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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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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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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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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 […]

NASA hopes fuel leaks are fixed as it launches another countdown test for the Artemis II moonshot

NASA began another practice launch countdown Tuesday for its first moonshot in decades with astronauts after making repairs to fix dangerous fuel leaks that already have bumped the flight into March.

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Astronomers may have just found one of the missing links in galaxy evolution

A team of 48 astronomers from 14 countries, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has discovered a population of dusty, star-forming galaxies at the far edges of the universe that formed only a billion years after the Big Bang, believed to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago. The galaxies may represent a snapshot in […]

JWST spots most distant jellyfish galaxy to date

Astrophysicists from the University of Waterloo have observed a new jellyfish galaxy, the most distant one of its kind ever captured. Jellyfish galaxies are named for the long, tentacle-like streams that trail behind them. They move quickly through their hot, dense galaxy cluster, and the gas within the cluster acts like a strong wind pushing […]

Is dark energy actually evolving?

Dark energy is one of those cosmological features that we are still learning about. While we can’t see it directly, we can most famously observe its effects on the universe—primarily how it is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. But recently, physicists have begun to question even that narrative, pointing to results […]