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NASA moon mission spacesuit nears milestone

The next-generation spacesuit for NASA’s Artemis III mission continues to advance by passing a contractor-led technical review, as the agency prepares to send humans to the moon’s South Pole for the first time. Testing is also underway for the new suits, built by Axiom Space, with NASA astronauts and spacesuit engineers recently simulating surface operations […]

New astronauts launch to the International Space Station after medical evacuation

A new crew rocketed toward the International Space Station on Friday to replace the astronauts who returned to Earth early in NASA’s first medical evacuation.

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A ‘ring of fire’ solar eclipse will dazzle people and penguins in Antarctica

The first solar eclipse of the year will grace Antarctica, and only a lucky few will get to bask—or waddle—in its glow.

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Hunting dark matter ‘stars’ that mimic black holes

Hypothetical dark matter stars known as “boson stars” could leave telltale ripples across the cosmos, offering researchers a new way to probe the invisible forces shaping the universe. In 2019, a strange event was observed in the depths of space. Called GW190521, the event sent out gravitational waves—invisible ripples in the universe—that were picked up […]

Europe’s Ariane 6 to launch Amazon constellation satellites into orbit

An enhanced version of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket will blast off Thursday to launch 32 satellites into orbit, forming part of the Amazon Leo network, which it hopes will rival Elon Musk’s Starlink.

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Hubble captures light show around rapidly dying star

This stunning image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals a dramatic interplay of light and shadow in the Egg Nebula, sculpted by freshly ejected stardust. Located approximately 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Egg Nebula features a central star obscured by a dense cloud of dust—like a “yolk” nestled within a dark, opaque […]

Chang’e-6 samples constrain lunar impact flux and illuminate early impact history

Scientists from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the CAS Aerospace Information Research Institute, and other institutions, have revised the decades-old lunar crater chronology model, using samples collected from the far side of the moon by China’s Chang’e-6 mission and complementary remote sensing imagery.

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Launch to ISS delayed again over weather: NASA

NASA is now aiming to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, in another delay over weather conditions, the U.S. agency announced Tuesday.

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Discovery of a possible pulsar in the Milky Way’s center could enable unprecedented tests of General Relativity

Researchers from Columbia University and Breakthrough Listen, a scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth, have published new results from the Breakthrough Listen Galactic Center Survey, one of the most sensitive radio searches ever conducted for pulsars in the dynamically complex central region of the Milky Way. The study, led by […]

Non-biologic processes don’t fully explain Mars organics collected by Curiosity, researchers say

In a new study, researchers say that nonbiological sources they considered could not fully account for the abundance of organic compounds in a sample collected on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The paper is published in the journal Astrobiology.

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How giant galaxies could form just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang

The existence of massive, elliptical galaxies in the early universe has puzzled astronomers for two decades. An international team led by Nikolaus Sulzenauer and Axel Weiß from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) used data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to shed light on this open question of galaxy formation. They […]

Experiment relies on pulsars to probe dark matter waves

Dark matter is a type of matter that is predicted to make up most of the matter in the universe, yet it is very difficult to detect using conventional experimental techniques, as it does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. While some past studies gathered indirect hints of its existence, dark matter has never been […]

Fermi data help refine orbital parameters of a gamma-ray binary

Using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Chinese astronomers have observed a gamma-ray binary system known as PSR J2032+4127. Results of the new observations, published February 3 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the orbital parameters of this binary, which could help us better understand its nature.

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An emotional countdown to the maiden launch of the Ariane 64, Europe’s most powerful rocket

In a tightly controlled manufacturing hangar west of Paris, workers put the finishing touches on an enormous silver-colored engine. In just a few days, a similar machine will help propel the most powerful version of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket yet, flying for the first time with four boosters.

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JWST uncovers rich organic chemistry in a nearby ultra-luminous infrared galaxy

A study led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA, using modeling techniques developed at the University of Oxford, has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a nearby galaxy, thanks to observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

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