Astronomy

Two SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets lifted off with Starlink satellites on June 28, 2025. The first launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida and the second from Vandenberg Space Force Station in California.

Scientists propose a revolutionary new method to detect primordial black holes by hunting for their Hawking radiation. Instead of searching for faint background signals, researchers suggest using the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station to watch for distinctive spikes in positron particles as these ancient black holes pass through our solar system, emitting Hawking radiation.

The search for life beyond our planet continues, and one of the most underappreciated tools in an astrobiologists' toolkit is statistics. While it might not be as glamorous as directly imaging a planet’s atmosphere or finding a system with seven planets in it, statistics is absolutely critical if we want to be sure that what we’re seeing is real and not just an artifact of the data, or of our observational techniques themselves. A new paper by Caleb Traxler and their co-authors at the Department of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine takes on that challenge head-on by statistically analyzing a set of about 10% of the total number of exoplanets found and judging their habitability.

Sometimes a non-detection can tell you a lot. For example, astronomers recently searched through data containing around 5 million stars captured by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. They were looking for stars that had been ejected from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, through the gravitational interaction of the supermassive black hole Sgr A*. They failed to find any obvious candidates, which suggests that Sgr A* hasn't merged with another black hole recently.

Calibration is a necessary, if typically invisible, step in the successful operation of any scientific telescope. Without a known value to compare its readings against, data from telescopes could suffer from biases or transients that could completely misdirect scientists analyzing it. However, those same scientists also struggle to find good sources of data to calibrate against. Enter Arcstone - a technology demonstration mission that launched earlier this week that plans to use one particular source as a calibration dataset - moonlight.

Microwave satellite data are key to capturing major changes in a hurricane’s strength, such as when a storm undergoes rapid intensification. But a main source of those data is being abruptly shut off

Most people have never seen the Little Dipper, because most of its stars are too dim to be seen through light-polluted skies.

A flexible fabric called X-Wear could replace some parts of medical scanners, which would make taking X-rays and CT scans far more comfortable and convenient

In 1963, Captain Engle was assigned as one of two Air Force test pilots to fly the X-15 Research Rocket aircraft. In 1965, he flew the X-15 to an altitude of 280,600 feet, and became the youngest pilot ever to qualify as an astronaut. Three of his sixteen flights in the X-15 exceeded the 50-mile (264,000 feet) altitude required for astronaut rating.

With the help of powerful computers, researchers discovered a four-sided shape that naturally rests on one side, and built a real-life version from carbon fibre and tungsten

Large sea anchors could be used to drag water under a bold plan to keep the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation moving – but some experts are sceptical