Astro Blog

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: In recent years, astronomy has become a big data science, with survey telescopes capturing thousands of objects in a single look. As soon as 30 August, NASA will take that approach into space with the launch of the $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. With the Hubble Space Telescope’s sharp vision but a field of view 100 times larger, Roman will rapidly survey the sky to tackle some of astronomy’s biggest questions—from the nature of dark energy to the demographics of planets around other stars....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-roman-telescope-readies-sweeping-view-universe .

By Dennis Normile , Science.  Excerpt: Over decades, lunar orbiters have amassed evidence that the Moon’s polar craters hold stores of water, locked up as ice. But no mission has directly sampled these frozen deposits to determine how much ice is there, how it is distributed, or how it got there in the first place. As early as next week, China will launch Chang’e-7, a robotic mission designed to address those questions by sending a thruster-powered “hopping” probe into a crater near the lunar south pole, among the coldest, darkest places in the Solar System. ...with the Chang’e missions, named after a Chinese Moon goddess, China “grew its capabilities step by step,” he says, progressing from orbiters to landers, rovers, and, most recently, the first sample return from the Moon’s far side . ...Rocks returned by the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s have long suggested sunlit regions of the Moon are nearly bone dry. But in the 1990s, NASA’s Clementine and Lunar Prospector orbiter...

By Jennifer Chu | MIT News .  Excerpt: Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot [that] resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. ...astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.” In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature , the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. ...The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole ...100,000 times as massive as the sun....  Full article at https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-type-astrophysical-object-black-hole-star-0812 .

By Hannah Richter , Science.  Excerpt: Sixteen thousand satellites currently whiz above our heads on a 3D space superhighway. ...that number may increase 10-fold within the next decade as operators launch internet and telecoms satellites en masse. ...A new analysis posted to the preprint server arXiv last week, however, s uggests those plans face a physical limit , stemming not from the number of satellites, but from the space junk generated as they collide. The study finds that the swarms of satellites, known as constellations, would reach a threshold known as Kessler syndrome ... proposed in 1978 by NASA astrophysicist Donald Kessler , describes ...collisions between spacecraft produc[ing] space junk faster than what falls naturally out of the atmosphere because of drag. ...that leads to an exponentially increasing amount of debris, posing threats to other satellites, limiting safe launch windows for future spacecraft and astronauts, and jeopardizing human infrastructure when the...

By Selam Gebrekidan , The New York Times.  Excerpt: More space debris is raining down on Earth than ever before — one effect of the frenetic race among governments and companies like SpaceX to reign over the skies. Last year, the U.S. Space Force issued alerts for nearly 820 objects entering the Earth’s atmosphere. The government issued alerts for 110 objects a decade ago. “The re-entries happen each and every day,” said Mariusz Slonina, who heads space situational awareness operations for the Polish Space Agency. Huge objects weighing a metric ton or more arrive about once a week, he said. Much of the debris incinerates in the atmosphere or splashes into the Pacific, but when it does not, it plummets to the ground, uncontrolled and unpredictable. ...Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has more than 10,000 satellites in orbit, has applied to launch a million more . Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origins has similar ambitions and Chinese “megaconstellations” are expected to have hundreds of thousands of sa...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Astronomers have discovered more than 6000 planets orbiting other stars—many of them small and rocky like Earth. But despite years of searching, firm evidence that such worlds have stable atmospheres has remained elusive. Now, researchers report in Science that the relatively nearby super-Earth LHS 1140b appears to be leaking helium gas into space , implying it still has a substantial atmosphere billions of years after its birth. ...Many teams are zooming in on LHS 1140b, because of its many charms. Besides being nearby, it could be hiding other gases in its lower atmosphere, such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide—much like Earth. And if those gases provide an element of greenhouse warming, it could possess a liquid water ocean warm enough to swim in....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/astronomers-spot-first-atmosphere-around-potentially-habitable-alien-world .  See also New York Times article, Astronomers Find a...