Space News & Blog Articles

Looking at an X-ray image of a galaxy cluster is like watching fireworks frozen in time. You see swirls and arcs, bubbles and filaments, structures that hint at past violence but don't explain what actually happened. Astronomers have puzzled over these features for decades, trying to determine which came from shock waves, which from cooling gas, and which from bubbles blown by black holes. Now a team led by Hannah McCall at the University of Chicago has developed a technique that answers these questions directly, creating images that classify the structures by their physics rather than their appearance.

(This is Part 4 of a series on primordial black holes. Check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3!)

There are already tens of thousands of pieces of large debris in orbit, some of which pose a threat to functional satellites. Various agencies and organizations have been developing novel solutions to this problem, before it turns into full-blown Kessler Syndrome. But many of them are reliant on understanding what is going on with the debris before attempting to deal with it. Gaining that understanding is hard, and failure to do so can cause satellites attempting to remove the debris to contribute to the problem rather than alleviating it. To help solve that conundrum, a new paper from researchers at GMV, a major player in the orbital tracking market in Europe, showcases a new algorithm that can use ground-based telescopes to try figure out how the debris is moving before a deorbiter gets anywhere near it.

The hunt is on for terrestrial exoplanets in habitable zones, and some of the most promising candidates were discovered almost a decade ago about 40 light-years from Earth. The TRAPPIST-1 system contains seven terrestrial planets similar to Earth, and four of them may be in the habitable zone. The star is a dim red dwarf, so the habitable zone is close to the star, and so are the planets. For that reason, astronomers expect them to be tidally-locked to the star.

In 2017, astronomers using the TRAnsiting Planets and PlanetesImals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope confirmed the presence of seven rocky planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, an M-type red dwarf star located about 39 light-years from Earth. What made the system especially intriguing was that three of these planets orbited within (or straddled) the system's habitable zone (HZ): TRAPPIST-1d, e, and f. Since then, scientists have been busy conducting follow-up observations of this system to learn as much as possible about its seven planets and whether they could be habitable.

Astronomers have found a unique blast coming from a distant supermassive black hole (SMBH). The SMBH is in a barred spiral galaxy about 135 million light-years away named NGC 3783. The Hubble recently imaged this face-on galaxy, showing its beautiful spiral arms and its center, tightly-packed with shining stars.

Supernovae aren't one of the JWST's main science themes, but the perceptive telescope is full of surprises. Recently, it pinpointed a single star in a galaxy when the Universe was only about 730 million years old. It wasn't just any random star; this one was a supernovae responsible for a gamma-ray burst (GRB) detected back in March, 2025.

(This is Part 3 of a series on primordial black holes. Check out Part 1 and Part 2!)

The UK is actively trying to support the infrastructure to make it a significant player in the coming age of the space economy. It recently received 560 proposals to it’s National Space Innovation Program, and handed out £17M in grants to 17 different organizations following five main themes. One of those is an effort by the University of Leicester and The Welding Institute (TWI) to develop a robotic welder for use in repairing and manufacturing in space, as described by a new press release from the university.

Cosmic filaments are the largest known structures in the universe, vast thread like formations of galaxies and dark matter that form a scaffolding upon which all smaller structures hang. These immense channels propel matter across hundreds of millions of light years, feeding gas into galaxies and shaping their evolution. Now, astronomers have caught one of these giant structures spinning.

Earth's climate has swung between ice ages and warmer periods for millions of years, driven by subtle changes in our planet's orbit and axial tilt. These variations, known as Milankovitch cycles, occur because Earth doesn't orbit the Sun in isolation. The gravitational pull of other planets constantly tugs at Earth, slowly altering its orbital path, the tilt of its axis, and the direction its poles point. While astronomers have long known that Jupiter and Venus play important roles in these cycles, a detailed new analysis reveals that Mars too, despite being much smaller than the gas giants, exerts a surprisingly strong influence on Earth's climate rhythms.

Almost every massive galaxy is has a supermassive black hole at its core, an object containing millions or even billions of times the mass of our Sun. Most of these giants simply lurk in the darkness, quietly consuming material from their surroundings while emitting barely a hint of radiation. But a small fraction shine brilliantly, pumping out enormous amounts of energy as active galactic nuclei (AGN). For decades, astronomers have debated what triggers this dramatic awakening. Now, a new dataset from the Euclid space telescope provides evidence that violent collisions between galaxies are the primary culprit.

If you feel a thrill every time we discover something new about the cosmos, then November 25th may have been a noteworthy day to you. That's the day that NASA completed assembly of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The two main segments of the powerful space telescope were joined together in the large clean room at Goddard Space Flight Center that day. This means that the telescope is on track for launch as early as Fall 2026.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRB) are some of the most perplexing phenomena in Nature. Even though astronomers have detected about 15,000 of them, with a new one each day, they're still mysterious. They're the most luminous, energetic explosions in the Universe, and typically last only a few milliseconds, or a few minutes, with a handful of them lasting for a few hours.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. It's also one of the largest planets in the Universe. There are planets out there with much more mass, but thanks to gravity, they are generally more dense, not "bigger." This raises an interesting question about massive exoplanets. Do they look similar to Jupiter? A new study finds they probably don't.

(This is Part 2 of a series on primordial black holes. Check out Part 1 here!)

Engineers can be split into two camps - those who just release whatever they’re building and try to fix whatever might be wrong with it as they get feedback on it, and those who test their product in every possible way before releasing it to the public. Luckily, NASA engineers are in the latter camp - it wouldn’t look great if all of the probes we send throughout the solar system failed because of something we could have easily tested for here at home. However, finding analogues for the places we want to send those probes remains a challenge for some NASA projects, so they make due with the best Earth has to offer. For Mars, that means testing technology in the desert’s rolling sand dune and rocky outcrops, and this year several different NASA technologies were tested in deserts throughout the country, as reported in a press release from the agency.

White dwarfs are called stellar remnants because they're what's left of main sequence stars after they've shed most of their mass and ceased fusion. But despite being mere remnants for whom fusion is only a distant memory, they can still be the locations of enormously powerful thermonuclear explosions called novae.

By its very nature, spaceflight is very challenging and very wasteful. As Tsiolkovsky's famous Rocket Equation establishes, propellant accounts for the majority of a rocket's mass, which is burned off during launch. The process also introduces large amounts of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, and black carbon, as well as ozone-depleting chemicals, into the upper atmosphere. On top of that, the disposal process for satellites once they are no longer operational (deorbiting and burning up in the atmosphere) is also wasteful, with no materials retrieved or reused.

Intermediate mass black holes (IMBH), if they exist, have between about 100 and 1000 solar masses, placing them in between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes. But while there's plenty of evidence for both stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes, the evidence for IMBHs isn't as convincing. There are many candidates, but there's no wide agreement on any of them. Yet our theories of black holes show there should be something in between stellar black holes and supermassive black holes, and IMBHs could be the missing link.

Removing, or “scrubbing”, carbon dioxide from the air of confined spaces is a critical component of any life support system on a spacecraft or submarine. However, modern day ones are energy intensive, requiring temperatures of up to 200℃ to operate. So a research lab led by Dr. Hui He at Guangxi University in China has developed what they call “micro/nano reconfigurable robots” (MNRM) to scrub CO2 from the air much more efficiently. Their work is described in a new paper in Nano-Micro Letters.