Astronomy

The dwarf planet Sedna will reach its closest point to the Sun in 2075, the ideal time to send a mission to study this world that takes 11,000 years to orbit the Sun. In a new paper, researchers consider two exotic propulsion systems for a mission like this: a direct fusion drive, and an enhanced solar sail. Both methods could allow a spacecraft to reach Sedna in under a decade of flight time.

Spielberg's contemporary spin on H. G. Wells would be up there with his best if only he could have nailed the ending.

Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its 13th crewed New Shepard rocket on a successful suborbital spaceflight on Sunday, June 29, 2025.

Muon Space released the first images from its new wildfire detection satellite, FireSat.

The World Meteorological Organization maintains a list of 21 hurricane names for each year. In especially busy years, a supplemental list is used.

Parisian astronomer Camille Flammarion brought used science fiction to bring Mars to life

"Returning the scientifically selected samples that await us on Mars, as part of a balanced portfolio, will help to ensure the US does not cede leadership in deep space to other nations, such as China."

How were these unusual Martian spherules created?

When humans finally reach Mars, they're going to rely on local resources for habitat construction. Researchers are considering how Martian explorers could use lichen and bacteria together with Martian regolith to form building materials. These biomaterials can glue together particles of crushed rock into a building material which can then be 3D-printed into houses, furniture and other buildings. This system might only require regolith, air, light and an inorganic medium to create the building material.

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.