Space News & Blog Articles

A recent study links ground and space-based observations to track structures moving through the solar corona.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) probe is on its (very long) way to Jupiter, and will finally arrive at the King of Planets in 2031. Its primary mission is to focus on the “big three” icy moons - Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. But while JUICE is busy mapping Ganymede’s magnetic field, it will also be keeping a sharp eye on the other 94 moons in the Jupiter system. A recent paper published in Space Science Reviews by Tilmann Denk of DLR, Germany’s space research association, and his co-authors showcases just how much “bonus science” JUICE is expected to squeeze out of these other targets.

A strange lack of stellar orbits around the core of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) mystified astronomers for decades. Not only that, but the SMC has a strange, irregular shape, and sports a tidal. Now, a team of observers led by graduate student Himansch Rathore at the University of Arizona, has tracked down the reason why the stars don't orbit. It's because the SMC crashed directly through its neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), in the distant past. That huge collision disrupted stellar motions and sent them on wildly different trajectories. It also disturbed the clouds of gas within the SMC and created a tail of gas stretching out across space.

Earth was once a magma ocean world, just as all rocky worlds were early in their development, according to theory. As the very young Earth cooled, only the outer core remained molten, wrapped around a solid inner core and covered by the solid mantle and crust. This arrangement, along with coriolis forces, is what sustains our protective magnetosphere.

NASA’s Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) is a small space telescope that launched to space on January 11th, 2026. Created by NASA and researchers from the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at the University of Arizona, the mission is tasked with monitoring the flares and sunspot activity of low-mass stars (M-type red dwarfs and K-type orange dwarfs). The telescope is equipped with far- and near-ultraviolet instruments to assess the habitability of the space environment around planets orbiting these stars.

Conventional SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) strategies have long been built on the idea that intelligent extraterrestrials (ETI) would aim to communicate with other intelligent civilizations along a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, preferably in the radio spectrum.

The Large Hadron Collider’s subatomic discoveries didn’t stop with the Higgs boson: This week, scientists at Europe’s CERN research center announced that the collider’s LHCb experiment has detected a doubly charmed particle that’s like a proton, but four times as weighty.

This is Part 4 of a series on topological defects. Read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

Oxygen has been the most important gas in our search for life among the cosmos thus far. On Earth, we have it in abundance because it is produced by biological synthesis. But that might not be the case on other planets, so even if we do find a very clear high oxygen signal in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it might not be a clear indication that life exists there. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Margaret Turcotte Seavey and a team of researchers from institutions like the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University, adds some additional context to what else might be going on in those atmospheres. In particular, they note that if there’s even a little bit of water vapor, it can make a big difference in whether a lifeless rock looks like a living, thriving world.

Greek mythology has given a name to a great many objects in our solar system. But perhaps one of the least well understood are the Trojans, named after the people of Troy featured in The Iliad. When astronomers refer to them, they are normally talking about a group of over 10,000 confirmed asteroids orbiting at the Lagrange points both in front of and behind Jupiter on its orbit around the Sun. But, more generally, astronomers can now use the term to refer to any co-orbital setup - indeed almost every planet in our solar system has Trojans, though not as many as Jupiter. Which also leads to the belief that “exotrojans” must exist around other stars. Despite our best efforts with initiatives like the TROY project, so far we have yet to find one. But a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Jackson Taylor of West Virginia University and an abundance of co-authors took the hunt to one of the most extreme environments in the universe: pulsar binary systems.

The International Space Station (ISS), which has been continuously occupied for 26 years, is approaching retirement. By 2030, all participating space agencies will bring their astronauts home for the last time, and the station will be maneuvered so it burns up in Earth's atmosphere. The legacy of this station is unmatched, and its successors (of which several are planned) will have extremely big shoes to fill. Nevertheless, there's no shortage of space programs and commercial interests looking to place new space stations in orbit.

The Milky Way could host billions of free-floating planets (FFP) according to some research estimates. Also called rogue planets, these worlds drift through interstellar space on their own trajectories, unbound to any star. Many of these worlds form around stars like other planets do, and so it's reasonable to think that they also have moons.

Every ounce counts when launching a rocket, which is why considerations for the Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) of every component matters so much. For decades, one of the heaviest and most power-hungry components on a spacecraft has been its optical and communications hardware - specifically the bulky mechanical mirror used for LiDAR and free-space laser communications. But a new paper, published in Nature by researchers at MIT, MITRE, and Sandia National Laboratories, might have just fundamentally changed the SWaP considerations of LiDAR systems. Their technology, which they’re called a “photonic ski-jump” could one day revolutionize how spacecraft communicate.

This is Part 3 of a series on topological defects. Read Parts 1 and 2.

One particularly well known fact about the Moon is that it doesn’t have much of a magnetosphere to speak of. There’s no blanket to protect it from the solar wind ravaging its surface, blowing away its atmosphere and charging the notoriously dangerous dust particles that make up its regolith. However, scientists have also known for around 60 years that some parts of the moon do experience sudden spikes in a magnetic field - some of which are up to 10 times stronger than the background magnetization. Since their discovery, these “lunar external magnetic enhancements” (LEMEs) have puzzled researchers - what was causing them, and why did they reach so high above the lunar surface that spacecraft could see them? A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by Shu-Hua Lai and her colleagues at the National Central University in Taiwan explains for the first time what is likely causing these LEMEs - a novel type of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.

Here is a problem that has been quietly gnawing at astronomers for decades. The standard approach to detecting life on other worlds involves scanning exoplanet atmospheres for oxygen, methane and ozone, whose presence is difficult to explain without biology. It's a clever idea, but it carries a hidden flaw. That entire shopping list was written by studying Earth. It is, inevitably, a search for life like us.

Our Sun is a middle aged, average star sitting in an unremarkable corner of the Milky Way. It fuses hydrogen into helium at its core, bathes its planets in light and heat, and has been doing so for around 4.6 billion years. Nothing about it immediately suggests a dramatic past. But look closer, and the questions start to stack up.

This is Part 2 of a series on topological defects. Read Part 1.

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 ten 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 that kept going for seven hours, fired three distinct bursts spread across an entire day, and then left behind an afterglow lasting months, astronomers knew immediately they were looking at something completely new.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft impacted the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits the larger asteroid Didymos, in September 2022. The purpose of this mission was to test the kinetic impactor method, a potential strategy to alter the orbit of asteroids so they don't pose a threat to Earth. The test was a success, as images taken by the Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube (which traveled alongside the DART mission) after the impact showed. Combined with Earth-based observations, these confirmed that the moonlet's orbit changed noticeably.

This is Part 1 of a series on topological defects.