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On June 9, 2026, NASA announced the four astronauts of Artemis III. None of them will set foot on the lunar surface. Instead, they'll spend about two weeks circling Earth, testing dockings with landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX. The actual landing has been pushed to Artemis IV in 2028. Here's a look at the unglamorous reality behind spaceflight: sometimes you need a dress rehearsal before the real thing.
SORABUMI explains: 190 light-years away, in the TOI-1130 system, a Neptune-sized planet survives on a 4-day orbit even closer to the star than a hot Jupiter that should have cleared everything out. JWST read the atmosphere and found a story of two worlds that migrated inward together.
About 200,000 light-years away, in a corner of the Small Magellanic Cloud, NGC 602 is a star cluster where the death of massive stars and the birth of new ones play out in the same place, at the same time. What JWST and Chandra captured together looks like a cosmic wreath — and it doubles as a window into what the early universe was like.
JWST detected methane and an unusually high abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. The chemical ratios look nothing like those of comets born in our own solar system. This is the first time we have directly measured the composition of material made around another star.
Erythrulose, a 4-carbon sugar, has been detected for the first time in the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027 near the galactic center. It could be the raw material for TNA, a simpler genetic molecule than DNA. Even more surprising: the sugar wasn't built one carbon at a time — it formed by snapping two 2-carbon fragments together.
In March 2025, ESA's Euclid space telescope trained its lens on a densely packed region toward the Milky Way's core. Here's what gravitational microlensing — the technique that lets stars find other stars' planets — could uncover, as data from the survey prepares for public release on June 24.
A red dwarf barely 40% the mass of our Sun is orbited by a gas giant nearly the size of Jupiter. TOI-5205b shouldn't exist according to planet formation theory — and when JWST peered at its atmosphere, the surprises kept coming.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch on August 30, 2026. With a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble, it will simultaneously attack three of astronomy's biggest puzzles: dark energy, exoplanets, and galaxy evolution. Here's what's happening on the ground before it leaves.
On WASP-94Ab, a giant planet 690 light-years away, silicate clouds made of vaporized rock form every morning and vanish by dusk. JWST's first direct observation of this rock-cloud cycle — and why it changes everything we know about planetary atmospheres.
In June 2026, the SPHERE instrument at ESO's VLT captured four years of observations that reveal, for the first time, a protoplanetary disk actually rotating. The AB Aurigae system is messier than theory predicted — and that's exciting.
For the first time, astronomers have directly detected a powerful wind blowing from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Why did it take half a century to spot? And what does this discovery mean for how galaxies evolve?
In July 2026, China's Tianwen-2 probe will rendezvous with Kamo'oalewa — a 40–100 m rock that follows Earth around the Sun. Could it be a fragment blasted off the lunar surface, or just a regular space rock that happened to wander close? SORABUMI breaks it down.
Voyager and Cassini kept measuring different rotation rates for Saturn, and nobody could agree on why. Then JWST stared at the north pole for a full day and found the culprit: a self-sustaining atmospheric feedback loop powered by aurora. Here's how a 40-year mystery finally unraveled.
The spiral galaxy M88, 63 million light-years away, is losing its gas as it plows through the Virgo Cluster. Hubble's observations of this "ram pressure stripping" reveal the mechanism that decides a galaxy's fate — explained clearly.
At the center of two dwarf galaxies named Perias and Nereus, astronomers found black holes that account for up to 60% of the galaxy's stellar mass — a figure that should be 0.1 to 0.5%. JWST is rewriting what we thought we knew about the early universe.
On the evening of June 9, 2026, Venus and Jupiter will close to within 1.5 degrees of each other in the western sky. They'll look like neighbors, but the actual gap between them is hundreds of millions of kilometers. Here's what a conjunction really is, and how to make the most of it.
TIC 295741342 is a triple-star system discovered by NASA's TESS satellite in which three stars orbit on nearly the same plane. The result is a remarkable 'head and shoulders' eclipse pattern that lets astronomers measure all three stars at once — a find with almost no precedent.
In May 2026, NASA officially announced its plans to build a base at the lunar south pole. The goal has shifted from 'returning to the Moon' to 'staying there.' We break down the seven-year plan and what lunar living would actually require.
Red dwarfs — small, dim, and utterly unremarkable — have been quietly swallowing their own planets. A May 2026 discovery used lithium as the smoking gun. The same thing may have happened in our own solar system.
On April 13, 2029, asteroid Apophis will pass just 32,000 km from Earth — closer than geostationary satellites. Up to 2 billion people could watch it move across the sky without a telescope. There's no collision risk, which is exactly why it's worth watching.
More than 130 small volcanoes have been confirmed clustered at the floor of Valles Marineris, Mars' massive canyon system. Evidence that magma and water once coexisted there makes it a compelling candidate in the search for ancient life. SORABUMI explains.
Astronomers have discovered a super-Earth orbiting the red dwarf Ross 318, a mere 28 light-years from Earth. With six times our planet's mass, it sits inside the habitable zone where liquid water could exist — and hints of an atmosphere make it one of the most compelling nearby finds in years.
Captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in the constellation Scorpius, globular cluster NGC 6441 packs stars at densities more than 5,000 times greater than our solar neighborhood. In that crush, stellar collisions are just another Tuesday. Here's a look at the remarkable structure of this cluster — and what it tells us about the age of the universe.
NASA's Juno spacecraft has captured detailed observations of Jovian lightning, confirming discharges with more than a million times the energy of Earth's. We look at 613 microwave pulses, the reason water behaves so differently in a hydrogen sky, and what the storm planet is still hiding.