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ISS study identifies thresholds for muscle atrophy and fiber changes in reduced gravity

It’s well known that spaceflight causes muscle atrophy and other biological changes in reduced gravity, and especially in near-zero gravity (microgravity) environments. However, the gravity threshold needed to maintain sufficient muscle health in space is still unclear.

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The first modern rocket launched 100 years ago, beginning a century of both innovations and challenges for spaceflight

Apollo 11 first landed astronauts on the moon in 1969, but the journey to the lunar surface actually began 43 years before, in snowy Massachusetts.

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The seven hour explosion nobody could explain

Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent explosions in the universe. In a fraction of a second, they can release more energy than the sun will emit across its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. Most are over before you’ve had time to register them, gone in seconds, minutes at most. So when something arrived on 2 July 2025 […]

Ice satellite detects powerful geomagnetic storm with precision

It seems improbable that a satellite designed to monitor polar ice sheets and floating sea ice could accurately measure a disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field. But that is just what ESA’s CryoSat mission did earlier this year. This is a story of unique innovation in satellite technology. At the end of last year, the CryoSat […]

SpaceX and Reflect Orbital plans would ‘permanently scar’ night sky, researchers warn

The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is alarmed by the threat to ground-based astronomy posed by proposals put forward by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Reflect Orbital. SpaceX has applied to launch one million satellites to act as data centers to power artificial intelligence, but brightness estimates show that thousands would be visible to the naked eye, […]

Globular cluster NGC 5824 is embedded in a dark matter halo, study suggests

Using data from the Magellan Clay telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), astronomers have investigated a galactic globular cluster known as NGC 5824. Results of the new study, available in a paper published March 5 on the arXiv pre-print server, suggest that the cluster is embedded in a dark matter halo.

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Volunteers find oddly high solar flare rates

Patches of the sun’s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a new study about these long-lived active regions, we now know much more about the patches where these strong magnetic fields […]

Planning Titan entry? New lab tests flag nitrogen-driven heat shield debris risks

Heat shields are designed to protect the surface and cargo of a spacecraft as it enters an atmosphere. Aerospace engineers in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently observed a violently destructive difference in how heat shields function in atmospheres like Earth that contain oxygen versus nitrogen-rich atmospheres such as […]

A new class of molten planet stores abundant sulfur in a perpetual magma ocean

A study led by the University of Oxford has identified a new type of planet beyond our solar system—one that stores large amounts of sulfur deep within a permanent ocean of magma. The findings have been published in Nature Astronomy.

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CHEOPS discovery defies planetary formation rules

We’re starting to see just how exceptional our own solar system and its history is, as more exoplanets are discovered. A fourth exoplanet discovery in the LHS 1903 system made by ESA’s CHEOPS mission places a rocky world right where it shouldn’t be. This “inside-out system” could challenge our current understanding of planetary formation.

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TESS discovers a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting nearby star

Using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have discovered a new super-Earth exoplanet orbiting a star located about 83 light years away. The newfound alien world is slightly larger than Earth and encircles its host in less than four days. The finding was reported in a paper published Feb. 28 on the arXiv pre-print […]

ATCA observations probe peculiar pulsar wind nebula Vela X

Astronomers have employed the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) to investigate a peculiar pulsar wind nebula known as Vela X. Results of the new observations, published March 2 on the arXiv pre-print server, provide more hints about the properties and nature of this nebula.

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Dry ice detected in a planetary nebula for the first time

An international team of astronomers has employed the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe a complex planetary nebula known as NGC 6302. The observations, detailed in a paper published Feb. 25 on the arXiv pre-print server, resulted in the discovery of dry (carbon dioxide) ice in this nebula. This is the first time dry […]

Dragonfly mission begins rotorcraft integration, testing stage

Dragonfly integration and testing—the activities involved in assembling the mission’s rotorcraft lander and testing it for the rigors of launch and extreme conditions of space—is officially underway in clean rooms and control rooms at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

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A 100-solar-mass black hole merger ripples spacetime, and may flash in gamma rays

An international team from China and Italy has reported a possible cosmic encore to the landmark 2017 multi-messenger discovery. In November 2024, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatories detected gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger, designated S241125n. Remarkably, just seconds later, satellites recorded a short gamma-ray burst (GRB) from the same region of the sky.

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