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Before SpaceX goes public, a scramble to get on bandwagon

As SpaceX prepares its long-awaited stock market debut, investors everywhere are scrambling to get a piece of the action—through investment funds, related company stocks, and even online prediction markets.

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Are JWST’s early, overmassive black holes just normal-range outliers?

Ever since the JWST revealed a population of SMBH in the early universe that were overmassive, scientists have been working hard to explain them. These black holes existed when the universe was only about 2 billion years old, during Cosmic Noon, and according to our models of black hole growth, there simply wasn’t enough time […]

How heavy can a neutron star get?

The physics of neutron stars are almost too fantastic to believe: something the weight of two suns compacted to a sphere the size of a city. Each teaspoon of its material would weigh billions of tons. If you’ve done any reading on the topic, you’ve heard these facts before. But despite the intense interest these […]

Ceres’ surface is much more complex than previously thought

The long, puzzling dwarf planet Ceres, in reality the first named asteroid, has surface features that are much more complex than previously thought. Or at least that’s the conclusion of a recent paper presented at the European Geosciences Union 2026 General Assembly in Vienna.

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Small Magellanic Cloud is being pulled apart, reshaping how astronomers read its past

Using more than a decade of observations from the VISTA Survey of the Magellanic Clouds (VMC), researchers measured the motions of millions of stars across the Small Magellanic Cloud with unprecedented precision. The new study, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, provides direct evidence of a galaxy-wide tidal disruption of the Small Magellanic Cloud from its […]

Rare meteorite provides evidence of giant early planet

Four-and-a-half billion years ago, a massive world—possibly as big as the moon or even Mars—orbited our sun before crashing into another celestial body and shattering into rubble. Now, in a paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, scientists report the first definitive evidence that this lost planetary embryo (protoplanet) existed. Its unique […]

Kamo’oalewa asteroid’s lunar origin challenged ahead of Tianwen-2 arrival

China’s Tianwen-2 sample-return mission is well on its way to its target, an asteroid called Kamo’oalewa. The spacecraft left Earth in May 2025 and should return in late 2027 with samples of a space rock that scientists had assumed originated from the moon. However, a new study published in Nature Communications suggests that we may […]

Despite explosion Blue Origin CEO says rocket to fly before year-end

The CEO of Blue Origin vowed its New Glenn rocket “will fly again before the end of this year” after a recent ground test ended in a massive fireball that damaged the launch platform.

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French astronaut to fly to commercial space station under deal

Two French astronauts are to blast into space next year, one of whom will stay on board the world’s first commercial space station, under a new deal sealed between France and the U.S. company Vast.

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‘Mini-Neptune’ exoplanets may have smoggy atmospheres similar to diesel exhaust

The astronauts circling Earth on the Artemis mission sent back beautiful clear photos of the continents, clouds, and oceans. But we might be the exception. Many planets in the universe may be hazed in clouds of soot, according to a new study by University of Chicago scientists. Their analysis explains a curious trend seen by […]

Blue Origin says rocket explosion spared fuel tanks and key launch pad parts

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin said Tuesday that last week’s rocket explosion spared fuel tanks and some other critical parts of the launch pad.

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For satellites as small as a briefcase, getting around in space just got a whole lot easier

MIT engineers are testing a new propulsion system that combines the power and speed of conventional chemical thrusters with the precision and fuel-efficiency of electrical thrusters. The system could enable the design of nimbler, more flexible small satellites, which could perform both fast, powerful maneuvers and slower, precise adjustments, depending on the mission and moment […]

Dormant black hole revives in under three years, brightening 10-fold in nearby galaxy

Astronomers monitoring a nearby active galaxy for six years have watched its supermassive black hole dramatically wake up, brightening by a factor of 10 across ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths. The paper outlining the study was posted to the preprint server arXiv on May 18.

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Astrobiology’s looming statistical crisis

Multi-billion-dollar space telescope programs aren’t only feats of aerospace engineering. They also feature “lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Or at least statistics. They definitely feature those, as does all good observational astronomy. The problem with statistics is, in order to get a clear definitive answer, you need lots of samples. And, to put it mildly, […]

Icy moons’ ability to host life could be revealed through an ecology-based method

New observatories and spacecraft missions are probing environments in our solar system that could potentially host life but have long remained hidden. Icy moons like Saturn’s Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa likely contain oceans beneath frozen outer shells. But a layer of ice prohibits space probes from sampling them directly.

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