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SpaceX squeezes in 100th Space Coast launch, but weather delays ULA, 2nd SpaceX mission

SpaceX managed to find a lull in the winds early Monday, but a second SpaceX launch as well as one from United Launch Alliance opted to wait at least a day before trying to add to the Space Coast’s rocket mission total.

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Rare brown dwarf discovered orbiting ancient star

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and elsewhere report the discovery of a new brown dwarf about 60 times more massive than Jupiter. The newfound substellar object, designated TOI-7019 b, is a brown dwarf known to orbit a star that is part of the Milky Way’s ancient thick disk. The finding is detailed […]

Forget stardust—it was star ice all along

Carl Sagan famously said that “We’re all made of star stuff.” But he didn’t elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been created in massive supernovae explosions—hence the saying—and scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled: the isotopes created in the […]

NASA’s Roman telescope will observe thousands of newfound cosmic voids

Our universe is filled with galaxies, in all directions as far as our instruments can see. Some researchers estimate that there are as many as 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. At first glance, these galaxies might appear to be randomly scattered across space, but they’re not. Careful mapping has shown that they are […]

Massive stars make their mark in Hubble image

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a glittering blue dwarf galaxy called Markarian 178 (Mrk 178). The galaxy, which is substantially smaller than our own Milky Way, lies 13 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear).

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2.8 days to disaster: Why we are running out of time in low earth orbit

A “House of Cards” is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It’s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her […]

Can scientists detect life without knowing what it looks like? Research using machine learning offers a new way

When NASA scientists opened the sample return canister from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample mission in late 2023, they found something astonishing.

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XMM-Newton sees comet 3I/ATLAS in X-ray light

The European Space Agency’s X-ray space observatory XMM-Newton observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on 3 December for around 20 hours. During that time, the comet was about 282–285 million km from the spacecraft.

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NASA announces plan to map Milky Way with Roman Space Telescope

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has released detailed plans for a major survey that will reveal our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in unprecedented detail. In one month of observations spread across two years, the survey will unveil tens of billions of stars and explore previously uncharted structures.

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Radio observations find nothing at Omega Centauri’s heart

Omega Centauri dominates the southern sky as the Milky Way’s largest and brightest globular cluster, a dense sphere containing roughly 10 million stars. Earlier this year, astronomers found evidence that an intermediate mass black hole hides within the cluster’s core, revealed by seven stars moving far too quickly to remain bound unless something massive holds […]

Interstellar comet keeps its distance as it makes its closest approach to Earth

A stray comet from another star swings past Earth this week in one last hurrah before racing back toward interstellar space.

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Hubble catches another glimpse of 3I/ATLAS

On July 1st, 2025, the third interstellar object (ISO) ever detected was seen making its way through our solar system. Shortly after being alerted by automated detection systems, astronomers at the European Space Agency (ESA) began using observatories in Hawaii, Chile, and Australia to get a better look at the interstellar interloper. Since then, 3I/ATLAS […]

Image: Hubble captures the death of a low-mass star in the Calabash Nebula

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an uncommon sight—the death of a low-mass star—in this image of the Calabash Nebula released on Feb. 3, 2017.

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EscaPADE explorer sort of goes to Mars

On 13 November, the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamic Explorers (EscaPADE) mission launched to space on the New Glenn rocket provided by Blue Origin.

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Did a rogue planet reshape our solar system?

The giant planets weren’t always where we find them today. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune formed in a more compact configuration and later underwent a violent reshuffling that scattered them to their current positions. Exactly what triggered this chaos remains uncertain, but researchers at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux and the Planetary Science Institute now […]