Hunting for the Lunar Debris Hiding Near Earth

By Andy Tomaswick - February 10, 2026 12:35 PM UTC | Observing
The Moon has a long history of being smacked by large rocks. Its pock-marked, cratered surface is evidence of that. Scientists expect that, as part of those impacts, some debris would be scattered into space - and that we should be able to track it down. But so far, there have been startlingly few discoveries of these Lunar-origin Asteroids (LOAs) despite their theoretical abundance. A new paper from Yixuan Wu and their colleagues at Tsinghua University explains why - and how the Vera Rubin Observatory might help with finding them.
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How a Single Martian Storm Triggered Massive Water Loss

By Andy Tomaswick - February 10, 2026 11:09 AM UTC | Planetary Science
Mars’ water disappeared somewhere, but scientists have been disagreeing for years about where exactly it went. Data from rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity, along with orbiting satellites such as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ExoMars have shown that Mars used to be a wet world with an active hydrodynamic cycle. Obviously it isn’t anymore, but where did all the water go? A new paper that collects data from at least six different instruments on three different spacecraft provides some additional insight into that question - by showing that dust storms push water into the Red Planet’s atmosphere, where it is actively destroyed, all year round.
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Research Reveals Why Tatooine Planets are Rare

By Matthew Williams - February 10, 2026 12:48 AM UTC | Exoplanets
Why are planets rarely found orbiting a pair of stars? UC Berkeley and American University of Beirut physicists find that general relativity makes the orbit of a tight binary pair precess. As the orbit shrinks because of tidal effects, the precesion increases. Eventually the precession matches the orbital precession of any circumbinary planet, creating a resonance that makes the planet’s orbit wildly eccentric. The planet either gets expelled from the system or is engulfed by one of the stars.
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A Dense Clump Of Dark Matter, Not A Supermassive Black Hole, Could Reside In The Milky Way's Center.

By Evan Gough - February 09, 2026 07:37 PM UTC | Milky Way
There's been widespread agreement that a supermassive black hole resides in the Milky Way's Center. But that may not be true. Researchers say that a dense clump of fermionic dark matter can also explain the motions of stars and gas clouds in the region. Crucially, it can also explain the famous Event Horizon Telescope image of the SMBH.
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Using Foldable Structures To Guide Microwaves

By Andy Tomaswick - February 09, 2026 03:26 PM UTC | Space Exploration
Origami and space exploration might not seem like they have much in common, but the traditional paper-folding technique solves one massive problem for space exploration missions - volume. Satellites and probes that launch in rocket housings are constrained by very restrictive requirements about their physical size, and options for assembling larger structures in orbit are limited to say the least. Anything that can fold up like an origami structure and then expand out to reach a fully functional size is welcome in the space community, and a new paper published in Communications Engineering by Xin Ning of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and his lab describes a novel use case for the idea - electromagnetic waveguides.
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Decoding China’s New Space Philosophy

By Andy Tomaswick - February 09, 2026 02:23 PM UTC | Space Policy
A major theme in communist governments is the idea of central planning. Every five years, the central authorities in communist countries lay out their goals for the country over the course of the next five years, which can range from limiting infant mortality to increasing agricultural yield. China, the largest current polity ruled by communists, recently released its fifteenth five-year plan, which lays out its priorities for 2026-2030. This one, accompanied by a press release of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the country’s state-owned giant aerospace corporation, has plenty of ambitious goals for its space sector.
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An International Team Uncovers What Powers Auroras

By Matthew Williams - February 08, 2026 07:47 PM UTC | Planetary Science
A new study co-led by the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) reveals that plasma waves traveling along Earth’s magnetic field lines act like an invisible power source, fueling the stunning auroral displays we see in the sky.
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SpaceX Crew-12 will Study How Microgravity Affects the Human Body

By Matthew Williams - February 07, 2026 11:34 PM UTC | Missions
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission is preparing to launch for a long-duration science mission aboard the International Space Station. During the mission, select crew members will participate in human health studies focused on understanding how astronauts’ bodies adapt to the low-gravity environment of space, including a new study examining subtle changes in blood flow.
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The Collaboration that Brought you the First Image of a Black Hole Just Released Photos of its Massive Jet

By Matthew Williams - February 06, 2026 08:51 PM UTC | Black Holes
Recently published data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) of the galaxy Messier 87 facilitate new insights into the direct environment of the central supermassive black hole. Measured differences in the radio light on different spatial scales can be explained by the presence of an as of yet undetected jet at frequencies of 230 Gigahertz at spatial scales comparable to the size of the black hole. The most likely location of the jet base is determined through detailed modeling.
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The Dirty Afterlife of a Dead Satellite

By Andy Tomaswick - February 06, 2026 12:08 PM UTC | Space Policy
Sometimes humans get ahead of ourselves. We embark on grand engineering experiments without really understanding what the long-term implications of such projects are. Climate change itself it a perfect example of that - no one in the early industrial revolution realized that, more than 100 years later, the emissions from their combustion engines would increase the overall global temperature and risk millions of people's lives and livelihoods, let alone the impact it would have on the species we share the world with. According to a new release from the Salata Institute at Harvard, we seem to be going down the same blind path with a different engineering challenge in this century - satellite megaconstellations.
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Is There A Link Between Primordial Black Holes, Neutrinos, and Dark Matter?

By Evan Gough - February 05, 2026 08:24 PM UTC | Physics
In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with such a high amount of energy that it should have been impossible. In fact, there are no known sources anywhere in the universe capable of producing such energy—100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. However, a team of physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently hypothesized that something like this could happen when a special kind of black hole, called a "quasi-extremal primordial black hole," explodes.
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Review: Dwarf Lab's New Dwarf Mini Smart Telescope

By David Dickinson - February 05, 2026 03:29 PM UTC | Observing
Telescopes are getting smaller. It’s strange to think: smartscopes have been with us for over half a decade now. Since 2020, we’ve tested units from Vaonis, Unistellar and more. In a short time, these smartscopes have revolutionized amateur astronomy, putting deep-sky imaging within reach of causal users. Recently, we had a chance to put Dwarf Lab’s latest unit the Dwarf Mini through its paces.
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Turning Forgotten Telescope Data into New Discoveries

By Andy Tomaswick - February 05, 2026 12:14 PM UTC | Observing
Astronomers have been collecting data for generations, and the sad fact is that not all of it has yet been fully analyzed. There are still discoveries hiding in the dark recesses of data archives strewn throughout the astronomical world. Some of them are harder to access than others, such as actual physical plates containing star positions from more than a hundred years ago. But as more and more of this data is archived, astronomers also keep coming up with ever more impressive tools to analyze it. A recent paper from Cyril Tasse of the Paris Observatory and his co-authors, published recently in Nature Astronomy describes an algorithm that analyzes hundreds of thousands of previously unknown data points in radio telescope archives - and they found some interesting features in it.
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NASA's Artemis II Spacecraft on the Launch Pad

By Matthew Williams - February 05, 2026 03:08 AM UTC | Missions
NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which will carry the Artemis II crew around the Moon, sits at the launch pad on Jan. 17, 2026, after rollout. It rests atop the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. Orion can provide living space on missions for four astronauts for up to 21 days without docking to another spacecraft. Advances in technology […]
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Cosmic Collision: The JWST Found An Early 5-Galaxy Merger

By Evan Gough - February 04, 2026 06:46 PM UTC | Extragalactic
The JWST found a system of at least five interacting galaxies only 800 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery adds weight to the growing understanding that galaxies were interacting and shaping their surroundings far earlier than scientists thought. There's also evidence that the collision was redistributing heavy elements beyond the galaxies themselves.
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Neutron Scans Reveal Hidden Water in Famous Martian Meteorite

By Andy Tomaswick - February 04, 2026 12:15 PM UTC | Planetary Science
New tools unlock new discoveries in science. So when a new type of non-destructive technology becomes widely available, it's inevitable that planetary scientists will get their hands on it to test it on some meteorites. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Estrid Naver of the Technical University of Denmark and her co-authors, describes the use of two of those (relatively) new tools to one of the most famous meteorites in the world - NWA 7034 - also known as Black Beauty.
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Researchers Conduct the Largest Study of Runaway Stars in the Milky Way

By Matthew Williams - February 04, 2026 12:07 AM UTC | Milky Way
Researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), in collaboration with the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), have led the most extensive observational study to date of runaway massive stars, which includes an analysis of the rotation and binarity of these stars in our galaxy.
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Reading the Moon’s Diary, One Speck of Dust at a Time

By Andy Tomaswick - February 03, 2026 12:45 PM UTC | Planetary Science
Magnetism on the Moon has always been a bit confusing. Remote sensing probes have noted there is some magnetic signature, but far from the strong cocoon that surrounds Earth itself. Previous attempts to detect it in returned regolith samples blended together all of the rocks in those samples, leading to confusion about the source - whether they were caused by a strong inner dynamo in ages past, or by powerful asteroid impacts that magnetized the rocks they hit. A new study from Yibo Yang of Zhejiang University and Lin Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published recently in the journal Fundamental Research, shows that the right answer seems to be - a little of both.
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Hubble And The Fingerprints Of An Ancient Merger

By Evan Gough - February 02, 2026 05:13 PM UTC | Extragalactic
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. This “lens-shaped” galaxy sits in between more familiar spiral alaxies and elliptical galaxies in the galaxy classification scheme. The dark, dramatic dust lanes are the fingerprints of an ancient galaxy merger.
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For the First Time, Scientists Detect Molecule Critical to Life in Interstellar Space

By Matthew Williams - January 31, 2026 12:12 AM UTC | Astrobiology
For the first time, a complex, ring-shaped molecule containing 13 atoms—including sulfur—has been detected in interstellar space, based on laboratory measurements. The discovery closes a critical gap by linking simple chemistry in space with the complex organic building blocks found in comets and meteorites. This represents a major step toward explaining the cosmic origins of the chemistry of life.
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Cracks on Europa Sport Traces of Ammonia

By Carolyn Collins Petersen - January 31, 2026 12:07 AM UTC | Planetary Science
The search for life-supporting worlds in the Solar System includes the Jovian moon Europa. Yes, it's an iceberg of a world, but underneath its frozen exterior lies a deep, salty ocean and a nickel-iron core. It's heated by tidal flexing, and that puts pressure on the interior ocean, sending water and salts to the surface. As things turn out, there's also evidence of ammonia-bearing compounds on the surface. All these things combine to provide a fascinating look at Europa's geology and potential as a haven for life.
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Boron Could Be Astrobiology’s Unsung Hero

By Bruce Dorminey - January 30, 2026 04:25 PM UTC | Astrobiology
The light, rare element boron, better known as the primary component of borax, a longtime household cleaner, was almost mined to exhaustion in parts of the old American West. But boron could arguably be an unsung hero in cosmic astrobiology, although it's still not listed as one of the key elements needed for the onset of life.
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Perseverance Rover Discovers an Ancient Martian Beach, Complete with Waves

By Andy Tomaswick - January 30, 2026 03:06 PM UTC | Planetary Science
When the rover now named Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in early 2021, scientists already knew they had picked an interesting place to scope out. From space, they could see what looked like a bathtub ring around the crater, indicating there could once have been water there. But there was some debate about what exactly that meant, and it’s taken almost five years to settle it. A new paper from PhD student Alex Jones at Imperial College London and his co-authors has definitively settled the debate on the source of that feature - part of it was once a beach.
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A Laser Ruler for Sharper Black Hole Images

By Mark Thompson - January 30, 2026 08:34 AM UTC | Black Holes
Researchers at KAIST have developed a breakthrough technology that could dramatically improve our ability to image black holes and other distant objects. The team created an ultra precise reference signal system using optical frequency comb lasers to synchronise multiple radio telescopes with unprecedented accuracy. This laser based approach solves long standing problems with phase calibration that have plagued traditional electronic methods, particularly at higher observation frequencies.
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Venus Might Harbor Massive Subsurface Lava Tunnels

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - January 30, 2026 04:43 AM UTC | Planetary Science
It’s 2050 and you’re living on Venus. This might come as a surprise due to the planet’s crushing surface pressures (~92 times of Earth) and searing surface temperatures (~465 degrees Celsius/870 degrees Fahrenheit), which is equivalent to ~900 meters (3,000 feet) underwater and hot enough to melt lead, respectively. But you’re not living on the surface. Instead, you’re safe and sound inside a lava tube habitat scanning data from the latest orbiter images while sipping on some habitat-made espresso.
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A New Theory for What Really Powers a Flare

By Andy Tomaswick - January 30, 2026 03:29 AM UTC | Solar Astronomy
Solar flares are one of the most closely watched processes in solar physics. Partly that’s because they can prove hazardous both to life and equipment around Earth, and in extreme cases even on it. But also, it’s because of how interestingly complex they are. A new paper from Pradeep Chitta of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and his co-authors, available in the latest edition of Astronomy & Astrophysics, uses data collected by ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft to watch the formation process of a massive solar flare. They discovered the traditional model used to describe how solar flares form isn’t accurate, and they are better thought of as being caused by miniaturized “magnetic avalanches.”
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The Star That Wasn't Dying After All

By Mark Thompson - January 29, 2026 10:06 PM UTC | Stars
Astronomers have solved a bit of a mystery that had them questioning whether one of the most extreme stars ever observed was about to explode. WOH G64, a massive red supergiant in the Large Magellanic Cloud, began behaving so strangely that researchers suspected it had evolved into a rare yellow hypergiant on the brink of supernova. But new observations from the Southern African Large Telescope reveal the star is still very much a red supergiant, yet still exhibiting strange behaviour.
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NASA Fires Up Nuclear Future for Deep Space Travel

By Mark Thompson - January 29, 2026 10:01 PM UTC | Space Exploration
NASA has completed its first major testing of nuclear reactor hardware for spacecraft propulsion in over 50 years, marking a crucial step toward faster, more capable deep space missions. Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center conducted more than 100 ‘cold flow’ tests on a full scale reactor engineering development unit throughout 2025, gathering vital data on how propellant flows through the system under various conditions.
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Finding A Frozen Earth In Old Data

By Evan Gough - January 29, 2026 08:23 PM UTC | Exoplanets
Finding Earth-like planets is the primary driver of exoplanet searches because as far as we know, they're the ones most likely to be habitable. Astronomers sifting through data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope have found a remarkably Earth-like planet, but with one critical difference: it's as cold as Mars.
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The Milky Way's Center is a Difficult Target, But It Can't Deter the Roman Telescope

By Evan Gough - January 29, 2026 04:59 PM UTC | Milky Way
The Milky Way's Galactic Center and Bulge are shrouded in thick dust and tightly-packed with stars. It's a tough region to observe, but the Nancy Gracy Roman Space Telescope is built for the task. Its Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will find more than 100,000 exoplanets, along with stars, black holes, neutron stars, and even rogue planets.
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What’s Really Going On Inside Jupiter? New Models Offer Clues

By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - January 29, 2026 04:04 AM UTC | Planetary Science
Jupiter’s atmosphere and clouds have mesmerized stargazers for centuries, as their multi-colored, swirling layers can easily be viewed from powerful telescopes on Earth. However, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has upped the ante regarding our understanding of Jupiter’s atmospheric features, having revealed them in breathtaking detail. This includes images of massive lightning storms, clouds swallowing clouds, polar vortices, and powerful jet streams. Yet, despite its beauty and wonder, scientists are still puzzled about the processes occurring deep inside Jupiter’s atmosphere that result in these incredible features.
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Dark Energy Survey Data Reveals the Tightest Estimates Yet on Cosmic Expansion

By Matthew Williams - January 29, 2026 12:19 AM UTC | Cosmology
The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration collected information on hundreds of millions of galaxies across the Universe using the U.S. Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera, mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at CTIO, a Program of NSF NOIRLab. Their completed analysis combines all six years of data for the first time and yields constraints on the Universe's expansion history that are twice as tight as past analyses.
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Chile's Paranal Observatory Saved from Industrial Development

By Mark Thompson - January 28, 2026 09:33 PM UTC | Telescopes
After months of protests led by Nobel laureate Reinhard Genzel, the American energy company AES Andes has abandoned plans to build a massive solar and wind facility just kilometres from one of the world's premier telescope sites. The decision preserves the pristine night skies above Chile's Paranal Observatory, where the European Southern Observatory operates some of humanity's most powerful eyes on the universe.
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