All 193 articles, newest first
On August 30, 2026, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifts off from Kennedy Space Center with a field of view more than 100 times wider than Hubble's. We trace the one-way journey of a precision machine, built over more than a decade, riding a rocket it can never come back from.
SORABUMI explains: JWST peered into the atmosphere of exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b and found neither water nor methane, but bare molecular carbon. It's the first detection of its kind among roughly 150 exoplanets studied, and current planet-formation models can't account for what's inside.
Voyager 2 caught Neptune's faint rings up close in 1989, and they've barely been visible since. Now JWST, sitting roughly 2.8 billion miles away, has spotted them again in infrared — with Neptune itself fading into the dark and its rings and seven moons popping into view. SORABUMI explains how staying farther away actually helped.
We weigh galaxies by their light, but light comes almost entirely from a handful of massive stars. More than 70% of all stars, by number, are dim and smaller than the Sun. JWST observations now suggest early-universe galaxies could be 3 to 4 times heavier than we thought. SORABUMI explains.
Most exoplanets never show up in a photo. So how did JWST directly image a gas giant 7.6 times the mass of Jupiter, 12 light-years away? The answer comes down to three things: brightness contrast, distance, and temperature.
Japan's MMX spacecraft is heading to Phobos, the tiny, misshapen moon of Mars, to scoop up 10 grams of sand and bring it home. Is Phobos a captured asteroid or debris from an ancient impact? SORABUMI explains how a handful of dust could finally settle the question.
Keck Observatory's KPIC instrument measured the spin of giant gas planets and brown dwarfs ('failed stars') using spectroscopy. In the HR 8799 system, the brown dwarf — more than three times heavier — rotates about six times slower than its lighter planetary neighbor. The likely culprit: a newborn planet's magnetic field braking against its birth disk, offering a new way to tell planets and stars apart.
Big galaxies didn't start out big. Hubble and Gaia teamed up to precisely measure 39 star clusters buried deep in the Milky Way, revealing the fossil remains of a small galaxy called LKH that our galaxy swallowed roughly 11.8 billion years ago. SORABUMI explains the evidence that galaxies grow by eating their neighbors.
Before humans return to the Moon, NASA is sending 17 uncrewed landers carrying more than 60 instruments — a roughly $2.6 billion reconnaissance effort. Why send machines dozens of times before people go even once? SORABUMI unpacks the long robotic run-up to a lunar base, from hunting for ice to proving landing accuracy to wiring up power and communications.
Hubble stared at a patch of darkness one-tenth the size of the full moon for eleven straight days and dug up about 10,000 galaxies. TESS, meanwhile, sweeps the entire sky in one pass. Why does studying the cosmos require such opposite telescopes? SORABUMI breaks down the trade-off between field of view, resolution, and exposure time.
A spacewalk to swap out a single component on the ISS usually runs 5 to 8 hours. Before that, astronauts spend hours breathing pure oxygen to purge nitrogen from their bodies, and rack up roughly 7 hours of pool training for every hour they'll spend outside. SORABUMI walks through what 'fixing something' really means in orbit, starting from the prep work.
Sunlight left the Sun about eight minutes ago. Light from Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is about 4.2 years old. The Andromeda Galaxy's light is roughly 2.5 million years old. Because light speed is finite, looking farther always means looking further back in time. SORABUMI translates this into everyday scale to explain why a single glance at the night sky holds hundreds of millions of years at once.
As Earth crosses the Sun's face, it dims the Sun's light by only 0.008%. ESA's PLATO exoplanet telescope, targeting a 2027 launch, will watch over 200,000 stars for years hoping to catch that same fleeting shadow. SORABUMI explains why hunting for a second Earth is such a patient game.
The Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon, but it's also about 400 times farther away, so the two appear almost exactly the same size in our sky. That's why the Moon can cover the Sun perfectly. And since the Moon drifts 3.8 cm farther from Earth every year, total eclipses won't last forever. SORABUMI unpacks the coincidence.
A galaxy in a photograph looks like a cluster of stars, but the real thing extends far beyond that: a diffuse cloud of gas, wider than the visible galaxy, that supplies the raw material for future stars. NASA's small satellite ASPERA is designed to catch this invisible gas in ultraviolet light, and SORABUMI explains how galaxies grow by inhaling and exhaling it.
Supermassive black holes are supposed to sit at the center of their galaxies. But astronomers just found a second one hiding about 2,600 light-years off-center in the same galaxy — roughly a tenth of the distance between the Sun and the Milky Way's core. Close to the center, but not quite there. Here's why.
In September 2022, NASA's DART probe slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos and shortened its orbit by 32 minutes. Now ESA's Hera is closing in on the same rock in November 2026 to check the results. SORABUMI explains why planetary defense needs a two-step approach.
The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the largest solar telescope on Earth, has resolved features as small as 30 km on the Sun's surface, 150 million km away. Texas-sized granules on a boiling face, magnetic threads just 20 km wide. SORABUMI explains how a ground-based instrument managed to see that clearly.
How do you find a black hole you can't see? At the center of Omega Centauri, seven stars are moving fast enough to escape the cluster — yet they never leave. That contradiction points to an intermediate-mass black hole with at least 8,200 times the Sun's mass. SORABUMI breaks down how two decades of Hubble images uncovered it.
Launch the best telescope in the world today, and you still can't photograph Jupiter as it looked a decade ago. Hubble, working since 1990, caught something no new instrument ever could: the outer winds of the Great Red Spot speeding up by as much as 8% between 2009 and 2020. SORABUMI explains why a telescope's worth isn't measured by how new it is, but by how long it has been watching.
Newborn star clusters are wrapped in gas cocoons and invisible in optical light. A team led by Stockholm University combed through thousands of clusters with Hubble and JWST and found that massive clusters break free in about 5 million years, while lighter ones take 7 to 8 million — and the heavier ones are the first to light up their galaxy. SORABUMI explains.
The quasar J0313-1806 shows us the universe as it looked barely 670 million years after the Big Bang. At its center already sat a supermassive black hole 1.6 billion times the Sun's mass. How did it grow so fast in such a young universe? SORABUMI traces the trick behind 'looking far means looking back in time.'
When a possible sign of life turns up in an exoplanet's atmosphere, scientists don't celebrate right away. Until the chance of a fluke falls below roughly 1 in 3.5 million — the '5-sigma' threshold — and until they've finished doubting their own wishful thinking, it isn't a 'discovery' yet. SORABUMI explains the yardstick of scientific confidence and why researchers hold their excitement in check.
On the rocky exoplanet LHS 1140 b, 48 light-years away, astronomers have confirmed the first atmosphere ever detected on a habitable-zone rocky world. The clincher: catching helium from its upper layers escaping into space. SORABUMI unpacks the July 2026 milestone.