Astronomy

George Lucas had big plans for a live-action TV series before he sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 — so what happened?

On Episode 167 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik are joined by AJ Gemer of Lunar Outpost, a fast-moving company innovating in cislunar technology.

The skepticism and debate around the question of "are we alone in the universe" makes the field of astrobiology more cautious

The Axiom Mission-4 (Ax-4) crew flying aboard SpaceX's Dragon "Grace" docked to the International Space Station beginning a two-week stay on the orbiting laboratory with the Expedition 73 crew.

The 50th and final liftoff of Japan's H-2A rocket launched the GOSAT-GW satellite on Saturday, June 28, 2025.

Cheap, uninsured satellites are creating more space junk — and it's starting to rain down on our heads.

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.

One of the most overlooked sequels in Capcom's history, Lost Planet 2 walked so games like Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2 could run.

This year's $10,000 Schweickart Prize is going to a team of students who are proposing a panel to address the risks that could arise when we start tinkering with asteroids.

JWST is a powerful telescope and has directly observed a handful of exoplanets. But according to a new paper, it could set its sights higher, way higher. Astronomers suggest that Webb's MIRI and NIRCam instruments have the capabilities to detect planets around nearby stars as cold (or colder) than Saturn, at the same orbital separation, mass, and age as Saturn and Jupiter. They also found that clouds can have a big impact on their ability to study the planets, but it's easier for MIRI.

For some lucky viewers, the moon will pass directly in front of Mars.

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

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

A solid rocket engine for NASA's Space Launch System rocket experienced an anomaly during a static fire test at the booster's Northrop Grumman facilities June 26.