Longest-period young transiting exoplanets discovered

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - June 01, 2026 05:34 AM UTC | Exoplanets
It’s 2234, you’re on your annual class field trip touring exoplanets, and your teacher informs everyone they can pick one more exoplanetary system to explore before heading back to Earth. You and your classmates are exhausted from the day’s activities and you’re hungry. However, you get really excited because you already know what everyone will want. You and your classmates all shout in unison, “The young and far away puffy ones!”
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Roman Telescope's massive infrared mirror is ready to fly

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - June 01, 2026 04:05 AM UTC | Telescopes
It’s June 2027, and you’re fresh off defending your PhD studying the direct imaging of exoplanets while starting your postdoctoral journey at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The trauma of eating ramen and living off a sub-living wage for the last five years of your life is still fresh in your brain. But you’re excited to finally get your real career started with funding you received for viewing time on the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman for short). You begin to download the first set of data as your eyes tear up knowing your entire journey in research and academia is about to be worth it.
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JWST Finds Methane Atmosphere on Temperate Exoplanet

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - June 01, 2026 01:08 AM UTC | Exoplanets
It’s 2165, and methane is in high demand, especially after the Titan Treaty of 2145 made it illegal to harvest methane from Saturn’s moon, Titan. But the advent of interstellar travel has made exoplanetary exploration far easier, enabling corporations to identify and harvest methane from exoplanets. However, it’s far cheaper and easier to harvest methane from exoplanets with reasonable (also called temperate) temperatures, because it means higher quantities of methane. The Exoplanet Exploration Corporation decides to send its first ship to one such exoplanet loaded with methane that could bring their quarterly financial statements back into the green.
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The Loudest Planet Wins

By Mark Thompson - May 31, 2026 10:17 PM UTC | Exoplanets
We are closer than ever to detecting signs of life on another world. The James Webb Space Telescope is already ‘sniffing’ alien atmospheres, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory is being built specifically to find biology beyond Earth. But a new paper raises an uncomfortable question; when we do find that first biosignature, will it actually tell us anything meaningful about life in the universe? The answer, it turns out, might be no.
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The Galaxy That Forgot to Spin

By Mark Thompson - May 31, 2026 07:35 PM UTC | Extragalactic
Every galaxy we know of spins. It's one of those rules of the universe so fundamental that astronomers barely think about it anymore. So when the James Webb Space Telescope pointed at one of the most massive galaxies in the early universe and found…well nothing. No spin, just stillness. They had to look twice.
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Did We Invent Dark Energy for Nothing?

By Mark Thompson - May 31, 2026 07:26 PM UTC | Cosmology
For nearly thirty years, dark energy has been cosmology's great get out of jail free card, the invisible, mysterious force we invented to explain why the universe is expanding faster than it should be. Now a team of mathematicians says we may never have needed it at all. And the implications are stranger than you might think.
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It Took a Cosmic Village to Shape Early Galaxies

By Carolyn Collins Petersen - May 31, 2026 05:20 PM UTC | Cosmology
An early galaxy cluster named after an Indian lake is teaching astronomers about influences on galaxy evolution in the infant Universe. Astronomer Ronaldo Laishram of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) used the Subaru Telescope’s wide-field camera, Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), to conduct a large sky survey to look for early galaxies with active star formation. The result was the discovery of a massive protocluster of galaxies that existed some 12.6 billion years ago, very early in cosmic time. Detailed study of this region could give new insight into how galaxies and their clusters form and evolve.
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Who You Send to the Moon Matters More Than You Think

By Mark Thompson - May 30, 2026 11:01 AM UTC
Building a permanent base on the Moon sounds like an engineering problem. Design the habitat, sort the power supply, figure out life support, and you're most of the way there. But the engineers who've spent time thinking hard about this will tell you the real challenge isn't the hardware — it's the humans inside it. Now researchers have built a virtual Moon base and run tens of thousands of simulated missions inside it, studying not the rocket engines or the radiation shielding, but the astronauts themselves. What they found could reshape how we plan humanity's return to the lunar surface.
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MAVEN Spacecraft Finds New Plasma Squeezing at Mars

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - May 30, 2026 12:32 AM UTC | Planetary Science
A cloaked alien invasion force is approaching Earth and coming up on Mars. The first officer looks through a viewfinder and says, “Captain, the fourth planet’s atmosphere is behaving strangely. As though it were trying to block incoming energy.” The captain takes a moment, then his (already big) eyes get wide and he exclaims, “It’s a defense shield! The Earthlings are hiding on the fourth planet and are prepared to attack us! Abort the invasion!” The first officer responds, “Aye aye, Captain!”
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The Sun is Changing and We Don’t Know Why

By Mark Thompson - May 29, 2026 04:46 PM UTC | Solar Astronomy
The Sun has a heartbeat. Every eleven years it swells with magnetic fury, hurling solar flares and charged particles into space, sparking auroral displays and threatening power grids, all before quietening down again. We've tracked this rhythm for centuries. But now, scientists listening to sound waves deep inside our local star have found something deeply unexpected, that heartbeat is changing. And nobody yet knows what it means.
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ESA Selects Two New Scout-Class Missions

By David Dickinson - May 29, 2026 12:48 PM UTC | Planetary Science
When it comes to understanding Earth and our changing environment, space is the place. Not only does it give us an overall holistic view of the planet below, but satellite-based imagery can transcend national boundaries and give us an understanding of key changes that often go unseen at ground level. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen two new missions to address key questions in Earth environmental science: Hibidis and SOVA-S.
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20,000 Eyes on the Universe

By Mark Thompson - May 29, 2026 09:27 AM UTC | Telescopes
We live in a golden age of astronomical imaging. Telescopes are capturing billions of galaxy images, painting the universe in breathtaking detail. But there's a problem, and it's a big one. A photograph tells you what something looks like but it doesn't tell you what it's made of, how fast it's moving, or how far away it really is. For that, you need spectroscopy. And right now, astronomy has a catastrophic imbalance, billions of images and nowhere near enough spectra to match them. A new telescope currently under construction in the mountains of western China is about to change that quite dramatically.
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The Flash Memory That Space Can't Destroy

By Mark Thompson - May 29, 2026 09:18 AM UTC | Space Exploration
Every byte of data a spacecraft collects, every image, every reading, every scientific measurement has to survive one of the most hostile environments imaginable. Space is awash with radiation, and that radiation is the silent enemy of conventional data storage. Now, a team of researchers have built a new kind of memory chip that doesn't just tolerate radiation, it laughs in its face. Using a quirk of physics called ferroelectricity, this technology can withstand radiation levels equivalent to 100 million X-rays, and it could transform how we store data on missions heading deeper into the Solar System than we've ever ventured before.
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We Can Now Weigh Galaxies Using Dead Stars As Scales

By Mark Thompson - May 29, 2026 09:08 AM UTC | Cosmology
Researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville have found a new way to measure the mass of neighbouring galaxies using pulsars. Using the universe's most precise natural clocks it’s possible to detect tiny gravitational disturbances rippling through the Milky Way. By analysing 54 millisecond pulsars, the team directly measured the gravitational pull of both the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, including their dark matter. The same technique could eventually map dark matter across the entire Galaxy bringing us closer to understanding what it actually is.
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Earthly Hors d'oeuvres For Hungry Red Dwarfs

By Evan Gough - May 28, 2026 09:46 PM UTC | Stars
We know that stars can engulf planets because stars that swell up to become red giants overwhelm any close-in planets. The Sun will do this to Venus, Mercury, and possibly Earth in a few billion years. But research shows that it can happen when low-mass stars first enter the main sequence. Lithium gives it away.
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