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Japan space probe skims asteroid in test for planetary defense

A Japanese space probe performed a flyby of a near-Earth asteroid on Sunday in a test mission for technology that could help protect the planet from space rocks.

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Astronomers find biggest super-puff planets yet that are lighter than cotton candy

Astronomers have uncovered a pair of giant planets that are lighter than cotton candy—super-puffs the size of Jupiter.

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Planned 1.7 million satellites ‘devastating’ for astronomy: Study

The 1.7 million satellites that companies are aiming to launch into Earth’s orbit in the coming years will have “devastating consequences for astronomy,” new research warned Wednesday.

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Astronomers may have caught an early galaxy in the process of dying

Astronomers have spotted many “red and dead” galaxies in the early universe. These are massive systems that stopped forming stars surprisingly early in cosmic history. Now, they may have found evidence of one in the act of becoming dead: a massive galaxy being stripped of its star-forming gas just 1.4 billion years after the Big […]

Hot Jupiter winds reveal exoplanet magnetic fields for first time

Planets beyond our solar system can have magnetic fields similar to those closer to home, astronomers said Tuesday after observing extreme winds on scorching worlds known as “hot Jupiters.”

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JWST discovers a new barred spiral galaxy

An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new massive barred spiral galaxy. The newfound galaxy, designated M1149-BSG-z5, was identified using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The finding was detailed in a paper published June 23 on the preprint server arXiv.

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Long-lived radio outburst from black hole exhibits properties of the early universe

Short-lived sources of radio radiation in the sky, known as radio transients, can originate in the vicinity of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. They are the result of processes that take place under extreme physical conditions. While most radio transients associated with galactic centers last only days or weeks, the galaxy SDSS […]

NASA’s Hubble spots star-spangled cosmic scene

More than 500,000 stars blaze red, white, and blue in this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, released in celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary. The image showcases Messier 3 (M3), one of the Milky Way galaxy’s most massive globular clusters, or spherical collections of gravitationally bound stars. Globular clusters are made up of […]

Cosmic neutrino ‘whispers’ may surface in 5,000-day Super-Kamiokande signal

Neutrinos: They have no electric charge, pass through matter like a ghost and are so light they were initially thought to have zero mass. These are just some of the traits that make them so difficult to detect. Research on neutrinos requires massive underground observatories far from potential confounders that drown out their weak signals. […]

Rescue mission launches to save NASA telescope that’s falling back to Earth

A three-armed spacecraft rocketed into orbit Friday to rescue a NASA telescope that’s in danger of crashing back to Earth.

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Could this asteroid be a piece of the moon? A Chinese spacecraft is about to find out

The moon is not the only natural object traveling through space alongside Earth. Several small asteroids travel around the sun in near lockstep with our planet. And just like Earth, these space rocks also take a year to complete a full orbit. Today, we know of eight such “quasi-moons” or quasi-satellites.

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Space startup to launch India’s first private orbital rocket

Indian startup Skyroot Aerospace said Thursday it would hold the maiden test flight of the country’s first privately developed orbital-class rocket in the coming weeks.

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Dynamic black holes may obey Hawking-style thermodynamics with an alternative entropy measure

Of the known things in the universe, black holes are among the most extreme. They pack huge amounts of mass densely into a small area, producing gravity that is so strong that even light cannot escape. To describe their properties, physicists have relied on complex equations from Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. […]

What makes a star a star? A strange ‘in‑between’ celestial object is testing astronomers’ boundaries

A star called TOI-2155 lies around 1,350 light-years (839 trillion miles) from Earth. It is a little bigger, heavier and hotter than the sun, and it is not particularly interesting or unusual in itself.

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Last-minute launch problem delays satellite rescue mission for NASA

A rush rescue mission to save a NASA space telescope remains grounded, this time because of a last-minute launch problem.

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