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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 […]

Scientists discover recent tectonic activity on the moon

Scientists have produced the first global map and analysis of small mare ridges (SMRs) on the moon, a characteristic geological feature of tectonic activity. Published in The Planetary Science Journal Dec. 24, 2025, the analysis performed by scientists at the National Air and Space Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies and colleagues reveals for […]

UAE extends Mars probe mission until 2028

The United Arab Emirates announced on Tuesday that it would extend its Mars probe mission, now in its fifth year, for an additional three, underlining the oil-rich state’s space ambitions.

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Double white dwarf system detected in a nearby stellar cluster

Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have discovered a compact binary system consisting of two white dwarfs in the center of a nearby globular cluster designated NGC 6397. The finding was presented in a paper published February 9 on the arXiv preprint server .

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What cold-water geysers on Earth reveal about the habitability of ocean worlds

In the eastern Utah desert, carbon-dioxide-saturated water bubbles, sprays and foams from the ground. These cold-water geysers, sometimes called soda pop geysers, are a new and reliable Earth-based analog for scientists studying plume eruptions of ocean worlds in the outer solar system, according to new research led by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Morgan Cable […]

New tool could reduce collision risk for Earth-observation satellites

Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed a new way to design Earth-observation satellite missions that could help protect the space environment while continuing to deliver vital data for tackling global challenges, such as climate change, food production, supply chain vulnerabilities and environmental degradation.

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Early Mars was warm and wet not icy, suggests latest research

A recent study showed that Mars was warm and wet billions of years ago. The finding contrasts with another theory that this era was mainly cold and icy. The result has implications for the idea that life could have developed on the planet at this time.

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