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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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Comet from another star has a composition unlike anything else in our solar system

Astronomers have revealed new details about the makeup and age of a visiting comet that was born around a distant star. They conclude that the composition of 3I/Atlas is strikingly different from any object found in our solar system.

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Scourge of satellites lighting up the sky could be mitigated with help of ultra-black coating

Astrophysicists working to tackle the growing impact of satellite constellations have pioneered a new ultra-black coating as one possible way to mitigate the problem.

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LSST begins full operations with key contributions from Japanese researchers and engineers

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has officially begun full operations for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), one of the world’s largest astronomical imaging surveys. Behind the scenes, Japanese researchers and engineers are drawing on technologies and expertise cultivated through the development and operation of the Subaru Telescope to support the project’s software, […]

New star activity catalog could sharpen hunt for habitable worlds

Searching for habitable worlds beyond our solar system involves more than having a planet orbit within its star’s habitable zone, the region where temperatures could be just right for liquid water to exist on the surface. On Earth, where water comprises approximately 75% of the planet’s surface, life is abundant. But what about the exoplanet’s […]

Cosmic dust could play key role in cracking long-standing mystery of solar corona heating

A researcher at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of The University of Alabama System, has published a new study in The Astrophysical Journal suggesting that tiny charged dust grains near the sun may significantly influence how energy moves through the solar corona, the outer atmosphere of the sun. The discovery potentially […]

Nautilus array to track missing exoplanet atmospheres

Exoplanet atmospheres have become prime targets for astrobiologists in the search for life beyond Earth. This is because exoplanet surfaces can’t be directly imaged yet, so astronomers must get creative in how they search for signs of life, also called biosignatures. Presently, powerful ground- and space-based telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and […]

TESS just found a planet in a new way—and more may be hiding in its eight years of data

For the first time, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission has identified a planet orbiting a distant star thanks to its warping of space-time. Unlike the star-hugging transiting planets TESS regularly reveals, the newfound microlensing world is a super-Jupiter orbiting far from its host star.

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A new CRASH clock measures the chance of satellite collisions, and it’s ticking down fast

Imagine a piece of space debris the size of a hockey puck slams into a Starlink satellite at about 10 kilometers per second. The kinetic energy is equivalent to 2 kilograms of TNT, or a fully loaded semitruck traveling at 100 kilometers an hour.

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XMM-Newton and Chandra help revise distance to Milky Way’s outer spiral arms

The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescopes have spotted the aftermath of three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. By measuring the distance to these echoes, they found the outer arms to be up to 10% farther away than previously thought.

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13,000 tons of space junk clutters Earth orbit. Here’s how it could be cleaned up

Seventy years ago, Earth had only one satellite: the moon. Now it has more than 15,000—about 10,000 of which are owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The world’s first trillionaire plans to launch 1 million more satellites, each roughly 70 meters (230 feet) long and 20 meters (66 feet) wide, that would form a data center […]

The universe is less uniform than we thought—cosmology may need a radical rethink

Modern cosmology rests on a simple assumption: If we look on large enough scales, matter should be distributed evenly, with no preferred direction within the cosmos. This is known as the cosmological principle.

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