Space News & Blog Articles

No matter where on Earth you stand, if you have a view of the night sky, and if it is dark enough, you can see the Milky Way. The Milky Way is our home, and its faint clouds of light and shadow have inspired human cultures across the globe. And yet, our view of the Milky Way is limited by our perspective. In many ways, we have learned more from other galaxies than from our own. But when the Gaia spacecraft launched in 2013, all of that changed.

A partial solar eclipse is coming this weekend, but weather could be an issue for many hoping to get a glimpse of the moon "taking a bite" out of the sun.

"Further strong activity is likely!"

In this age of exoplanet discovery, the flaring of red dwarf stars (M-dwarfs) has taken on new importance. M-dwarfs are known to host many terrestrial planets in their putative habitable zones. The problem is the flaring could make their habitable zones uninhabitable.

Zena Cardman,who was removed from an ISS launch to facilitate the return to Earth of Starliner's first crew, will command SpaceX's upcoming Crew-11 mission to the station.

Watch all Marvel content, including the Avengers movies and the X-Men movies from the 2000s, ahead of Avengers: Doomsday next year, with a 72% discount.

New findings from the ALMA telescope have revealed that planets are born in much smaller protoplanetary disks than astronomers suspected, some of which would fit with the orbit of Earth.

The space telescope's image of a odd-looking spiral galaxy is, in reality, two distant galaxies overlapping each other.

Hiroyasu Tsukamota has developed a deep-learning-based guidance and control framework called Neural-Rendezvous that could allow spacecraft to safely encounter interstellar objects.

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Meet Arnaud Prost—aerospace engineer, professional diver, and member of ESA’s Astronaut Reserve. From flying aircraft to getting a taste of spacewalk simulation, his passion for exploration knows no bounds.

Week in images: 24-28 March 2025

The crew of SpaceX's pioneering Fram2 mission includes a polar explorer, a marine technology scientist, a filmmaker and a bitcoin magnate.

There are a number of ways that exoplanets have been discovered over recent years but a team of astronomers have been exploring other ways. One particular exciting method is to hunt for them by finding their magnetospheres! Earth and Jupiter are a great example of planets that are surrounded by strong magnetospheres that interact with solar activity and when they do, they release radio emissions. The team of researchers have been demonstrating just how they could detect Jupiter’s radio emissions using simulated data. Not only would they be able to detect it, but they could also measure its rotation and even detect interactions with its moons!

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For over a decade, ESA’s Gaia mission has mapped our galaxy with stunning precision—rewriting the story of the Milky Way. As its mission enters a new phase, we look back at its most groundbreaking discoveries.

When the James Webb Space Telescope was launched in December 2021, one of its primary purposes was to see the first galaxies in the Universe forming just a few million years after the Big Bang. In true JWST style though, it has surpassed all expectations and now, a team of astronomers think they have gone even further back, seeing one galaxy clearing the early fog that obscured the Universe! The image represents a point in time 330 million years after the Big Bang and reveals a bright hydrogen emission from the fog surrounding a galaxy. It was somewhat unexpected though as current models predict it would have been blown away long ago!

Here's everything you need to know to make the most of the partial solar eclipse on March 29, as the moon takes a 'bite' out of the sun.

The outer planets remain somewhat of a mystery and Neptune is no exception. Voyager 2 has been the only probe that has visited the outermost planet but thankfully the James Webb Space Telescope is powerful enough to reveal it in all its glory. With its cameras regularly fixed on Neptune it has even picked up auroral activity in some of its latest images. The data was gathered back in 2023 using Webb’s Near-Infrared spectrograph which detected the tell tale sign of auroral activity, an emission line of trihydrogen cation. The element appears on other giant planets too when aurora are present.

The first image from a new Italian Earth observation satellite mission was published today: a high-resolution image of a strip of the Italian peninsular showing the city of Rome at a resolution of 2.66 metres. This is three times higher than the resolution currently available for systematic acquisition over Italy.

NASA and Boeing are still working on the thruster issues that Starliner experienced on its first crewed flight last year, so the capsule's next liftoff is a ways off yet.

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captures the striking landscape surrounding the Waza National Park in Cameroon.

Can the cosmic rays bombarding the lunar surface be used to identify subsurface water ice deposits? This is what a recent study and iposter presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a team of researchers developed a novel method called the Cosmic Ray Lunar Sounder (CoRaLS) capable of detecting subsurface lunar water ice deposits that are elusive to current radar systems. This study has the potential to help expand the human presence on the Moon since water ice deposits are currently being focused on the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the Moon for the upcoming Artemis missions.