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A debate has been raging among planetary scientists for more than a decade—why are there so few exoplanets with a radius of about 1.8 times that of Earth? Exoplanets are currently largely grouped into two distinct categories—”super-Earths” are below that size and have rocky interiors, whereas “sub-Neptunes” are above that size limit and appear puffier. […]
If we’re to reach another star, chemical propulsion will not get us there in any reasonable time frame. We’re going to need a different propulsion technology, and one of the most promising seems to be a solar sail. These giant reflective surfaces form the basis of many interstellar mission concepts. Combined with giant lasers pushing […]
Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers may have found a supernova remnant in an intriguing neighborhood in the middle of our galaxy. A paper describing these new findings was published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected, opening a new radio astronomy frontier. A hydroxyl megamaser is a natural space laser, and this one is located in a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away.
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Between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, two physicists, Michael Hart and Frank Tipler, published a controversial series of papers arguing that extraterrestrial intelligence didn’t exist. As they argued, the likelihood that extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) would have had enough time to develop advanced computing, spaceflight and self-replicating machines (Von Neumann probes) means they would have colonized […]
Physicists led by the University of Iowa have documented in the finest detail to date how energy from the sun interacts with Earth’s magnetic field, which could yield greater insight into solar effects on Earth that drive space weather.
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Sarah Pappert is a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at the TUM School of Natural Sciences and conducts research at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. She is supervised by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Genzel and Prof. Dr. Frank Eisenhauer, who holds a TUM Distinguished Affiliated Professorship at the TUM School of Natural Sciences. Her research […]
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have performed deep X-ray observations of a galactic globular cluster known as NGC 6540. The new observational campaign, described June 1 on the preprint server arXiv, focused on disentangling the nature of a peculiar X-ray flare emitted by the cluster about two decades ago.
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More than 20 years after its founding, SpaceX made history Friday with its record-high stock market debut, crowning a unique journey marked by dazzling successes but also catastrophic failures and unfulfilled promises.
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To truly understand what an asteroid is made of, we need to send a probe to it. Remote sensing from ground-based telescopes, or even orbiting observatories, can only do so much. A new white paper submitted to the U.K. Space Agency’s 2035 Space Frontiers program (available on the arXiv preprint server) pitches just such a […]
This March 20, 2026, image of Messier 64, or the Black Eye Galaxy, is a composite view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope. It shows Messier 64 captured at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths by Webb, while Hubble’s image shows the galaxy in ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared light.
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Astronomers may have uncovered new details about one of the Milky Way’s most important ancient collisions. Using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and a new clustering algorithm, researchers have found evidence suggesting the famous Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus structure (GSE) has a far more complicated origin than previously thought.
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX began its first day as a public company on Wall Street on Friday after the biggest initial public offering in history, with the polarizing entrepreneur promising he will take humanity to Mars.
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Looking somewhat like a swarm of bees returning to their hive, this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the galaxy cluster MACS0329-0211. Galaxy clusters like MACS0329-0211 are important signposts in the story of how the structure of the universe evolved, and are the ultimate telescopic lenses, placing gravitationally lensed galaxies from the earliest stages of […]
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket loaded with Starlink satellites Friday less than an hour before Elon Musk’s company was set to lift off for what would be the largest IPO in Wall Street history.
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