Space

The gap between stellar-mass black holes and the supermassive giants at the centers of galaxies has been a persistent hole in the cosmic inventory. Intermediate-mass black holes, ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of solar masses, have been frustratingly elusive. Now a team of astronomers has found two promising candidates hiding in the dynamic […]

For decades, cosmologists have known that roughly 17% of the universe’s matter is ordinary baryonic matter, the stuff of stars, planets, and people. The problem has been finding it. Direct surveys of stars and gas have consistently come up short, accounting for only about half the predicted total. A new study using fast radio bursts […]

Poland has committed 656 million euros ($745 million) to Europe’s IRIS2 satellite constellation, covering nearly 10% of the planned multi-orbit network in what Warsaw described as a strategic investment in secure communications. The agreement, signed July 21 in Warsaw by Polish Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski and European Commission Defense and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius, funds […]

A fifth of NASA’s civil servant workforce has left the agency over the past year through deferred retirement programs, and the consequences are beginning to ripple across the agency’s major science and exploration programs. A Government Accountability Office report released July 23 found that 25 of 36 major NASA projects have been affected by the […]

Astronomers have, for the first time, detected a heavy water molecule in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, opening a new window into how distant worlds form and evolve. Using the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the hot Jupiter WASP-39b, a team led by researchers at LMU Munich identified the deuterated water isotopologue HDO, in […]

When the James Webb Space Telescope opened its eyes on the early universe, it revealed a population of objects that had no precedent: small, intensely red galaxies that appeared in abundance roughly 600 million years after the Big Bang and then seemed to vanish by the time the universe reached two billion years of age. […]

A coalition of environmental and conservation groups has filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission demanding a halt to licensing for orbital datacenter projects, warning that millions of satellites in low-Earth orbit could be catastrophic for the atmosphere. Companies including SpaceX and Blue Origin have proposed launching large networks of orbital datacenters as an […]

Orienspace launches third Gravity-1 mission from East China Sea Chinese commercial launch firm Orienspace successfully completed its third Gravity-1 mission on July 21, sending nine satellites into orbit from a ship in the East China Sea off Shanghai. The 30-meter (98-foot) solid rocket lifted off at 10:54 p.m. Eastern (0254 UTC, July 22) from a […]

Vast hires former Air Force officer to lead new national security division Commercial space station developer Vast is deepening its ties to the defense sector with the creation of a special programs unit focused on national security space projects, the company announced July 22. Melanie Stricklan, a 21-year U.S. Air Force veteran and co-founder of […]

Six thousand exoplanets have been cataloged across the galaxy, yet not a single exomoon has ever been confirmed. That drought may have just ended. A team led by Kevin Hoy at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile has detected a planetary-mass object orbiting the brown dwarf CD-35 2722 B, a substellar companion roughly 100 light-years from […]