NASA’s next big eye on the cosmos is now fully assembled. On Nov. 25, technicians joined the inner and outer portions of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the largest clean room at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

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In the leading model of cosmology, most of the universe is invisible: a combined 95% is made of dark matter and dark energy. Exactly what these dark components are remains a mystery, but they have a tremendous impact on our universe, with dark matter exerting a gravitational pull and dark energy driving the universe’s accelerating […]

MPE Director and Nobel Laureate Reinhard Genzel is spearheading an open letter signed by nearly 30 eminent international astronomers urging the Chilean government to relocate the proposed INNA industrial complex. The project threatens the world-renowned dark skies over ESO’s Paranal Observatory, the premier site for cutting-edge astronomical research.

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Searching for technosignatures—signs of technology on a planet that we can see from afar—remains a difficult task. There are so many different factors to consider, and we only have the technological capabilities to detect a relatively small collection of them.

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A new theory for the origins of dark matter suggests that fast-moving, neutrino-like dark particles could have decoupled from Standard Model particles far earlier than previous theories had suggested.

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“Why are we here?” is humanity’s most fundamental and persistent question. Tracing the origins of the elements is a direct attempt to answer this at its deepest level. We know many elements are created inside stars and supernovae, which then cast them out into the universe, yet the origins of some key elements has remained […]

There’s been a lot of speculation recently about interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS—much of which is probably caused by low-quality data given that we have to observe it from either Earth, or in some cases, Mars. In either case, it’s much further away than what would be the ideal. But that might not be the case for […]

Light from the half a million satellites that humanity is planning to launch into Earth’s orbit in the coming years could contaminate almost all the images taken by space telescopes, NASA astronomers warned Wednesday.

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