Space

Star formation in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) has declined by roughly 80 percent over the past 500 million years, with the most dramatic drop occurring in the last 40 million years, according to a new study using archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal, are based on an […]

Primordial black holes would have formed in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, when dense pockets of energy in the primordial plasma collapsed directly into black holes. Spanning an enormous range of masses, from specks lighter than a mountain to objects rivaling the Sun, they have long been considered a dark […]

Astronomy has always been driven by advances in instrumentation. Every major leap in understanding of the cosmos, from the discovery of exoplanets to the detection of gravitational waves, has been enabled by new tools that push the boundaries of sensitivity, resolution, and scale. Two preprints released in July 2026 highlight this trend from opposite ends […]

White Paper Makes the Case for a European Exoplanet Interferometer Finding signs of life beyond the solar system remains one of the most ambitious goals in science. Over the past three decades, astronomers have confirmed thousands of exoplanets and learned that Earth-sized worlds in the habitable zones of their stars are statistically common. But detecting […]

LEO-to-Ground Low-Elevation Optical Communication: Adaptive Optics for Satellite Downlinks Low Earth orbit satellites drive Earth observation, scientific research, and global communications. As these platforms generate ever larger data volumes, the demand for high-speed downlinks grows. Free-space optical communication, using laser beams instead of radio frequencies, delivers higher data rates with potential advantages in power, mass, […]

Detecting Habitable Exoplanet Atmospheres with the LIFE Mission Finding signs of life beyond the solar system remains one of the most ambitious goals in all of science. Over the past three decades, astronomers have confirmed thousands of exoplanets and learned that Earth-sized worlds in the habitable zones of their stars are statistically common. But detecting […]

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has produced the first measurements of temperature beneath the surface of Io, Jupiter’s innermost Galilean moon and the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The data, collected during two close flybys and published July 22, 2026 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, reveal a temperature increase of more than […]

Black Hole Accretion Physics: From Hot Accretion Flows to AGN Winds and Jets The way black holes consume matter, a process known as accretion, governs everything from their observed brightness to the powerful jets they can launch. While the broad strokes have been understood for decades, the details remain fiercely complex. Three papers posted to […]

For decades, a tidy assumption has guided black hole accretion theory: what happens around stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries should scale up directly to supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN). If a stellar-mass system produces either disk winds or relativistic jets but not both, the same dichotomy should hold at millions of […]

LEO-to-Ground Low-Elevation Optical Communication: Adaptive Optics for Satellite Downlinks Low Earth orbit satellites are the backbone of modern Earth observation, scientific research, and global communications. As these platforms generate ever larger volumes of data, the demand for high-speed downlinks capable of transferring terabytes to ground stations in minutes has intensified. Free-space optical communication, using laser […]