Space

For more than a decade, a faint spherical glow of gamma rays emanating from the heart of the Milky Way has divided astrophysicists. Known as the Galactic Center Excess (GCE), this high-energy signal has been interpreted as either the long-sought fingerprint of dark matter annihilation or the combined light of tens of thousands of rapidly […]

Featured image: [Artist’s concept of the Sun as a red giant, with Earth in the foreground; credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser)] For decades, the standard answer to the question of Earth’s ultimate fate has been grim: in roughly 5 billion years, the Sun will swell into a red giant, engulf the inner planets, and incinerate whatever […]

Featured image: [Artist’s concept of dark matter particles decaying in a galaxy halo; credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, J. Mould] One of the deepest assumptions in modern cosmology is that dark matter is stable. It has been there since the early universe, and it will be there, unchanged, for the foreseeable future. But what if that assumption […]

A tiny spacecraft built by two dozen undergraduate students at Tsinghua University is set to join the most heavily observed asteroid encounter in history: the April 2029 flyby of Apophis, a 340-meter near-Earth asteroid that will pass within 32,000 kilometers of Earth, closer than the ring of geostationary satellites. The Student-led Threatening Asteroid Reconnaissance of […]

Astronomers have found the first hints that supermassive black holes may be surrounded by dense clouds of dark matter, using a novel technique that repurposes a standard method of weighing black holes: listening for light echoes. The research, led by Mayank Sharma, a physics graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), […]

A new mission concept could give astronomers the tool they have dreamed of for decades: a space-based observatory capable of directly detecting signs of life on rocky exoplanets. But rather than a single giant telescope, the design calls for a swarm of smaller spacecraft flying in precise formation hundreds of meters apart. The Large Interferometer […]

The James Webb Space Telescope has unmasked a pair of cosmic impostors lurking within our own galaxy: two ultra-cool brown dwarfs that had been mistaken for some of the most distant galaxies ever observed. The discovery, published in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters (arXiv:2604.23668), serves as a cautionary tale for astronomers hunting […]

The Aeolus orbiter will carry four NASA-built scientific instruments to Mars to study the planet’s atmosphere in unprecedented detail. The instruments include a Doppler Wind and Temperature Sounder (DWTS-Ozone) to measure wind and temperature profiles, a Thermal Limb Sounder (TLS) for vertical temperature and dust measurements, a Surface Radiometric Sensor Package (SuRSeP), and a Wide-Field […]

Jio Platforms, the digital and telecommunications arm of Reliance Industries, has announced plans to develop a sovereign low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation to extend broadband connectivity to every corner of India. The announcement, made by managing director Akash Ambani at Reliance Industries’ 49th annual general meeting on June 19, coincides with Jio filing draft […]

A new study published in Physical Review D has systematically calculated the probability of detecting gravitational wave signals from primordial black holes (PBHs) interacting with neutron stars in the Galactic center, concluding that current observatories face extremely long odds. Despite the theoretical appeal of PBH-neutron star encounters as a window into dark matter, the probability […]