NASA has selected a concept study, led by physicist Paul Stankus, exploring whether a pair of spacecraft flying in tight formation could one day produce an actual image of an Earth like exoplanet's surface, oceans, continents and all. It's an early stage idea, backed by NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program, but if it ever came together, it would represent an extraordinary leap beyond simply detecting a distant world to genuinely seeing its face.
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A team of researchers have found a surprisingly simple way to boost the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. It’s surprisingly simple to, just point an ordinary thermal imaging camera at the mirrors themselves. The technique could improve LIGO's next upgrade by up to 31%, letting it detect neutron star collisions tens of millions of light years farther away, and is already being built into the design of its planned successor, Cosmic Explorer.
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A new study presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting suggests that solar storms may warm the Martian lower atmosphere, but only when they strike during a major Martian dust storm. The discovery was accidental, emerging from a search for a different effect entirely, and hints that the weather system on Mars may be more tangled and interconnected than scientists previously assumed.
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Confirming the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence via radio signals, also called technosignatures, is the cornerstone of radio astronomy. While humanity has been asking since time immemorial whether or not we’re alone in the universe, radio astronomers are at the frontlines trying to tirelessly answer this longstanding question. To accomplish this, they’ve traditionally focused on a specific radio frequency band called the “water hole”, which resides between 1.42 and 1.66 GHz. This is due to two water-forming molecules, hydrogen and hydroxyl, emitting these frequencies.
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When astronomers talk about directly imaging an exoplanet that is orbiting a far away star, the analogy they most commonly go with is trying to spot a fireflight next to a massive search light. An Earth-like exoplanet is incredibly dim - usually between 100 million and 10 billion times fainter than its host star. Understandably, that makes them very difficult to see. But a new paper from Hyunsoo Choi of Hanyang University in South Korea and his co-authors, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, describes a theoretical solution - use a mix of smart computer algorithms and quantum physics.
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Geostationary orbit (GEO) is arguably one of the most important orbital spaces we have. So it's critical that we keep it clear of debris that could destroy the valuable GPS, weather tracking, and communications satellites already in this orbit. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done; small pieces of debris at that altitude can slip past even our most sensitive sensors. But now, a new paper published in the Journal of Astronautical Sciences by James Blake and an international collaboration of researchers showcases how an advanced algorithm can help find tiny pieces of debris that would otherwise be missed by traditional surveys.
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A strong foundation is key for any building construction, and this doesn’t just apply to construction on Earth. As humanity slowly expands throughout the many worlds of our solar system, and possibly beyond, understanding the planetary surfaces is key to constructing long-lasting habitats beyond Earth. Thus, it’s only natural this venture begins with our own Moon, which is the target of a permanent lunar south pole base by NASA. While the Moon is covered by a thin layer of dust, also called regolith, it’s vital for engineers to know the thickness of this regolith to know the safest locations to construct future lunar habitats and buildings.
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Every year, thousands and thousands of satellites get launched into orbit around our planet. The result is an increasingly congested "space" above Earth populated by equipment that provides services to the surface. At the same time, these satellites affect ground-based astronomy research and create potential for damage when they eventually fall through Earth's atmosphere to the ground. In addition, near-Earth space hosts old rocket bodies and other materials left in space by past missions.
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A new study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) addresses the threat of debris in cislunar space, which could pose threats for future missions bound for the Moon.
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The National Radio Astronomy Observatory has completed a new survey with the updated Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico. It's called the VLASS, the Very Large Array Sky Survey, and it's the most detailed radio survey of the sky ever completed. The VLA used the power of its 28 movable dishes to complete the survey.
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Planetary debris disks around white dwarfs appear to be more plentiful than thought. That's because some white dwarfs are magnetic, and those magnetic fields create patches of metallic debris near the stars' poles, where it's more difficult to detect. This leads to an underestimation of debris, something new research is trying to correct.
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Astronomers want to know how universal the initial mass fraction (IMF) of galaxies is. To do they that, they need to discern binary stars in other galaxies, a difficult task. Researchers used the JWST to study the Small Magellanic Cloud and determine how many binary stars are there, since they can confuse measurements of the IMF.
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Sometimes, you have embark on a journey to appreciate home. The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission recently gave us just such a view of our homeworld and our large natural satellite, as seen from the spacecrafts’ temporary orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point.
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What happens when a black hole and a star meet in the middle of nowhere in a galaxy? It sounds like it could be a dramatic science fiction backdrop, with some hapless starship caught in the crunch. Actually, such encounters in real life are pretty rare. They happen maybe once every 100,000 years. But, when they do occur, the immense gravity of the supermassive black hole tears the star apart. It's an eerie-looking process. The star gets "spaghettified" — that is, pulled on one side by the black hole. That rips out a stream of gas from the star which eventually forms a disk around the black hole.
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Based on a new analysis of the Chang'e-6 lunar samples, scientists are again questioning the timing and intensity of the Late Heavy Bombardment period.
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The search for extrasolar rocky planets circling other stars is more than mere science. It offers researchers a chance to gain crucial insight into how our own planet functions.
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In recent years, the idea that galaxy mergers are responsible for quenching galaxies has grown in importance. This paradigm says that galaxies merge, their black holes form a powerful quasar, and that quasar stifles star formation. But new results from the IllustrisTNG simulations shows that this paradigm may not be accurate.
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Little Red Dots are among the most intriguing discoveries made to date by the infrared-sensitive James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). They are distant, small objects that appear red in the JWST observations and they've only been known since 2024. More than 300 of them have been found as part of JWST's infrared surveys of the early Universe.
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Where will you be on August 12th? Many an eclipse chaser and the ‘eclipse curious’ will make the journey to stand in the Moon’s shadow on that fast-approaching Wednesday date. This unique eclipse sees the pencil-thin shadow of our Moon curl around the Earth’s pole, before arcing across Greenland, Iceland and the Iberian peninsula towards a dramatic sunset over the western Mediterranean.
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Long before a human ever sets foot on the Red Planet, we already know how hard the environment is. Once one finally does, the only things protecting them from that harsh environment will be the infrastructure we’ve built up there, and the spacesuit that keeps that in a protective bubble. Unfortunately, modern space suits aren’t built with Martian gravity, which is 3/8ths of Earth’s, in mind. To prove that point, a team of NASA and industry engineers made a presentation at the 55th International Conference on Environmental Systems (ICES) that showed that the newest generation of spacesuits are simply too heavy to use on Mars.
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Jupiter’s moon, Io, is the most volcanically active planetary body in the solar system, boasting hundreds of active volcanoes spewing molten lava into space. This occurs from a process called tidal heating where Jupiter’s massive gravity constantly stretches and compresses the much smaller moon during the latter’s non-circular orbit. However, a lesser-known fact is that Io’s volcanic gases fuel Jupiter’s aurorae by traveling along Jupiter’s magnetic field lines, resulting in Jupiter’s bright aurorae observed by spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes. But what if this same phenomenon could be used to detect Io-like exomoons, also called exo-Ios, orbiting Jupiter-like exoplanets?
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The samples returned by the Chang'e-6 mission from the far side of the Moon reveal that the two hemispheres have had rather different experiences when it comes to space weather.
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Little Red Dots are one of the mysteries uncovered by the JWST. Astronomers have been trying to figure out what they are, and have come up with multiple possibilities. New research says they could be ancient Globular Clusters with supermassive stars in their centers.
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We’ve been covering the journey of the Habitable Worlds Observatory for some time now. Over the past few years, it's gone from a proposal to a relatively fleshed-out plan for how and what the next Great Observatory should do—in this case, look at and characterize potentially habitable exoplanets. Back in August 2024, NASA set up the HWO Technology Maturation Project Office (TMPO) to coordinate the technological and scientific development needed to make the mission a success. They recently released a comprehensive plan for the first steps of that process in pre-print form on arXiv, and it’s very clear on what needs to happen before the Mission Concept Review (MCR) at the end of the decade.
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A black hole merger is one of the Universe's most energetic and massive events. During such a collision, two black holes orbit closer and closer until they collide and become a much more massive black hole. The event also gives off radiation and, as it happens, gravitational waves. They help tell the story of the two objects involved in the collision.
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Scientists at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration have demonstrated how clouds in a sub-Neptune's atmosphere shape the interior structure of the planet.
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Through the Photonics-Enabled Exoplanet Spectroscopic System (PEEPSS) program, researchers are developing a technology that will assist NASA's planned Habitable World's Observatory (HWO).
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One of the challenges of searching for “technosignatures” (i.e. signs that intelligent life somewhere in the universe has created technology) is understanding what to look for. Technology is a very broad area, and different types would show up as different features. One of the most commonly cited is a Dyson sphere, which attempts to encapsulate a star and capture it’s outgoing light to produce energy. But while we’ve looked for the mid-infrared waste heat these structures would produce for decades, we haven’t found a definitive instance of one. According to a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Turkish high school student Sahin Torlakcik, that might be because we are looking for the wrong type of energy all together.
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Sub-Neptune exoplanets, exoplanets that are slightly smaller than Neptune, have been designated as the most common type of planet in the Milky Way Galaxy based on their vast discovery numbers, totaling almost 3,300 out of the more than 6,300 confirmed exoplanets to date. Despite these numbers, the characteristics of sub-Neptunes remain relatively unknown. This is primarily due to our own solar system not having its own sub-Neptune to use as an analog, along with their atmospheres being thick and hazy. As a result, this makes telescopic observations, even from powerful instruments like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, extremely difficult.
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Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They’re the sources of the strongest consistent gravitational fields, which allows us to test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to an extent that’s impossible with small objects. But we’re also reaching our limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eventually send a probe directly to a black hole to observe it up close. One of the most vocal of those authors is Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai - and he recently released a paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, about what it would take for us to send a gram-size probe to a nearby black hole.
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SpaceX's Starship super-rocket deployed operational next-generation Starlink satellites for the first time during its 13th flight test, which addressed snags that arose in the previous test.
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Researchers from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with international collaborators, carried out the first spatially resolved dual-frequency spectral study of the M87 black hole using observations obtained in 2018 with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA).
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In democracies, opinion polls are one of the most common ways to measure public and therefore political support for an issue. Because space exploration is still closely tied to the government policy and funding, public opinion can play an important role in shaping America’s space priorities. In May 2026, Global Strategy Group (GSG) surveyed 1,000 U.S. voters and found broad support for space exploration. The report, [The Next Frontier: Public Attitudes Towards Space and the Space Economy](https://globalstrategygroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/GSGs-The-Next-Fronter-Public-Attitudes-Toward-Space-and-the-Space-Economy.pdf), reveals an electorate that is enthusiastic about a future beyond Earth, but views it through a practical, Earth-focused lens.
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Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence has so far meant primarily focusing on one particular type of signal - and that signal has normally been based on what our own current cutting edge technology is. But what if that’s the wrong way to look for signs of an alien intelligence? What if a resource-conscious civilization decided it was too complicated to send femto-second lasers in high energy bursts out across the universe. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from researchers Dániel Apai, Chia-Lung Lin, and Kevin Wagner, suggest that might actually be what happens, and that we should start looking for long-duration pulsing interstellar beacons.
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Juno's Microwave Radiometer (MWR) was built peer deep down into Jupiter's massive atmosphere. But during the spacecraft's extended mission, it's been studying the Galilean moons. During two flybys of volcanic Io, the spacecraft its MWR to measure the heat flowing from deep within the moon.
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When we think of Mars as the “Red Planet”, the image that comes to mind is just that - a lot of red. That comes from the oxidization of the dust and rocks that cover the planet's surface, but there are some instances where the Red Planet still has a few visual tricks up its sleeve. One such trick was recently captured by the European Space Agency’s venerable Mars Express orbiter, which captured what seems to be a set of metallic waves inside a giant impact basin. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear they aren’t liquid metal or some sort of alien architecture, but a manifestation of Mars’ complex environment.
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Comets are known for providing breathtaking observations of their long and shiny tails when they travel too close to the Sun. This happens because comets are made of ice and primarily orbit far from the Sun, but as their icy core heats up it evaporates, resulting in the aforementioned breathtaking observations. But while evaporating comets make for great public photos, scientists who study comets are focused on these snowballs of gas and dust and how they are remnants of the origins of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
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The worlds of the Solar System offer up exciting and (so far) mostly pristine places for planetary scientists to study. As space missions continue to travel to Mars, Europa, asteroids, and other worlds, questions keep coming up about keeping them safe for continued exploration and observations.
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Combining over 20 years of archival data from Hubble with new data from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has found the first of the "missing" black holes.
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What do you call a Jupiter-like object that orbits the brown dwarf companion of a star? Is it a planet, a moon, or something new?
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The collapsing stars Eddington swore couldn't exist turned out to be everywhere, and half a century later the world handed Chandrasekhar his Nobel. How the 1.4 solar mass limit became one of the most important numbers in modern astronomy.
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Galaxies attract cold gas from the intergalactic medium and turn it into stars. But the JWST has found galaxies that aren't forming stars in the early Universe, long before they should've become quiescent. In at least one instance involving the Red Potato Galaxy, an AGN jet from a neighbouring galaxy is the likely culprit.
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Astronomers aren't certain where Fast Radio Bursts come from. But they still have utility. They can use them to find the Universe's "missing matter."
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The Milky Way has two disks, the thin disk where most of the stars dwell, and the thick disk, populated by much older stars. The ESA's Gaia mission showed us that the thick disk rotates more slowly than the thin disk. The culprit, according to powerful simulations, was a disk flip in the MW's past, driven by a merger.
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Driven from Europe by the feud, Chandrasekhar rebuilt his life in America and turned mastery-and-move-on into an art form. On his conviction that beautiful physics is true physics, and the two students he drove through blizzards to teach.
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Astronomers have conclusively identified a source of the highest energy cosmic ray protons in the Milky Way, solving a long standing puzzle near the star Altair. By combining gamma ray, radio, and X-ray data from three separate observatories, a Hiroshima University led team ruled out competing explanations and confirmed the object as a genuine “PeVatron”. These natural particle accelerators are far more powerful than anything humans have ever built and helps us in the hunt for similar sources across the Galaxy.
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Martian dust storms are some of the most fascinating and mysterious planetary surface processes ever observed, as Earth, Mars, and Saturn’s moon Titan are the only known planetary bodies to have active dust storms. However, the major difference for Mars is its dust storms can blanket the entire planet at once, resulting in the surface becoming completely unobservable and blocking out sunlight, with the scientific community concerned this might hinder robotic, and even human, space exploration. But what if covering the surface and blocking sunlight wasn’t the only issue Martian global dust storms pose for future missions?
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NASA's Psyche mission used a gravity assist maneuver at Mars to gain velocity and adjust its trajectory to its eventual target. The asteroid 16 Psyche is a metal-rich asteroid that may be the remnant rocky core of a protoplanet. The flyby not only shepherded the spacecraft on to its target, it was also an opportunity to test Psyche's science instruments and cameras. NASA has released a timelapse of the flyby.
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Spiral galaxies, including grand spirals like the Whirlpool galaxy, are plentiful. But it's still a mystery how their spiral arms form and persist for hundreds of millions of years, and why some galaxies have one, two, or three or more arms. New research based on Euclid data finds links between galaxy mass, star formation rate, and number of arms, and hints at their formation.
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Our ability to track and visualize small rocks in space is still improving. And occasionally we’ll find a space rock that will remind us of that fact. One such rock is detailed in a new paper, led by Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and recently published in Nature Astronomy, where the research team discovered what they thought was a normal, run of the mill asteroid, was actually a “dark comet”.
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