Phys.org Astronomy and Space

• Sophie Adenot, the second French woman to fly to space

  When she was growing up, Sophie Adenot plastered her childhood bedroom with posters of rockets launching from Cape Canaveral.

• NASA moon mission spacesuit nears milestone

  The next-generation spacesuit for NASA's Artemis III mission continues to advance by passing a contractor-led technical review, as the agency prepares to send humans to the moon's South Pole for the first time. Testing is also underway for the new suits, built by Axiom Space, with NASA astronauts and spacesuit engineers recently simulating surface operations and tasks underwater to demonstrate safety and mobility.

• Hunting dark matter 'stars' that mimic black holes

  Hypothetical dark matter stars known as "boson stars" could leave telltale ripples across the cosmos, offering researchers a new way to probe the invisible forces shaping the universe. In 2019, a strange event was observed in the depths of space. Called GW190521, the event sent out gravitational waves—invisible ripples in the universe—that were picked up on Earth. These waves appeared to mark the moment when two massive black holes, dozens of times the mass of our sun, collided and merged. Or at least, that was the initial theory.

• New astronauts launch to the International Space Station after medical evacuation

  A new crew rocketed toward the International Space Station on Friday to replace the astronauts who returned to Earth early in NASA's first medical evacuation.

• A 'ring of fire' solar eclipse will dazzle people and penguins in Antarctica

  The first solar eclipse of the year will grace Antarctica, and only a lucky few will get to bask—or waddle—in its glow.

• Sunlight extracts oxygen from regolith using solar chemistry

  NASA's Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration (CaRD) project has completed an important step toward using local resources to support human exploration on the moon. The CaRD team performed integrated prototype testing that used concentrated solar energy to extract oxygen from simulated lunar soil, while confirming the production of carbon monoxide through a solar-driven chemical reaction.

• Recently discovered SN 2024abfl is a low-luminosity Type IIP supernova, astronomers find

  An international team of astronomers has conducted photometric and spectroscopic observations of a recently discovered supernova designated SN 2024abfl. Results of the observational campaign, presented February 4 on the preprint server arXiv, yield important insights into the properties of this stellar explosion.

• NASA, SpaceX shoot for predawn Crew-12 launch with sonic boom possible

  The Space Coast's first human spaceflight of the year is on tap for early Friday morning as NASA and SpaceX aim to send up a mission to the International Space Station, and also bring back the rocket's booster that could bring with it a sonic boom across Central Florida.

• NASA crew set for flight to ISS

  NASA is set to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station on Friday, replacing a crew that was evacuated early due to a medical issue.

• Europe's most powerful rocket carries 32 satellites for Amazon Leo network into space

  The most powerful version of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket Thursday carried 32 satellites into space for the Amazon Leo network, which aims to rival Elon Musk's Starlink.

• Vulcan rocket launch suffers fiery booster issue but makes it to space, company says

  United Launch Alliance suffered yet another fiery burn-through on one of its solid rocket boosters during a national security mission Thursday.

• UK space firm Skyrora explores buying assets of struggling rival Orbex

  British company Skyrora, which designs and builds rockets to carry small satellites into space, announced Thursday it could acquire "select" assets from its stricken rival Orbex, including its spaceport in Scotland.

• Temporal evolution of GRB 240825A afterglow provides insight into origins of optically dark gamma-ray bursts

  Researchers from the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have conducted a new study on the temporal evolution of the afterglow from gamma-ray burst GRB 240825A. The study offers new evidence to better understand the physical environment surrounding gamma-ray bursts and provides insights into the mechanisms that govern their afterglow emission. The findings were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

• Gravitational lensing technique unveils supermassive black hole pairs

  Supermassive black hole binaries form naturally when galaxies merge, but scientists have only confidently observed a very few of these systems that are widely separated. Black hole binaries that closely orbit each other have not yet been measured. In a paper published today in Physical Review Letters, the researchers suggest hunting down the hidden systems by searching for repeating flashes of light from individual stars lying behind the black holes as they are temporarily magnified by gravitational lensing as the binary orbits.

• Failed supernova provides clearest view yet of a star collapsing into a black hole

  Astronomers have watched a dying star fail to explode as a supernova, instead collapsing into a black hole. The remarkable sighting is the most complete observational record ever made of a star's transformation into a black hole, allowing astronomers to construct a comprehensive physical picture of the process.

• Unique 'inside out' planetary system reveals rocky outer world

  A global team of astronomers, led by the University of Warwick, have used a European Space Agency (ESA) telescope to discover a planetary system that turns our understanding of planet formation upside down, with a distant rocky world. In our solar system, the inner planets (Mercury to Mars) are rocky, and the outer planets (Jupiter to Neptune) are gaseous. This planetary pattern—rock then gas—is consistently observed across the Milky Way. That was, until an international team of scientists, led by Dr. Thomas Wilson from the University of Warwick, took a closer look at a star called LHS 1903. Their observations, published in Science, reveal a system of four planets that breaks this convention.

• Jupiter-family comet 41P/TGK slows down and reverses spin after perihelion

  New analysis on 2017 Hubble images of the Jupiter-family comet, 41P/Tuttle–Giacobini–Kresak (41P/TGK), indicates that the comet underwent a spin reversal between April and December 2017. While this behavior is not unheard of, 41P/TGK's rotational changes were deemed "particularly dramatic" in the new paper published on the arXiv preprint server.

• By The Numbers: A look at European rocket Ariane 64's maiden launch

  Europe's Ariane 6 rocket is scheduled to make a powerful debut with a new equipment configuration Thursday, flying with four boosters to carry Amazon's internet satellites.

• Extraterrestrial strategy: How the US could achieve energy dominance in space

  Energy is fundamentally important—researchers have linked a lack of reliable energy to poor physical health, poor mental health and higher mortality rates. But when astronauts push the boundaries of space exploration, energy is a matter of life and death.

• Unseen planet or brown dwarf may have hidden 'rare' fading star

  One of the longest stellar dimming events ever observed was likely caused by the gigantic saucer-like rings of either an unseen brown dwarf or "super-Jupiter" blocking its host star's light, astronomers say. For decades, the star—which sits 3,200 light-years from Earth and is about twice as big as our sun—had been observed as stable, but at the end of 2024 it faded dramatically.

• NASA's SPHEREx mission spots 3I/ATLAS's bright envelope

  NASA's Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) was built for the ambitious purpose of performing an all-sky survey. The data it collects from more than 450 million galaxies and 100 million stars in the Milky Way over its two-year mission will help scientists explore the origins of the universe and its evolution over time. But that doesn't mean scientists can't occasionally take a break from investigating the deepest cosmological mysteries to take a peek at an interstellar object (ISO), right?

• Saturn's moon Titan could have formed in a merger of two old moons

  Recent research suggests that Saturn's bright rings and its largest moon, Titan, may have both originated in collisions among its moons. While Cassini's 13-year mission expanded our understanding of Saturn, the discoveries of its young rings and Titan's rapidly shifting orbit have raised new questions.

• Space mining without heavy machines? Microbes harvest metals from meteorites aboard space station

  If humankind is to explore deep space, one small passenger should not be left behind: microbes. In fact, it would be impossible to leave them behind, since they live on and in our bodies, surfaces and food. Learning how they react to space conditions is critical, but they could also be invaluable fellows in our endeavor to explore space.

• Mira A ejects seven Earth masses, forming a heart-shaped cloud 300 light-years away

  Just in time for Valentine's Day, space offers a heart-shaped greeting. The star Mira A, about 300 light-years from Earth, has released material into an expanding cloud of gas and dust resembling a heart. Both the amount of material and the speed at which the star ejected it were unexpected.

• Mars' 'young' volcanoes prove more complex than scientists once thought

  What appears to be a single volcanic eruption is often the result of complex processes operating deep beneath the surface, where magma moves, evolves, and changes over long periods of time. To fully understand how volcanoes work, scientists study the volcanic products that erupt at the surface, which can reveal the hidden magmatic systems feeding volcanic activity.

• The radical propulsion needed to catch the solar gravitational lens

  Sending a mission to the solar gravitational lens (SGL) is the most effective way of actually directly imaging a potentially habitable planet, as well as its atmosphere, and even possibly some of its cities. But, the SGL is somewhere around 650–900 AU away, making it almost four times farther than even Voyager 1 has traveled—and that's the farthest anything human has made it so far.

• Can life begin on a moon without a sun?

  Free-floating planets, or as they are more commonly known, rogue planets, wander interstellar space completely alone. Saying there might be a lot of them is a bit of an understatement. Recent estimates put the number of rogue planets at something equivalent to the number of stars in our galaxy. Some of them, undoubtedly, are accompanied by moons—and some of those might even be the size of Earth. A new paper, accepted for publication into the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and also available in pre-print on arXiv, by David Dahlbüdding of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and his co-authors, describes how some of those rogue exo-moons might even have liquid water on their surfaces.

• Subaru observations suggest an intrinsic gap in NGC 5466's tidal stream

  Astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and elsewhere have used the Subaru Telescope to perform deep imaging observations of a distant globular cluster known as NGC 5466. The observational campaign yields important information about the structure of the cluster's tidal stream. The new findings were published February 4 on the arXiv preprint server.

• Weather pushes back SpaceX's Crew-12 window, opening door for first ULA launch of year

  NASA's plans to get the first human spaceflight of the year off the pad have to hold off until at least Friday because of weather constraints along the flight path needed in case of emergency. That delay, though, opens the door for a national security mission aiming for liftoff on Thursday morning.

• NASA selects two Earth System Explorers missions

  Two next-generation satellite missions announced Thursday will help NASA better understand Earth and improve capabilities to foresee environmental events and mitigate disasters.