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SpaceX’s hold over orbit matches East India Company’s grip on maritime trade

Elon Musk’s SpaceX holds sway over the emerging space economy in a way that has more in common with notorious colonial-era trading companies than the competitive markets of today’s textbooks, according to a new study.

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MeerKAT reveals three electron acceleration sites in one solar flare

Solar flares are the most explosive energy-release events in the solar corona, leading to intense particle acceleration, plasma heating and bulk plasma motions on short timescales. Core questions during solar flares remain unresolved, including how and where particle acceleration occurs, and how energized electrons propagate through coronal magnetic structures.

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Italian Luca Parmitano to be first European to join an Artemis mission: NASA

Luca Parmitano, an Italian astronaut, will be the pilot of NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, the first European to join one of the program’s missions, the U.S. space agency announced Tuesday.

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Possible dark matter-deficient twins discovered in the Fornax Cluster

Astronomers have identified a possible new example of one of the universe’s strangest galaxy types: galaxies that appear to contain little or no dark matter. The newly studied pair, FCC 224 and FCC 240, on the outskirts of the Fornax Cluster, share several unusual traits with the only known pair of controversial dark-matter-deficient galaxies. The […]

Space telescopes are now overwhelmed by satellite trails

Unfortunately, there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available on the arXiv preprint server from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite […]

Artemis II moon mission research continues on Earth

Since NASA’s Artemis II crew members safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on April 10 after their record-setting mission around the moon, science teams have been busy collecting more data and combing through observations collected on the test flight. Results from these science investigations will help support safe human exploration of deep space and […]

NASA’s INCUS mission on road to launch, study storms from space

Teams working on NASA’s INCUS (Investigation of Convective Updrafts) mission, the first space-based survey of the dynamics of tropical convective storms, have completed assembly and tested two of the mission’s small satellites, or SmallSats. Testing continues on the third SmallSat and is scheduled for completion no earlier than September ahead of a 2027 launch.

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Cosmic bombardment may have opened Earth’s crust for prebiotic chemistry

Asteroids and planetesimals regularly bombarded Earth between about 4.6 billion and 3.5 billion years ago, during the Hadean and Archean eons. Because few rocks today are more than 4 billion years old, our understanding of the planet’s environment during that time is limited. However, samples from the moon and its cratered surface hint at the […]

Upcoming telescopes could shed light on dark matter

NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon through the Artemis program and ultimately send humans to Mars highlight just how far space exploration has come. Yet while the moon and Mars remain compelling destinations filled with scientific mysteries, looking beyond our solar system raises even deeper questions about the universe itself.

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What happens to a star that captures a primordial black hole?

We don’t know whether theorized primordial black holes (PBH) are real. If they are, they formed in the very early universe, when physics was much different. They had no stellar progenitors and were created by the direct collapse of densely packed subatomic matter. Theorists have wondered whether PBH could be dark matter, or a component […]

Plants could be used to grow medicines in space, study shows

Astronauts on long space missions may one day use plants to produce fresh stocks of medicines on demand, thanks to new research by engineers at the University of California San Diego. The team developed a simple method to grow and repeatedly harvest pharmaceuticals from plants under space-like conditions, without destroying the plants or generating large […]

Neutron star merger simulations gain new precision with AI-driven r-process heating

Using a novel simulation model based on machine learning, an international research team at GSI/FAIR has succeeded in gaining a deeper understanding of element formation in stellar events such as neutron star mergers. For the first time, the scientists used deep learning with a neural network to model the energy release during r-process nucleosynthesis in […]

Astronomers discover the earliest known flickering quasar

A supermassive black hole lies at the heart of every galaxy, including the Milky Way. When a black hole is active, it pulls material in as a whirlpool of high-temperature gas and dust. As this cosmic material piles up and falls onto a black hole, it lights up its vicinity, radiating a huge amount of […]

Black hole feeding bursts may explain JWST’s Little Red Dots in early universe

A new theoretical study may have cracked one of the most puzzling discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): Little Red Dots, spotted across the early universe. The paper, posted to the arXiv preprint server on May 29, argues that these objects could be black holes caught in rare, violent bursts of feeding at […]

How Artemis II livestreamed hi-def videos and images from the moon to Earth

This April, humanity had front-row seats to space as the Artemis II Orion spacecraft transmitted crystal-clear footage of its historic journey around the moon from more than 250,000 miles (about 402,000 kilometers) back to Earth at speeds on par with home internet connections.

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