Space

True Anomaly says its Jackal-0004 spacecraft chased down and imaged an evading target in orbit as part of Victus Haze, a U.S. Space Force demonstration of tactically responsive space. The company announced on July 29 that it is the first to execute a space-to-space pursuit of an evading target within a tactically responsive space mission, […]

Galaxies that sit along the minor axis of a massive companion show a measurable excess of heavy elements in their gas, according to a study accepted in principle by Nature Communications and posted on arXiv on July 27. The authors, led by Cheqiu Lyu and Enci Wang of the University of Science and Technology of […]

Adaptive optics images taken with two of the largest ground-based telescopes show that (44) Nysa, a bright asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, has a three-lobed structure and carries a previously unseen small moon. The findings appear in a paper led by Kate Minker of Lowell Observatory and colleagues, submitted to Astronomy […]

Finding an Earth-like planet around another star is one of the hardest problems in modern astronomy. The planet may be only ten millionths of a degree away from its star on the sky, and a hundred million to ten billion times fainter. A standard telescope cannot separate the two: diffraction blurs them into a single […]

Boeing disclosed in its quarterly SEC filing on July 28 that the next Starliner mission will not fly until at least the final three months of 2026, marking another delay for a program that has not completed a crewed flight since June 2024. The disclosure came in Boeing’s Form 10-Q for the second quarter of […]

A team of researchers has developed a new framework for interpreting exoplanet observations that incorporates planetary evolution over time, addressing a fundamental limitation of existing static retrieval models. The work, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal and led by Harrison Nicholls of the University of Oxford, builds on the PROTEUS planetary evolution framework and introduces a […]

Two large meteors have illuminated New Zealand skies within three days of each other, the most recent on the night of July 28 when a bright fireball crossed the lower North Island and produced a sonic boom heard over a wide area. Fireballs Aotearoa, the citizen science network that tracks meteors across New Zealand, reported […]

Large language models can produce scientific project plans comparable in quality to those written by human researchers, but AI-based evaluators show a systematic preference for AI-generated proposals, according to a new study published on arXiv. The study, led by Jia Liu of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, compared one-page […]

Astronomers have published three separate studies this week that together paint a new picture of black holes on the move: objects that have escaped their galactic homes, shredded passing stars, or reached across hundreds of thousands of light-years to disrupt a neighbouring galaxy. A clear sighting of a wandering black hole For the first time, […]

Intel has entered the space computing market with a new system-on-chip called Starfire, designed to handle artificial intelligence workloads, onboard data processing, and autonomous operations on satellites and spacecraft. The Starfire processor integrates a CPU, graphics processing, neural processing, and image processing in a single package. It runs Ubuntu Linux and uses the x86 architecture, […]