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Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 are shutting down instruments one by one as power dwindles by 4 watts every year. With only two science tools left, NASA is preparing a high-stakes maneuver called the 'Big Bang.'
JWST has detected methane in the atmosphere of exoplanet TOI-199b — a planet roughly the size of Saturn with temperatures around 79°C. This 'temperate giant' is a new category of world, and it's already shaking up our models of how planets form.
SpaceX's Starship has reached its third generation. New Raptor 3 engines, fewer grid fins, and an integrated hot-stage ring. This isn't a minor update — it's a fundamental redesign built around mass production and full reusability.
A Japanese research team has pinpointed a massive solar storm that struck around 1200–1201 CE. The evidence comes from two sources: a sharp spike in carbon-14 trapped in the rings of a buried tree from northern Japan, and a line in the medieval diary of poet Fujiwara no Teika describing 'a red light in the northern sky.' An 800-year-old convergence — and a warning for today.
Why do comets shatter? This piece breaks down three mechanisms — tidal disruption, thermal explosion, and spin-up — and explores what the spectacular crash of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 revealed about our solar system.
How can a spacecraft speed up without burning a drop of fuel? Gravity assist — the trick that took Voyager to the edge of the solar system and is now sending NASA's Psyche spacecraft toward a metal asteroid — is one of the cleverest moves in the history of spaceflight. Here's how it actually works.
In May 2026, NASA's Psyche spacecraft flew past Mars and gained 4 km/s of speed without burning a drop of fuel. Here's how gravity assist works, why it matters, and the 50-year history behind this elegant trick of orbital mechanics.
Galaxies don't float around randomly. They line up along thread-like structures called filaments, tied together at knots called galaxy clusters. JWST's COSMOS-Web survey has now produced the highest-resolution map of this cosmic web ever made, reaching back to just one billion years after the Big Bang.
China's Chang'e 7 launches in August 2026, heading for the lunar south pole on a mission to collect water ice directly. Here's why lunar water matters so much — from the strange physics of permanently shadowed craters to what it means for the future of space exploration.
Researchers melted 300 kilograms of Antarctic ice core spanning 80,000 years and found iron-60 — a radioactive element that can only be born in a supernova explosion. It turns out the region of space the solar system is currently passing through is the remnant of a star that once exploded.
Glaciers spread across Mars's mid-latitudes turned out to be more than 80% pure water ice, not rock. Here's what that means, and why it matters for crewed exploration.
Astronomers have detected a thin atmosphere around 2002 XV93, a trans-Neptunian object just ~500 km across — smaller than Pluto. We break down why such a tiny body can hold onto gas at all, and how stellar occultation makes the detection possible.
On April 13, 2029, asteroid Apophis will skim past Earth at just 32,000 km — closer than geostationary satellites. During this once-in-10,000-year flyby, Earth's gravity will physically reshape the rock in real time. ESA and JAXA's Ramses mission will be there to document it.
A massive galaxy with barely any rotation has been discovered just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. JWST's observations are quietly dismantling the assumption that young galaxies always spin.
ESA's exoplanet-hunting mission PLATO bundles 26 cameras to monitor up to 1 million stars. It aims to measure planetary radii to within 3% and even determine stellar ages. What sets it apart from previous telescopes, and what does it really mean to find an 'Earth-like planet'?
Just 300 million years after the Big Bang, a galaxy rivaling the Milky Way in 'maturity' already existed. JADES-GS-z14-0, discovered by JWST, is challenging the foundations of cosmology.
More than 650 new sensors have been added to IceCube, the massive detector buried in Antarctic ice. Here's the story of how humanity dares to 'catch' neutrinos — particles that pass through everything — and what secrets we're hoping to uncover.
In 2022, NASA slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos and changed its orbit — the first time humanity had ever deflected a space rock. Now ESA's Hera mission is heading there to examine the aftermath. Here's how far planetary defense has come.
NASA's Juno spacecraft has remeasured Jupiter's shape, overturning figures that planetary scientists had relied on since the 1970s. The equatorial radius is about 8 km shorter than previously thought, the polar radius about 24 km shorter. That 'small' difference is now rippling through exoplanet research.
The AI pipeline RAVEN analyzed light curves from 2.2 million TESS-observed stars, confirming 118 new planets and revealing that roughly 10% of Sun-like stars host a close-in planet. Here's how it works and why it matters.
BepiColombo, the joint ESA–JAXA mission launched in 2018, will finally enter Mercury's orbit in November 2026. Why does the journey take so long, and what makes Mercury such a puzzling world?
SMILE, a spacecraft developed jointly by ESA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is set to launch on May 19, 2026. It will image — for the first time — the moment the solar wind slams into Earth's magnetosphere using X-rays, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of space weather.
Galaxy clusters — the most massive objects in the universe — may contain roughly twice the baryonic mass astronomers have long assumed. The culprit is something no one bothered counting seriously: the accumulated remains of dead stars.
Dark "holes" that appear on the Sun's surface from time to time — coronal holes — blast high-speed solar wind toward Earth, disrupting GPS, power grids, and satellite orbits. Here's how space weather works and why it matters.