The Cosmo-SkyMed Second Generation Flight Model 3 spacecraft is pictured prior to being encapsulated within a pair of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 payload fairings. Image: SpaceX
SpaceX is ringing in the new year with a Falcon 9 rocket launch slated for Friday evening from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
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SpaceX will launch the first mission of 2026 tonight (Jan. 2), and you can watch the action live.
SpaceX will soon lower the orbits of about 4,400 Starlink satellites, to decrease the threat they pose to other spacecraft and reduce space traffic overall.
Entertainment is the final frontier, as you experience everything from Starfleet to the Green Lantern Corps and Godzilla in 2026.
It's happening. We are going.
Auroras may be visible from Alaska to Illinois as an incoming coronal mass ejection could disrupt Earth's magnetic field and trigger geomagnetic storm conditions.
Don't miss January's Wolf Moon rise over the eastern horizon tonight, as the first full moon of 2026.
The Sun is not only our closest stellar neighbor, it's also the star we understand the most. As we've observed it over the centuries, we've learned that the Sun is not an immortal constant. It goes through active and quiet cycles, it has become warmer over geologic time scales, and it occasionally batters the Earth with solar flares. We've generally thought that other main sequence stars behave in much the same way, but when it comes to solar flares, that isn't always true.
Astronomers have detected a "free floating" rogue planet the size of Saturn drifting through the Milky Way some 10,000 light-years from Earth.
An elusive meteor shower kicks off the skywatching year for 2026.
Size matters when it comes to telescopes. The bigger they are, the farther they can see. Prioritizing constructing large ones is therefore high on the priority list for many observational organizations. But doing so comes at a cost, and not just in terms of money. Finding a suitable site can be a challenge, and that has been particularly true for the effort to build a 30-meter telescope in the Northern hemisphere. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Francesco Coti Zelati of the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona and his co-authors, makes the argument for building it at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma in the Canary Islands.
Do you want to build a snowman?
In late April 2026, a long-period comet will swing through the inner solar system. It will likely be visible with binoculars, and there's a small chance it could be seen with the naked eye.
The bright Moon shines over Jupiter, Pollux and Castor on Friday evening the 2nd, then
groups right up amidst them on Saturday the 3rd.
Image: A neighbouring vista of stellar birth
For decades, scientists have observed the cosmos with radio antennas to visualize the dark, distant regions of the Universe. This includes the gas and dust of the interstellar medium (ISM), planet-forming disks, and objects that cannot be observed in visible light. In this field, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile stands out as one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes. Using its 66 parabolic antennas, ALMA observes the millimeter and submillimeter radiation emitted by cold molecular clouds from which new stars are born.
The Quadrantids and Eta Aquariids will have Moon trouble in 2026, but the beloved Perseids and Geminids should be glorious.
A daylight peak and a full moon combine to sabotage the powerful Quadrantid meteor shower in 2026.
Lego has recently released their first-ever Star Trek set, the 3600-piece U.S.S Enterprise, but is it better than Playmobil's model?
Hidden behind veils of interstellar dust lies Westerlund 1, the most massive, luminous, and nearby super star cluster in the Milky Way. Despite being a stellar powerhouse just 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Ara, it remains invisible to the naked eye. Yet this stellar congregation has just revealed something remarkable: it’s actively blowing an enormous bubble of gamma rays into the space beneath our galaxy’s disk.
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