Space News & Blog Articles

Yesterday, on Nov. 14th, 2025, the crew of Shenzhou-20 has returned to Earth from China's Tiangong space station after a week's delay. The delay was imposed by damage inflicted on their spacecraft, allegedly caused by an impact with space debris. This impact cracked the window aboard the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft, forcing the crew to depart the station using the newly arrived Shenzhou-21 spacecraft. The three-person crew, consisting of Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui, and Wang Jie, was originally scheduled to return to Earth on Nov. 5th.

The Pleiades ranks among humanity's most culturally significant celestial object, appearing in the Old Testament, celebrated as Matariki in New Zealand, and even inspiring Subaru's corporate logo. But astronomers have long suspected this tight cluster of bright stars represents only a fragment of something larger. The challenge lay in proving it.

Measuring the Solar System's velocity through space sounds straightforward, but it represents one of the most challenging tests of our cosmological understanding. As our Solar System travels through the universe, this motion creates a subtle asymmetry, a "headwind" where slightly more distant galaxies appear in our direction of travel than behind us. The effect is extraordinarily faint and requires sensitive measurements to detect.

Carl Sagan, along with co-author Edwin Salpeter, famously published a paper in the 70s about the possibility of finding life in the cloud of Jupiter. They specifically described “sinkers, floaters, and hunters” that could live floating and moving in the atmosphere of our solar system’s largest planet. He also famously talked about how clouds on another of our solar system’s planets - Venus - obfuscated what was on the surface, leading to wild speculation about a lush, Jurassic Park-like world full of life, just obscured by clouds. Venus turned out to be the exact opposite of that, but both of those papers show the impact clouds can have on the Earth for life. A new paper by authors as the Carl Sagan Institute, led by Ligia Coelho of Cornell, argues that we should look at clouds as potential habitats for life - we just have to know how to look for it.

NASA is facing increasingly sharp challenges as it pursues its goal of landing astronauts on the moon again before this decade is out — and as the space agency braces for another leadership change, it’s clear that the year ahead will also bring further challenges. How will NASA fare?

The James Webb Space Telescope didn't need much time to show us how wrong we were about the early Universe. Mere weeks after it began observations, it found galaxies in the very early Universe that were far more massive than our theories showed. These confounding images required an explanation.

Quasars acting as strong gravitational lenses are among the rarest finds in astronomy. Out of nearly 300,000 quasars catalogued in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, only twelve candidates were identified, and just three confirmed. These systems are exceptionally valuable because they allow astronomers to precisely measure the mass of a quasar's host galaxy, something that is normally impossible given that the overwhelming brightness of the quasar itself drowns out its surroundings.

Nestled on a hillside in Guangdong Province near Zhaoqing City, the Jinlin crater managed to hide in plain sight until researchers identified it as an impact structure. Only about 200 confirmed impact craters exist worldwide, making each discovery scientifically valuable. But this one stands out for its exceptional size and youth.