US slaps TV provider with first-ever space debris fine

US authorities said they have issued a "breakthrough" first-ever fine over space debris, slapping a $150,000 penalty on a TV company that failed to properly dispose of a satellite.

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The world's largest radio telescope has scanned Barnard's star for extraterrestrial signals

Barnard's Star is a small red dwarf just six light-years from Earth. Despite its proximity, it was only noticed in 1916 when E. E. Barnard found it had a particularly high proper motion. It had appeared in photographic plates taken by Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s, but as a small dim star, no one took notice of it. Since its discovery, Barnard's Star has been one of the most studied red dwarfs.

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Growing in molasses: Cosmic large-scale structure caught growing slower than expected

The large-scale structure of the universe—the gigantic, hierarchical cosmic web of structures bound by gravity—is mostly made up of dark matter. The growth of the large-scale structure, from individual galaxies to galaxy clusters, cosmic voids and filaments (Fig. 1), revolves around a competition: Gravity pulls matter together while dark energy pushes space apart. The distribution and evolution history of matter and large-scale structure therefore provide an avenue to study the properties and nature of dark matter, gravity and dark energy.

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India's private space sector skyrockets

When Indian entrepreneur Awais Ahmed founded his satellite startup in Bangalore in 2019, his country was still a year away from opening the space industry to the private sector.

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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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