Space exploration, astronomy & astrophotography news
On June 23, 2026, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a payload that SpaceX had kept almost entirely secret until the moment of launch. The mission, designated Starfall Demo, deployed a disk-shaped capsule about 3.1 meters (10.2 feet) wide and just 0.75 meters (2.5 feet) tall the company says will enable […]
China is preparing for the debut orbital flight of its Long March 10B (CZ-10B) rocket, with a launch window opening July 10-13, 2026, and an ambitious attempt to recover the first stage at sea using a net-equipped barge. The mission, launching from Commercial Launch Pad 2 at the Wenchang Commercial Space Launch Site on Hainan […]
A European-Japanese satellite has achieved a milestone that weather forecasters have pursued for decades: the operational use of spaceborne cloud radar data in global weather prediction models. The EarthCARE mission, a joint venture between ESA and JAXA, is now providing daily data that directly sharpens forecasts of storms, heavy rainfall, and extreme weather events. On […]
ESA’s dark universe detective has taken a break from mapping distant galaxies to produce the sharpest, largest visible-light image ever made of the heart of our own Milky Way. The result is a stunning mosaic of more than 60 million stars and at least 51 known exoplanet systems, captured in just 26 hours of observing […]
Elon Musk’s Starlink has long dominated the satellite broadband market, with more than 10,400 satellites in orbit, 12 million subscribers across 160 countries, and a freshly minted $85.7 billion IPO from June 2026. But China is now pushing a homegrown competitor: SpaceSail, also known as the Qianfan (Thousand Sails) constellation. With 200 satellites in orbit […]
On June 15, 2026, at 15:24 CEST, a faint blue glow in space was switched off for the last time. After nearly eight years of nearly continuous firing, ESA and JAXA’s BepiColombo mission permanently shut down its solar electric propulsion (SEP) system, marking the end of its long interplanetary cruise and the beginning of the […]
What astronomers initially thought was a single distant radio galaxy has turned out to be something far more interesting: a dense cluster of at least six galaxies in the process of merging into one. The discovery, made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), offers an unprecedented direct view of how giant galaxies assembled […]
Astronomers have detected a rare damped millisecond oscillation pattern in a fast radio burst, offering one of the clearest signals yet that these enigmatic cosmic flashes originate from young, highly magnetized neutron stars. The study, led by Shuo Xiao and Di Li of Guizhou Normal University and Tsinghua University, analyzed publicly available data from the […]
The Hubble Space Telescope has detected ultraviolet light escaping from a galaxy that existed just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, a feat astronomers previously considered impossible. The discovery provides direct evidence that compact clusters of hot, massive stars, not just black holes, were responsible for clearing the neutral hydrogen fog that once filled […]
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known object from beyond our Solar System, has been wandering the galaxy for 10 to 12 billion years, making it almost as old as the universe itself and one of the most ancient objects ever studied up close by human instruments. The finding, published June 22 in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10771-6), […]
