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AI learns to identify exploding stars with just 15 examples

How can artificial intelligence (AI) help astronomers identify celestial objects in the night sky? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the potential for using AI to conduct astrophysical surveys of celestial events, including black holes consuming stars or even exploding stars […]

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket for moon-bound Artemis II mission fully stacked at Kennedy Space Center

Despite the ongoing government shutdown, NASA did manage to complete a major milestone in its effort to send astronauts back to the moon.

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MeerKAT detects 30 new radio transient pulsars

Using the MeerKAT telescope, an international team of astronomers have detected 30 new radio transient pulsars as part of the Meer(more) TRAnsients and Pulsars (MeerTRAP) project. The discovery was reported in a paper published Oct. 20 on the arXiv pre-print server.

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Young stars ejecting plasma could offer clues into the sun’s past

The sun is frequently ejecting huge masses of plasma, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), into space. They often occur together with sudden brightenings called flares, and sometimes extend far enough to disturb Earth’s magnetosphere, generating space weather phenomena including auroras or geomagnetic storms, and even damaging power grids on occasion.

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Dark matter could color our view of the universe

Dark matter has two central properties: it has mass like regular matter, and unlike regular matter, it reacts weakly or not at all with light. Neutrinos satisfy these two criteria, but neutrinos move through space at nearly the speed of light, making them a form of hot dark matter. The observations we have suggest that […]

Japan successfully launches new cargo spacecraft to deliver supplies to International Space Station

Japan’s space agency successfully launched Sunday its most powerful flagship H3 rocket, carrying a newly developed unmanned cargo spacecraft for its first mission to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.

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4MOST telescope facility captures first light

On October 18, 2025, the 4-meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (4MOST) facility, installed on the VISTA telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Paranal Observatory in Chile, obtained its first light. This milestone is a crucial step in the life of any telescope, marking the moment it is ready to begin its scientific journey.

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Simulating solar storms for satellite operator training

Threats from space aren’t always obvious, but statistically, it’s only a matter of time before one of them happens. One of the most concerning for many space experts is a massive solar storm, like the one that literally lit telegraph paper on fire when it hit back in 1859.

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Europe’s deep-sea telescope on a hunt for the origins of the universe

Below the waves of the Mediterranean, Europe’s KM3NeT neutrino telescope is on a cosmic hunt. Towering strings of sensors stretch a kilometer down to the seafloor, arranged in a vast 3D grid.

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Three Earth-sized planets discovered in a compact binary system

An international team of researchers has just revealed the existence of three Earth-sized planets in the binary stellar system TOI-2267 located about 190 light-years away. This discovery, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, is remarkable as it sheds new light on the formation and stability of planets in double-star environments, which have long been considered hostile […]

Image: Focusing on NGC 3370

Today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week features a galaxy that Hubble has captured multiple times over more than 20 years. The galaxy is called NGC 3370, and it is a spiral galaxy located nearly 90 million light-years away in the constellation Leo (the Lion).

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Space weather drill simulates Carrington-level solar storm, challenging satellite safety and mission control response

No communication or navigation, faulty electronics and collision risk. At ESA’s mission control in Darmstadt, teams faced a scenario unlike any before: a solar storm of extreme magnitude. Fortunately, this nightmare unfolded not in reality, but as part of the simulation campaign for Sentinel-1D, pushing the boundaries of spacecraft operations and space weather preparedness.

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Search for elusive neutrino multiplets tightens limits on cosmic particle origins

The origins of extremely high-energy particles that fill the universe—such as protons, electrons, and neutrinos—remain one of the longest-standing mysteries in modern astrophysics. A leading hypothesis suggests that “explosive transients,” including massive stellar explosions (supernovae) and tidal disruption events (TDE) caused by stars being torn apart by black holes, could be the cosmic engines driving […]

Are we in the ‘Solitude Zone’ of the universe?

Are we alone? It’s one of the most basic questions of human existence. People have been trying to answer it for millennia in one form or another, but only recently have we gained the tools and knowledge to start tractably trying to estimate whether we are or not. Those efforts take the form of famous […]

Astronomers capture radio signals from comet 12P/Pons-Brooks

A research team led by the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has used the Tianma Radio Telescope to conduct multi-band radio observations of the returning comet 12P/Pons-Brooks (12P). They measured its water production rate during outburst activities and made the most distant detection of ammonia molecules in a Halley-type comet to […]