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AI tool observes solar active regions to advance warnings of space weather

New research by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF-NCAR) has developed a new tool providing a first step toward the ability to forecast space weather weeks in advance, instead of just hours. This advance warning could allow agencies and industries to mitigate impacts to GPS, power […]

Why some objects in space look like snowmen: Gravitational collapse may shed light on contact binaries

Astronomers have long debated why so many icy objects in the outer solar system look like snowmen. Michigan State University researchers now have evidence of the surprisingly simple process that could be responsible for their creation.

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NASA conducts second rocket fueling test that will decide when Artemis astronauts head to the moon

NASA took another crack at fueling its giant moon rocket Thursday after leaks halted the initial dress rehearsal and delayed the first lunar trip by astronauts in more than half a century.

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Webb maps the mysterious upper atmosphere of Uranus

For the first time, an international team of astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere, uncovering how temperature and charged particles vary with height across the planet. Using Webb’s NIRSpec instrument, the team observed Uranus for nearly a full rotation, detecting the faint glow from molecules high above the clouds.

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How fast is the universe expanding? Supernova could provide the answer

That the universe is expanding has been known for almost a hundred years now, but how fast? The exact rate of that expansion remains hotly debated, even challenging the standard model of cosmology. A research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) and the Max Planck Institutes, MPA and […]

Upper-atmospheric lithium pollution directly linked to Falcon 9 reentry

A plume of upper-atmospheric lithium pollution observed in February 2025 has been attributed to the reentry of a specific rocket stage. The results, published in Communications Earth & Environment, are the first known direct detection of upper-atmospheric pollution from space debris reentry.

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Largest ever radio sky survey maps the universe in unprecedented detail

An international collaboration using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) has published an exceptionally detailed radio sky map, revealing 13.7 million cosmic sources and delivering the most complete census yet of actively growing supermassive black holes. It showcases an extraordinary variety of systems powered by these black holes, whose radio emission can extend for millions of […]

Could a recently reported high-energy neutrino event be explained by an exploding primordial black hole?

The KM3NeT collaboration is a large research group involved in the operation of a neutrino telescope network in the deep Mediterranean Sea, with the aim of detecting high-energy neutrino events. These are rare and fleeting high-energy interactions between neutrinos, particles with an extremely low mass that are sometimes referred to as “ghost particles.”

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A super stable laser on the moon could guide future lunar missions and improve our timekeeping

Scientists are proposing to build a laser in a crater on the moon to help future lunar missions land safely in the dark and find their way around. This ultra-stable light source could also help us keep time more accurately, as they explain in a paper available on the arXiv preprint server.

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Hubble identifies a near-invisible galaxy that may be 99% dark matter

In the vast tapestry of the universe, most galaxies shine brightly across cosmic time and space. Yet a rare class of galaxies remains nearly invisible—low-surface-brightness galaxies dominated by dark matter and containing only a sparse scattering of faint stars.

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New ‘Mars GPS’ lets Perseverance pinpoint its location within 25 centimeters

Imagine you’re all alone, driving along in a rocky, unforgiving desert with no roads, no map, no GPS, and no more than one phone call a day for someone to inform you exactly where you are. That’s what NASA’s Perseverance rover has been experiencing since landing on Mars five years ago. Though it carries time-tested […]

Too many satellites? Earth’s orbit is on track for a catastrophe—but we can stop it

On January 30, 2026, SpaceX filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission for a megaconstellation of up to 1 million satellites to power data centers in space.

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Eclipse research finds turbulent times in the sun’s corona

Researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi have uncovered new clues about how energy moves through the sun’s outer atmosphere, using one of nature’s rarest events as their window: total solar eclipses. Drawing on more than a decade of eclipse observations, a team led by Shadia Habbal at the Institute for Astronomy has, for the first […]

Araish spiral galaxy observations uncover a 26,700-light-year radio jet

An international team of astronomers has performed multi-wavelength observations of the nearby Araish galaxy to investigate the origin of its radio emission. As a result, they detected an extended radio jet of this galaxy. The finding was reported February 11 on the arXiv pre-print server.

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Cosmic predators: How supermassive black holes slow star growth in nearby galaxies

Intense radiation emitted by active supermassive black holes—thought to reside at the center of most, if not all, galaxies—can slow star growth not just in their host galaxy, but also in galaxies millions of light-years away, according to a study led by Yongda Zhu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy […]