India space chief unfazed by Moon mission's apparent end

As hopes dim of further contact with India's moon rover, the country's space chief has said he was satisfied with the prospect of calling its successful lunar mission to an end.

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Blue Origin to remain grounded for now following crash probe

US aviation regulators said Wednesday that Blue Origin must complete "21 corrective actions" before it can resume launches, closing a probe into an uncrewed crash last year that set back Jeff Bezos's space company.

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Giant mid-infrared outburst detected from a distant young stellar object

By conducting a blind search for large amplitude mid-infrared variables in the Wide Infrared Sky Explorer (WISE) archive, Chinese astronomers have serendipitously discovered a giant mid-infrared outburst from a distant young stellar object designated J064722.95+031644.6. The finding is reported in a paper published September 20 on the pre-print server arXiv.

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The interaction between AGN and starburst activity as viewed with JWST

With excellent sensitivity and spatial and spectral resolutions, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) presents an unprecedented opportunity to promote our understanding of the evolutionary processes of galaxies.

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Largest asteroid sample ever collected is coming down to Earth

Chunks of asteroid that could tell us about the earliest days of the 4.5 billion-year-old solar system and the possible origins of water on our planet are set to land in the Utah desert Sunday.

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We can't see the first stars yet, but we can see their direct descendants

If you take a universe worth of hydrogen and helium, and let it stew for about 13 billion years, you get us. We are the descendants of the primeval elements. We are the cast-off dust of the first stars, and many generations of stars after that. So our search for the first stars of the cosmos is a search for our own history. While we haven't captured the light of those first stars, some of their direct children may be in our own galaxy.

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Study reveals cosmic surprises about star formation from the dawn of time

A groundbreaking international study has unveiled remarkable insights into the early evolution of galaxies, shedding light on the fundamental processes that have shaped our universe. The findings were published in Nature Astronomy.

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Parker Probe's path through solar blast yields unparalleled space weather insights

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has racked up an impressive list of superlatives in its first five years of operations: It's the closest spacecraft to the sun, the fastest human-made object and the first mission to ever "touch the sun."

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Researchers ready NASA's SPHEREX space telescope for 2025 launch

NASA's SPHEREx space telescope has been tucked inside a custom-built chamber on and off for the past two months undergoing tests to prepare it for its two-year mission in space. SPHEREx, which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, is set to launch into orbit around Earth no later than April 2025.

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Autonomous systems help NASA's Perseverance do more science on Mars

A computer pilot helps NASA's six-wheeled geologist as it searches for rock samples that could be brought to Earth for deeper investigation.

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New Type I supernova discovered with JWST

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has observed the galaxy cluster PLCK G165.7+67.0. The observational campaign resulted in the detection of a new Type I supernova. The finding is reported in a paper published September 13 on the pre-print server arXiv.

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Mars region offers NASA rover environment to search for evidence of ancient microbial life

Purdue University scientist Briony Horgan is leading NASA's Mars rover into unfamiliar territory as the mission turns toward its next opportunity to find ancient signs of life on the red planet.

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New Mars gravity analysis improves understanding of possible ancient ocean

The first use of a novel method of analyzing Mars' gravitational force supports the idea that the planet once had an extensive northern ocean.

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James Webb Space Telescope and ALMA capture the core of the most distant galaxy protocluster

The study of how individual stars are born and die in galaxies, how new stars are born from remnants of old stars, and how galaxies themselves grow are important themes in astronomy, as they provide insight into our roots in the universe. Galaxy clusters, one of the largest structures in the universe, are the assembly of more than 100 galaxies which are bound together through mutual gravitational force.

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An ambitious new technology might be needed to see other Earths

The race is on to discover truly habitable Earth-like worlds. While we are starting to observe the atmospheres of large potentially habitable planets such as Hycean worlds with the telescopes we currently have, the most significant breakthroughs will likely come with the development of advanced specialized telescopes. These new designs will likely use a starshade to hide the glare of a star and allow us to directly observe its exoplanets. But will that be enough to study distant terrestrial planets?

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Turkish astronomers investigate open cluster NGC 2509

Using data from ESA's Gaia satellite, astronomers from the Istanbul University have inspected a Galactic open cluster known as NGC 2509. Results of the study, published September 10 on the pre-print server arXiv, deliver important insights into the structural and astrophysical parameters of this cluster.

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UFOs: What we will learn from the NASA panel investigating sightings

A committee set up by NASA has examined about 800 reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), or what most of us would call UFOs (unidentified flying objects). NASA defines these events as sightings "that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective".

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Parker probe observes powerful coronal mass ejection 'vacuum up' interplanetary dust

On Sept. 5, 2022, NASA's Parker Solar Probe soared gracefully through one of the most powerful coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever recorded—not only an impressive feat of engineering, but a huge boon for the scientific community. Parker's journey through the CME is helping to prove a 20-year-old theory about the interaction of CMEs with interplanetary dust, with implications for space weather predictions. The results were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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NASA joins the still controversial search for UFOs

NASA on Thursday officially joined the search for UFOs—but reflecting the stigma attached to the field, the US space agency kept secret for hours the identity of the person heading a new program tracking mystery flying objects.

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Signs of life? Why astronomers are excited about CO2 and methane in the atmosphere of an alien world

Are we alone? This question is nearly as old as humanity itself. Today, this question in astronomy focuses on finding life beyond our planet. Are we, as a species, and as a planet, alone? Or is there life somewhere else?

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Possible hints of life found on distant planet. How excited should we be?

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has shown that an exoplanet around a star in the constellation Leo has some of the chemical markers that, on Earth, are associated with living organisms. But these are vague indications. So how likely is it that this exoplanet harbors alien life?

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Two Russians, American reach space station

Two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut docked with the International Space Station on Friday after blasting off amid raging tensions between Moscow and Washington over Ukraine.

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Solar Orbiter closes in on the solution to a 65-year-old solar mystery

A cosmic alignment and a little bit of spacecraft gymnastics has provided a ground-breaking measurement that is helping solve the 65-year-old cosmic mystery of why the sun's atmosphere is so hot.

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Teams watch weather as OSIRIS-REx prepares to return asteroid sample

This September, after traveling billions of miles through our solar system, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will cruise past Earth with an extraordinary delivery. As it passes, it will release a mini-fridge size capsule containing a sample of primordial space rock collected from an asteroid located between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

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Maduro says to send first Venezuelan to the Moon 'soon'

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said his country could soon send its first astronauts to the Moon in a Chinese spacecraft, hailing Thursday a scientific cooperation agreement reached with President Xi Jinping.

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Titanic galaxy cluster collision in the early universe challenges standard cosmology

A collision of two massive clusters of galaxies when the universe was half its current age should not have happened according to the standard theory of cosmology, says a new study by an international group of astronomers, including a physicist at the University of St Andrews.

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Two new rotating radio transients discovered

Using the Large Phased Array (LPA) radio telescope of the Lebedev Physical Institute (LPI) in Pushchino, Russia, astronomers have detected two new rotating radio transients (RRATS). The finding is reported in a research paper published September 2 on the pre-print server arXiv.

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OSIRIS-REx adjusts course to target sample capsule's landing zone

On Sept. 10, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly fired its ACS (attitude control system) thrusters to point itself toward Earth, putting it on course to release its sample capsule, carrying rocks and dust from asteroid Bennu, from 63,000 miles (or 102,000 kilometers) above Earth's surface on Sunday, Sept. 24.

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Measuring dark matter halos around ancient quasars

At the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. Beyond a certain size, these become active, emitting huge amounts of radiation, and are then called quasars. It is thought these are activated by the presence of massive dark matter halos (DMH) surrounding the galaxy, directing matter towards the center, feeding the black hole.

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Flashes of light in Venusian atmosphere may be meteors, not lightning

A team of planetary scientists at Arizona State University has found evidence that the multitude of bright flashes in Venus' atmosphere may be due to meteors passing through, not lightning strikes. In their paper published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the group describes their study of the flashes of light and what they learned about them.

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Team of astronomers investigate a galaxy group in the early universe

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers led by researchers at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, have investigated a galaxy seen almost 11 billion years back in time. Contrary to typical observations, the galaxy was discovered not by the light it emits, but by the light it absorbs. The galaxy itself evades observations, but has at least one nearby companion. Together, these galaxies comprise an early group which may later evolve to resemble the Local Group in which we live.

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A medieval manuscript likely hides a record of an impending recurrent nova

Approximately every 80 years, a faint 10th magnitude star in the constellation of Corona Borealis dramatically increases its brightness. This star, T CrB, is known as a recurrent nova and last flared in 1946, peaking at magnitude 2.0, temporarily making it one of the 50 brightest stars in the night sky.

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Here's how the Sept. 24 asteroid sample delivery will work

Early morning on Sunday, Sept. 24, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's sample capsule will come face-to-face with Earth's atmosphere for the first time since the mission's 2016 launch. On board are an estimated 8.8 ounces, or 250 grams, of rocky material collected from the surface of Bennu in 2020—NASA's first asteroid sample and the largest ever collected in space.

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Mysterious ultra-high energy source investigated by astronomers

Astronomers from the University of Maryland and the Michigan Technological University, have inspected a mysterious ultra-high energy gamma-ray source known as LHAASO J2108+5157. Results of the study, published August 31 on the pre-print server arXiv, could help us unveil the true nature of this source.

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Billion-light-year-wide 'bubble of galaxies' discovered

Astronomers have discovered the first "bubble of galaxies," an almost unimaginably huge cosmic structure thought to be a fossilized remnant from just after the Big Bang sitting in our galactic backyard.

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XRISM satellite launches to study the universe in different colors of X-rays

On Sept. 6, a new satellite left Earth; its mission is to tell us about the motions of hot plasma flows in the universe.

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Study hints at the existence of the closest black holes to Earth in the Hyades star cluster

A paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hints at the existence of several black holes in the Hyades cluster—the closest open cluster to our solar system—which would make them the closest black holes to Earth ever detected.

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How do you weigh a star? Masses of RR Lyrae stars revealed through their pulsations

RR Lyrae stars are old, pulsating stars that burn helium in their cores for fuel. Their progenitors were similar to our sun, but they are now much larger and brighter than our sun. We know of hundreds of thousands of RR Lyrae stars within the Milky Way, and we can use them to study how our galaxy has evolved since its formation. However, one fundamental measurement has so far eluded astronomers: there has been no reliable way to determine the masses of RR Lyrae stars—until now.

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Have we really found the first samples from beyond the solar system? The evidence is not convincing

Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University in the US, has published a press release claiming that some of the 700 or so spherical metallic fragments (spherules) he recovered from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, just off the coast of Papua New Guinea, are from beyond the solar system.

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New ring galaxy discovered by Indian astronomers

By analyzing the data from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), astronomers from the Christ University in Bangalore, India, have serendipitously discovered a new ring galaxy, which received designation DES J024008.08-551047.5 and may belong to the rare class of polar ring galaxies. The finding was reported in a paper published August 29 on the pre-print server arXiv.

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Four astronauts return to Earth in SpaceX capsule to wrap up six-month station mission

Four astronauts returned to Earth early Monday after a six-month stay at the International Space Station.

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4.6-billion-year-old meteorite increases our understanding of the early solar system

An analysis of the approximately 4.6-billion-year-old meteorite Erg Chech 002, discovered in 2020 in the Erg Chech region of the Sahara Desert in Algeria, is presented in Nature Communications.

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India's moon rover completes its walk, scientists analyzing data looking for signs of frozen water.

India's moon rover has completed its walk on the lunar surface and been put into sleep mode less than two weeks after its historic landing near the lunar south pole, India's space mission said.

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India launches spacecraft to study the sun after successful landing near the moon's south pole

India launched its first space mission to study the sun on Saturday, less than two weeks after a successful uncrewed landing near the south polar region of the moon.

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Researchers reveal statistical properties of dispersion measure, waiting time on repeating fast radio burst

Repeating fast radio bursts (FRBs) are mysterious radio transient sources in the universe that emit a repeating radio pulse lasting for a few milliseconds. Plasma lensing is the cold, non-magnetized, and inhomogeneous plasma cloud in cosmic space, which can refract the radio signal as images with frequency-dependent properties, such as the frequency-dependent dispersion measure (DM).

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Unprecedented gamma-ray burst explained by long-lived jet

Last year, Northwestern University researchers reported new observational evidence that long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can result from the merger of a neutron star with another compact object (either another neutron star or black hole)—a finding that was previously believed to be impossible.

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