space

For the first time, astronomers have captured images of a periodic rocky near-Sun comet breaking apart, a common fate for heavenly bodies with destabilized orbits. Because they pass so close to the Sun, they are challenging to study, and…

The Gaia space mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) is mapping our galaxy, providing unprecedented, detailed data that promises to revolutionize our knowledge of the solar system and beyond. Gaia, launched on December 19th, 2013,…

An F-104 Starfighter (hopefully named after the 1984 movie, the Last Starfighter or the Star Wars spacecraft) kicked off the grand opening of Gateway™: The Deep Space Launch Complex at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on the 15th.…

Ultralight particle clouds can form around rotating black holes. Physicists from the University of Amsterdam and Harvard University now show that these clouds would leave a characteristic imprint on the gravitational waves emitted by binary…

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are part of a large international collaboration that unveiled the first image proving a supermassive black hole spins at the center of the Milky Way. The partnership published their…

MIT astronomers have locked onto a mysterious system 3,000 light years from Earth—a "black widow binary." The rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar, is circling and slowly consuming a smaller companion star, just like the mate-destroying…

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope uncovered a companion star previously hidden in the glare of its partner's supernova. The discovery marks the first time astronomers have found a supernova without evidence of the star's atmosphere in its…

The alignment of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is finished, and it's ready to capture images with its four powerful onboard science instruments. Webb will now move to a final series of preparations, known as science instrument…

An Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) launched by NASA on 9 December 2021 is a space-based observatory. Developed with the Italian Space Agency (ASI), it has three identical telescopes, each with an imaging X-ray detector sensitive…

NASA's Perseverance mission is taking the first-ever recordings of the soundscape on Mars. Perseverance recorded the first sounds from Mars on February 19, 2021, the day after its arrival. The result? Mars is quiet, and natural sound…