Space

The European Space Agency and The Pokémon Company International announced a limited-time partnership built around World Space Week, which runs from October 4 to October 10, 2026. The two organizations said the collaboration brings together audiences that share a taste for curiosity, exploration and imagination, with the specifics of the activities to be revealed closer […]

A meteor’s brief, destructive passage through Earth’s atmosphere was caught in the middle of a long exposure of the Great Lacerta Nebula, and the picture became NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for August 3. The image shows a dark starfield with a faint red nebula near the center, crossed by a bright horizontal streak […]

A camera built largely from commercial parts has been operating in orbit for about two years, and its developers argue the design can remove one of the biggest cost barriers in space-based astronomy: the price of a flight-grade ultraviolet detector. Space-grade astronomy cameras with proven performance in orbit have long been expensive, and ultraviolet observations […]

British research funders have decided not to renew support for the e-MERLIN radio astronomy network, whose headquarters sit at Jodrell Bank Observatory, home of the Lovell telescope. The decision, announced July 27, means current funding ends in March 2028, and the University of Manchester is now seeking alternative backing for the observatory and its iconic […]

Asteroid 2023 NT1 passed within about a quarter of the Moon’s distance of Earth on July 13, 2023, and astronomers did not see it until two days after the flyby. That near miss has become the basis for a modeling study testing what planetary defense could actually do with that little warning. The simulations, published […]

A group of Spanish physicists has proposed a machine-learning pipeline that designs the placement and internal optics of gravitational wave detector networks at the same time, rather than fixing a detector geometry first and fitting it to a site afterward. The approach, described in a preprint posted on arXiv on July 28, uses reinforcement learning […]

Astronomers have captured what they describe as the clearest image yet of a companion to Betelgeuse, the red supergiant in Orion, after roughly a century of searching. The candidate star, called Betelgeuse B, appears to be about two to three times the mass of the Sun, heavier than the roughly one solar mass that earlier […]

The planned Einstein Telescope would still deliver most of its promised science even if parts of its design fell short of baseline expectations, according to a preprint from the collaboration behind the proposed observatory. The study, posted on arXiv on July 29, systematically degrades the detector’s projected noise performance and tracks the losses across a […]

The strongest hint so far that dark energy changes with time may rest on a single slice of galaxy data, according to a reanalysis built around a statistical method designed for surveys that get re-tested release after release. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) released its second batch of baryon acoustic oscillation measurements, and the […]

Katalyst Space has spelled out how it intends to recover its spinning LINK servicing spacecraft and still complete the orbit-boost mission it was built for, with the company now expecting to move toward NASA’s Swift observatory around the end of August. The plan pairs repeated burns of an electric thruster with a rebuilt attitude controller, […]