Phys.org Astronomy and Space

• 42 years of measuring the sun, the Earth and the energy in between

  On Jan. 31, 1958, Explorer 1 became the first satellite launched by the United States. Its primary science instrument, a cosmic ray detector, was designed to measure the radiation environment in Earth orbit. Though its final transmission was in May 1958, it continued to revolve around Earth more than 58,000 times. As those looping orbits continued, NASA was busy building other groundbreaking instruments to observe and better understand Earth's systems.

• NASA boss blasts Boeing and space agency managers for Starliner's botched astronaut flight

  NASA's new boss blasted Boeing and the space agency Thursday for Starliner's botched flight that left two astronauts stuck for months at the International Space Station.

• AI tool observes solar active regions to advance warnings of space weather

  New research by Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF-NCAR) has developed a new tool providing a first step toward the ability to forecast space weather weeks in advance, instead of just hours. This advance warning could allow agencies and industries to mitigate impacts to GPS, power grids, astronaut safety and more.

• Why some objects in space look like snowmen: Gravitational collapse may shed light on contact binaries

  Astronomers have long debated why so many icy objects in the outer solar system look like snowmen. Michigan State University researchers now have evidence of the surprisingly simple process that could be responsible for their creation.

• NASA conducts second rocket fueling test that will decide when Artemis astronauts head to the moon

  NASA took another crack at fueling its giant moon rocket Thursday after leaks halted the initial dress rehearsal and delayed the first lunar trip by astronauts in more than half a century.

• Webb maps the mysterious upper atmosphere of Uranus

  For the first time, an international team of astronomers have mapped the vertical structure of Uranus's upper atmosphere, uncovering how temperature and charged particles vary with height across the planet. Using Webb's NIRSpec instrument, the team observed Uranus for nearly a full rotation, detecting the faint glow from molecules high above the clouds.

• How fast is the universe expanding? Supernova could provide the answer

  That the universe is expanding has been known for almost a hundred years now, but how fast? The exact rate of that expansion remains hotly debated, even challenging the standard model of cosmology. A research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) and the Max Planck Institutes, MPA and MPE, has now imaged and modeled an exceptionally rare supernova that could provide a new, independent way to measure how fast the universe is expanding. The studies are published on the arXiv preprint server.

• Rocket re-entry pollution measured in atmosphere for first time

  When part of a SpaceX rocket re-entered Earth's atmosphere exactly a year ago, it created a spectacuglar fireball that streaked across Europe's skies, delighting stargazers and sending a team of scientists rushing toward their instruments.

• Largest ever radio sky survey maps the universe in unprecedented detail

  An international collaboration using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) has published an exceptionally detailed radio sky map, revealing 13.7 million cosmic sources and delivering the most complete census yet of actively growing supermassive black holes. It showcases an extraordinary variety of systems powered by these black holes, whose radio emission can extend for millions of light-years.

• Could a recently reported high-energy neutrino event be explained by an exploding primordial black hole?

  The KM3NeT collaboration is a large research group involved in the operation of a neutrino telescope network in the deep Mediterranean Sea, with the aim of detecting high-energy neutrino events. These are rare and fleeting high-energy interactions between neutrinos, particles with an extremely low mass that are sometimes referred to as "ghost particles."

• Hubble identifies a near-invisible galaxy that may be 99% dark matter

  In the vast tapestry of the universe, most galaxies shine brightly across cosmic time and space. Yet a rare class of galaxies remains nearly invisible—low-surface-brightness galaxies dominated by dark matter and containing only a sparse scattering of faint stars.

• A super stable laser on the moon could guide future lunar missions and improve our timekeeping

  Scientists are proposing to build a laser in a crater on the moon to help future lunar missions land safely in the dark and find their way around. This ultra-stable light source could also help us keep time more accurately, as they explain in a paper available on the arXiv preprint server.

• New 'Mars GPS' lets Perseverance pinpoint its location within 25 centimeters

  Imagine you're all alone, driving along in a rocky, unforgiving desert with no roads, no map, no GPS, and no more than one phone call a day for someone to inform you exactly where you are. That's what NASA's Perseverance rover has been experiencing since landing on Mars five years ago. Though it carries time-tested tools for determining its general location, the rover has needed operators on Earth to tell it precisely where it is—until now.

• Too many satellites? Earth's orbit is on track for a catastrophe—but we can stop it

  On January 30, 2026, SpaceX filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission for a megaconstellation of up to 1 million satellites to power data centers in space.

• Eclipse research finds turbulent times in the sun's corona

  Researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi have uncovered new clues about how energy moves through the sun's outer atmosphere, using one of nature's rarest events as their window: total solar eclipses. Drawing on more than a decade of eclipse observations, a team led by Shadia Habbal at the Institute for Astronomy has, for the first time, clearly identified turbulent structures in the sun's corona and shown that they can survive far from the solar surface.

• Araish spiral galaxy observations uncover a 26,700-light-year radio jet

  An international team of astronomers has performed multi-wavelength observations of the nearby Araish galaxy to investigate the origin of its radio emission. As a result, they detected an extended radio jet of this galaxy. The finding was reported February 11 on the arXiv pre-print server.

• Cosmic predators: How supermassive black holes slow star growth in nearby galaxies

  Intense radiation emitted by active supermassive black holes—thought to reside at the center of most, if not all, galaxies—can slow star growth not just in their host galaxy, but also in galaxies millions of light-years away, according to a study led by Yongda Zhu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory.

• NASA hopes fuel leaks are fixed as it launches another countdown test for the Artemis II moonshot

  NASA began another practice launch countdown Tuesday for its first moonshot in decades with astronauts after making repairs to fix dangerous fuel leaks that already have bumped the flight into March.

• Astronomers may have just found one of the missing links in galaxy evolution

  A team of 48 astronomers from 14 countries, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has discovered a population of dusty, star-forming galaxies at the far edges of the universe that formed only a billion years after the Big Bang, believed to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago. The galaxies may represent a snapshot in the galactic life cycle, linking recently discovered ultradistant bright galaxies formed 13.3 billion years ago with early "quiescent" (dead) galaxies that stopped forming stars about two billion years after the Big Bang.

• JWST spots most distant jellyfish galaxy to date

  Astrophysicists from the University of Waterloo have observed a new jellyfish galaxy, the most distant one of its kind ever captured. Jellyfish galaxies are named for the long, tentacle-like streams that trail behind them. They move quickly through their hot, dense galaxy cluster, and the gas within the cluster acts like a strong wind pushing the jellyfish galaxy's own gas out the back, forming trails. The technical term for this process is ram-pressure stripping. The Waterloo scientists found this galaxy in deep space data captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It is at z = 1.156, meaning we're seeing it as it was 8.5 billion years ago, when the universe was much younger.

• Is dark energy actually evolving?

  Dark energy is one of those cosmological features that we are still learning about. While we can't see it directly, we can most famously observe its effects on the universe—primarily how it is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. But recently, physicists have begun to question even that narrative, pointing to results that show the expansion isn't happening at the same rate our math would have predicted.

• Scientists discover recent tectonic activity on the moon

  Scientists have produced the first global map and analysis of small mare ridges (SMRs) on the moon, a characteristic geological feature of tectonic activity. Published in The Planetary Science Journal Dec. 24, 2025, the analysis performed by scientists at the National Air and Space Museum's Center for Earth and Planetary Studies and colleagues reveals for the first time that SMRs are geologically young and are widespread across the lunar maria—the vast, dark plains on the moon's surface. The team's discovery of how SMRs form introduces a new set of potential moonquake sources that could affect future site selections for lunar landings.

• UAE extends Mars probe mission until 2028

  The United Arab Emirates announced on Tuesday that it would extend its Mars probe mission, now in its fifth year, for an additional three, underlining the oil-rich state's space ambitions.

• Double white dwarf system detected in a nearby stellar cluster

  Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have discovered a compact binary system consisting of two white dwarfs in the center of a nearby globular cluster designated NGC 6397. The finding was presented in a paper published February 9 on the arXiv preprint server .

• What cold-water geysers on Earth reveal about the habitability of ocean worlds

  In the eastern Utah desert, carbon-dioxide-saturated water bubbles, sprays and foams from the ground. These cold-water geysers, sometimes called soda pop geysers, are a new and reliable Earth-based analog for scientists studying plume eruptions of ocean worlds in the outer solar system, according to new research led by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Morgan Cable and published in Astrobiology.

• New tool could reduce collision risk for Earth-observation satellites

  Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed a new way to design Earth-observation satellite missions that could help protect the space environment while continuing to deliver vital data for tackling global challenges, such as climate change, food production, supply chain vulnerabilities and environmental degradation.

• If alien signals have already reached Earth, why haven't we seen them?

  For decades, scientists have searched the skies for signs of extraterrestrial technology. A study from EPFL asks a sharp question: if alien signals have already reached Earth without us noticing, what should we realistically expect to detect today?

• Early Mars was warm and wet not icy, suggests latest research

  A recent study showed that Mars was warm and wet billions of years ago. The finding contrasts with another theory that this era was mainly cold and icy. The result has implications for the idea that life could have developed on the planet at this time.

• Long-term radio observations probe a relativistic binary pulsar system

  Astronomers have analyzed the data from long-term radio observations of a binary pulsar known as PSR J1906+0746. Results of the new study, published February 5 on the arXiv pre-print server, deliver important information regarding the nature of this system.

• A new concept for catching up with 3I/ATLAS

  The arrival of 3I/ATLAS in our solar system spawned multiple proposals for a rendezvous mission to study it up close. As the third interstellar object (ISO) ever detected, the wealth of information direct studies could provide would be groundbreaking in many respects. However, the mission architecture for intercepting an interstellar comet poses numerous significant challenges for mission designers and planners. Chief among them is the technological readiness level (TRL) of the proposed propulsion systems, ranging from conventional rockets to directed-energy propulsion (DEP).