Space

SpaceX’s Starlink constellation now performs more than 355,000 collision avoidance maneuvers per year, meaning the average satellite in the megaconstellation dodges a potential collision nearly every week. The figures, drawn from SpaceX’s semiannual Federal Communications Commission report, have sparked renewed warnings from space safety experts that the orbital environment is approaching a breaking point. Between […]

Strongly Lensed Gravitational Waves Offer New Way to Measure the Cosmic Dipole The universe looks almost the same in every direction, almost. A subtle asymmetry known as the cosmic dipole reveals that Earth is moving through the cosmos at about 370 kilometers per second relative to the cosmic microwave background (CMB). But for years, measurements […]

Astronomers are zeroing in on the oldest stars in the universe. These behemoths, known as Population III (or Pop III) stars, represent a missing link in cosmology between the primordial soup of the early universe and the complex, metal-rich cosmos we see today. A new review paper led by Alessandra Venditti of the University of […]

Astronomers have measured the ages of more than 150,000 ancient stars scattered across the Milky Way and found that the oldest among them is exactly as old as the standard model of cosmology predicts. The result quietly undermines one of the leading classes of explanations for the Hubble tension, the long-running mismatch between how fast […]

For the first time, astronomers have directly mapped the magnetic field around a racing pulsar, confirming a long-standing theory about how these dead stars inject high-energy particles into the Milky Way. Using NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), scientists measured the magnetic field of pulsar PSR J1101-6101, the rapidly spinning neutron star at the heart […]

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch Aug. 30, 2026, will detect supermassive black holes that existed up to 11 billion years ago by capturing the flashes produced when black holes shred entire stars. New research published July 14 in The Astrophysical Journal predicts Roman’s High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will detect roughly 100 tidal […]

!Orion Nebula as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (STScI/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team A team of astronomers has combined the power of the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope with a sensitive interferometer to uncover previously hidden structures within the Orion Nebula, the nearest massive […]

A recent study from the Planetary Science Institute reveals that the close passage of the star HD 7977 approximately 2.5 million years ago may have triggered a cascade of long-period comets into the inner solar system. Remarkably, the same comet shower may still be underway today. The research, presented at the American Astronomical Society Division […]

WARSAW, Poland will host a new European Space Agency center focused on civil security and resilience, marking the first ESA facility established in an eastern flank member state and the first outside the agency’s 11 founding nations. The announcement was made July 13 at a joint press conference at the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw […]

First-Ever X-Rays in Space Open New Frontier for Astronaut Health on Moon Missions Featured image: NASA Glenn researchers Kelly Gilkey, Cy Peverill, Daniel Phan, Chase Haddix, and Ariel Tokarz test portable, handheld X-ray systems for future space missions at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Credit: NASA/Sara Lowthian-Hanna For the first time, medical X-rays […]