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SpaceX defends airspace safety ahead of Florida Starship launch plans

With plans to launch the massive Starship from Florida next year, SpaceX defended its commitment to airspace safety after a Wall Street Journal article claimed an explosive mission in early 2025 was a greater danger to some flights than previously reported.

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Webb spots the ‘smoke’ from crashing exocomets around a nearby star

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was involved in yet another first discovery recently available in pre-print form on arXiv from Cicero Lu at the Gemini Observatory and his co-authors. This time, humanity’s most advanced space telescope found UV-fluorescent carbon monoxide in a protoplanetary debris disk for the first time ever. It also discovered some […]

Russia’s plans for a space station include ‘recycling’ its ISS modules

With the International Space Station (ISS) set to retire in 2030, several nations and commercial space companies have plans to deploy their own successor stations. This includes China, which plans to double the size of its Tiangong space station in the coming years, and the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) proposed Bharatiya Antariksh Station (BAS), […]

The chaotic ‘Dracula’s Chivito’: Hubble reveals largest birthplace of planets ever observed

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have imaged the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed circling a young star. For the first time in visible light, Hubble has revealed the disk is unexpectedly chaotic and turbulent, with wisps of material stretching much farther above and below the disk than astronomers have seen in any similar system. […]

Scientists crack ancient salt crystals to unlock secrets of 1.4 billion-year-old air

More than a billion years ago, in a shallow basin across what is now northern Ontario, a subtropical lake much like modern-day Death Valley evaporated under the sun’s gentle heat, leaving behind crystals of halite—rock salt.

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The universe may be lopsided, new research suggests

The shape of the universe is not something we often think about. My colleagues and I have published a new study that suggests it could be asymmetric or lopsided, meaning not the same in every direction.

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A dance of galaxies: JWST captures interacting dwarf galaxies

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured two nearby dwarf galaxies interacting with each other in this image released on Dec. 2, 2025.

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Engineering the first reusable launchpads on the moon

Engineers need good data to build lasting things. Even the designers of the Great Pyramids knew the limestone they used to build these massive structures would be steady when stacked on top of one another, even if they didn’t have tables of the compressive strength of those stones.

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Hubble glimpses galactic gas making getaway

A sideways spiral galaxy shines in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. Located about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden), NGC 4388 is a resident of the Virgo galaxy cluster. This enormous cluster of galaxies contains more than a thousand members and is the nearest large galaxy cluster to the Milky […]

Supermassive black holes show selective feeding habits during galaxy mergers

Black holes are notorious for gobbling up everything that comes their way, but astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered that even supermassive black holes can be picky eaters, and this can have a significant impact on their growth.

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The dual impact of stellar bars on star formation in galaxy pairs

Professor Woong-bae Zee of the College of Liberal Studies at Sejong University has revealed that a galaxy does not possess only a single evolutionary pathway; instead, depending on the nature of its neighboring galaxy, it can exhibit two entirely different “faces of evolution.” The work is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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ALMA observations reveal multiscale fragmentation in massive star formation

Researchers from Yunnan University, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have unveiled new insights into the fragmentation mechanisms of high-mass star-forming regions.

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What’s powering these mysterious, bright blue cosmic flashes? Astronomers find a clue

Among the more puzzling cosmic phenomena discovered over the past few decades are brief and very bright flashes of blue and ultraviolet light that gradually fade away, leaving behind faint X-ray and radio emissions. With slightly more than a dozen discovered so far, astronomers have debated whether they are produced by an unusual type of […]

Possible ‘superkilonova’ exploded not once but twice

When the most massive stars reach the ends of their lives, they blow up in spectacular supernova explosions, which seed the universe with heavy elements such as carbon and iron. Another type of explosion—the kilonova—occurs when a pair of dense dead stars, called neutron stars, smash together, forging even heavier elements such as gold and […]

PUNCH mission spacecraft producing unprecedented images of Sun

After less than a year in orbit, the Southwest Research Institute-built PUNCH spacecraft have made major accomplishments, imaging the sun in context while tracking comets and enormous space weather events as they traveled through the inner solar system. SwRI’s Dr. Craig DeForest discussed the achievements of NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) […]