Discovery
NASA Just Made Moonlight into Breathable Air
The News NASA's Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project has cleared a critical hurdle: successfully extracting oxygen from simulated lunar regolith using nothing but concentrated sunlight. The integrated prototype test, conducted aboard the International Space Station, confirmed that sol...
Webb reveals Uranus's auroras in stunning 3D detail
Webb's First True Look Into Uranus's Vertical Atmosphere The James Webb Space Telescope has achieved a scientific first: mapping the three-dimensional structure of auroras dancing above Uranus, revealing how energy flows vertically through the ice giant's upper atmosphere. Using the Near-Infrared Sp...
Astronomers Spot Universe's Brightest Microwave Laser 8 Billion Light-Years Away
A Cosmic Accident Reveals Nature's Most Powerful Microwave Laser Astronomers have detected the brightest microwave laser ever observed, emanating from a galaxy called H1429-0028 located nearly 8 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery, made using South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope array, r...
Binary Stars May Break Physics—Here's How We'll Know
A Test Case for Gravity Itself Scientists may be on the verge of resolving one of modern physics' deepest puzzles: whether Newton's laws actually hold at the smallest scales, or whether reality operates under fundamentally different rules in weak gravitational fields. A new algorithm published this ...
Ancient galaxies challenge our understanding of cosmic evolution
The Discovery That Rewrites Early Universe Timeline Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) have identified 70 dusty, star-forming galaxies in the ancient universe—and they're appearing in places where current cosmic evolut...
Rocky Planet in Wrong Place Rewrites How Worlds Form
Discovery Upends Planet Formation Models Astronomers have discovered a planetary system that breaks one of astronomy's most reliable rules: rocky planets belong close to stars, and gas giants far away. The finding, published today in Science and led by McMaster University's Prof. Ryan Cloutier, chal...
Volcanic Comet Erupts Into Glowing Spiral—And We Don't Know Why
A Cosmic Fireworks Display With a Mystery Inside On February 10, a city-size ball of ice and rock called 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann experienced one of the most violent eruptions in its observed history, brightening 100-fold in a matter of hours. In the days that followed, the expanding cloud of vapori...
Webb Telescope Catches Galaxy Being Stripped Bare 8.5 Billion Years Ago
A Jellyfish Galaxy Reveals the Universe's Violent Adolescence The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first detailed image of ESO 137-001, a galaxy being systematically stripped of its gas as it plows through its home galaxy cluster like a stone through water. The image shows the galaxy as i...
Japan's moon lander hits engine trouble ahead of NASA mission
Engine Troubles Threaten Japan's Lunar Ambitions ispace, Japan's commercial lunar company, is facing significant delays in developing a new engine for its next-generation moon landers, threatening a series of high-profile missions including work for NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. ...
Radio telescope maps 13.7 million cosmic objects in unprecedented detail
A Decade of Observation Yields the Universe's Most Complete Radio Census An international consortium of astronomers has released the most detailed radio map of the cosmos ever created, cataloging 13.7 million cosmic sources and providing humanity's clearest view yet of how supermassive black holes s...
Moon's Hidden Faults Could Shake Future Lunar Bases
The Moon Never Stopped Moving For decades, planetary scientists treated the Moon as a dead world—geologically frozen in time since the end of heavy bombardment billions of years ago. New research from the National Air and Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies has shattered that assum...
JWST Captures Most Distant Jellyfish Galaxy, Witnessing Cosmic Violence 8.5 Billion Years Ago
A Cosmic Squid at the Universe's Edge Astrophysicists at the University of Waterloo have spotted something spectacular lurking in the deep universe: the most distant jellyfish galaxy ever observed. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, they've captured an object being violently stripped of its gas a...
Two Dead Stars Locked in Eternal Cosmic Dance
Ancient Stellar Graveyard Yields Rare Binary Treasure Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have spotted something that shouldn't exist—or rather, something that exists far more frequently than theory predicted. Deep in the dense core of globular cluster NGC 6397, located roughly...
NASA's Sun-Skimming Probe Unlocks Solar Secrets
NASA's Parker Solar Probe just completed a record-breaking dive into the Sun's neighborhood, collecting data that could revolutionize how we predict and defend against space weather. Think of the probe as a weather station for the cosmos: by measuring solar wind up close—the stream of charged partic...