Space

Did Viking 1 Find Life on Mars 50 Years Ago? The Debate Is Far From Settled Fifty years ago this week, NASA’s Viking 1 lander touched down on the Chryse Planitia plains of Mars and promptly began scooping soil into a suite of biological experiments. The results were confounding then. They remain unresolved today. The […]

Astronomers Create First 3D Map of Temperature Phases in the Local Interstellar Medium The space between the stars is not empty. It is a dynamic, multiphase medium where gas cycles between warm diffuse clouds and cold dense nurseries, and where the seeds of future stars are shaped by forces astronomers are only beginning to map […]

The Sun’s Missing Silver Mystery Solved by Better Physics, Not New Data Astronomers have solved a decades-old puzzle about the Sun’s missing silver, and they did it without discovering anything new. Instead, they built a better model of the Sun’s atmosphere and asked an old question with sharper tools. The Sun and meteorites formed from […]

Astronomers Warn an Artificial ‘Saturn’s Ring’ of Satellites Could Ruin the Night Sky Forever A constellation of satellites so dense it would form an artificial ring around Earth, visible from every point on the planet and brighter than any star, is moving from science fiction toward regulatory reality. Astronomers are sounding the alarm. Several companies, […]

How large can a galaxy become? Astronomers have spent decades trying to answer that question, and a new study of IC 1101, the giant elliptical at the heart of the Abell 2029 cluster, has pushed the known upper limit further than ever before. Using the deepest images ever taken of this galaxy, obtained with the […]

The Very Large Telescope has delivered the most detailed chemical portrait yet of 3I/ATLAS, only the third known interstellar object to pass through the solar system. Over 23 nights of high-resolution spectroscopy with the ESPRESSO instrument, astronomers tracked the comet’s gas emissions from before its closest approach to the Sun all the way out to […]

NASA’s Perseverance rover, now exploring the western rim of Jezero Crater, has uncovered a 75-meter (245-foot) thick stack of layered bedrock that preserves a direct record of the solar system’s most violent era. The formation, called the “Broom Point member,” contains evidence of multiple asteroid impacts from roughly 3.9 billion years ago, offering scientists an […]

Artificial intelligence could confidently identify non-life as alien life and never flag its mistake, according to new research from Michigan State University that carries troubling implications for upcoming astrobiology missions. Christoph Adami, a computational biologist, and his student Ankit Gupta have demonstrated that AI classification systems are alarmingly vulnerable to false positives when asked to […]

NASA will conduct a full-scale dress rehearsal for returning astronauts to the Moon when the Artemis III mission launches in 2027, testing rendezvous and docking operations between the Orion spacecraft and commercial lunar landers in low Earth orbit before committing to a crewed surface landing the following year. The demonstration mission, announced in detail by […]

!The RV-X reusable rocket prototype during its first test flight at JAXA’s Noshiro test facility on July 11, 2026. Credit: JAXA Japan has entered the reusable rocket era. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched and landed its RV-X experimental reusable rocket prototype on July 11, 2026, at the Noshiro Rocket Testing Center in […]