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Space and Astronomy News from Universe Today

  • The First Foreign Astronaut Will Visit China's Tiangong Space Station in Two Weeks

    An image of China's Tiangong space station, taken on May 25th, 2026. Credit: CMSA

    The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) will be taking a Pakistani astronaut to Tiangong as part of the Shenzou 24 mission, marking the first time a foreign astronaut has been to the station.

  • Baby, She's Back! SpaceX Catches a Starship From Orbit for First Time

    The Starship rocket's second stage, known as Ship 42, hangs from a set of giant mechanical arms on the launch tower at SpaceX's Starbase launch pad in Texas. (Credit: SpaceX via X)

    SpaceX brought back its Starship rocket's second stage for a first-ever midair capture at its launch pad, capping a record-setting, 22.5-hour orbital flight test.

  • When Einstein's Gravitational Waves Meet Newton's Tides

    A pair of dead stars spiraling together, radiating ripples in spacetime—just one part of the cacophony of the Milky Way's gravitational-wave information. Credit: NASA/GSFC/D. Berry

    A researcher at Freie Universität Berlin has developed a theoretical framework for searching high-precision measurements for possible relativistic traces in lunar tides.

  • Astrophysicists Cross Another Dark Matter Candidate Off Their List: Stupendously Large Black Holes

    This illustration shows a type of hypothetical primordial black hole called SLABs, Stupendously Large Black Holes, forming in the early Universe. Cosmologists theorize that they formed form matter overdensities shortly after the Big Bang. If they did, they should have left an imprint on the Cosmic Microwave Background. Researchers hunted for those signs in data from the ESA's Planck satellite and came up empty-handed. Image Credit: Christopher Gerlach.

    Astrophysicists are leaving no stone unturned in their search for what dark matter is. Different particles have been proposed, like WIMPs and axions. Hypothetical rimordial black holes have also been proposed. But there's another less well-known candidate, SLABs or Stupendously Large Black holes, a sub-type of primordial black holes. Alas, SLABs can't account for dark matter either, according to new research.

  • SpaceX Launches Starship But Passes Up Booster Catch for Safety's Sake

    SpaceX's Starship rocket rises from its Texas launch pad. (Credit: SpaceX via X)

    SpaceX sent its Starship on a flight that was meant to feature a first-ever retrieval of both rocket stages, but a launch-pad catch of the first-stage booster had to be canceled due to safety concerns.

  • LOFAR Takes the Deepest Image of the Low-Frequency Radio Sky to Date

    A compilation of the new science results from LOFAR. Credit: Ramírez-Olivencia et al. NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA/ A. Evans, University of Virginia, Charlottesville / NRAO / Stony Brook University / R. Cumming / C. Groeneveld / R. Timmerman / LOFAR / Kukreti / Sloan Digital Sky Survey / A. Kappes / F. Sweijen / DESI Legacy Imaging Survey / S. Badole / L. Calcada / W.L. Williams.

    Using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), an international team led by Leiden University has produced the sharpest and most sensitive radio image of the sky ever made at low radio frequencies.

  • Dense Galaxy Clusters Foster Mechanisms That Throttle Star Formation

    This is an image of the large-scale structure of the Universe from the Illustris simulation. Galaxy clusters are situated on the filaments in the image, and some of those clusters form extremely dense environments. In new research, astronomers examined one particularly dense galaxy cluster at the intersection of filaments like these to measure the star-forming gas there, and to try to understand what forces throttled the Universe's star formation rate after the Cosmic Noon. Image Credit: Illustris Collaboration.

    The Cosmic Noon was when the Universe's Stelliferous Era Began, and star formation was prodigious during that epoch. But since then, star formation has slowed to a relative crawl, despite the fact that we can watch them forming in regions throughout the Milky Way. What happened to the hydrogen gas that forms stars? New research found clues in a particulary dense galaxy cluster.

  • Shape-Shifting Robotic "Slugs" Could One Day Crawl Across Alien Worlds

    A set of three TeCoBots cleaning off a table. Credit - Adaptive Robotics Lab YouTube Channel

    Robots have been a mainstay of our early space exploration efforts. But they normally have wheels. Or in some cases, rotors. While those solutions are great on flat ground, they struggle with jagged boulders or tight crevices. So engineers have been working on alternative robotic form factors, and a recent paper in Nature Machine Intelligence from researchers at Colorado State University’s Adaptive Robotics Lab, describes a unique morphology using a design principle typically seen in architecture rather than robotics - tensegrity.

  • Tears of the Lion: Catching the 2026 Leonid Meteors

    An early Leonid from 2022. Credit: Northern Lights/Jan Curtis, used with permission. See the [full video here](https://www.flickr.com/photos/cloud_spirit/52468549652).

    It’s always worth being vigilant when skywatching in mid- to late November. Every year, a few Leonid meteors punctuate the November sky morning sky around the 17th. These silent harbingers are only a hint at the shower’s true storm potential, which culminates once every three decades. The Leonid meteor shower can put on a true spectacle, and while 2026 isn’t expected to be a ‘storm year,’ we could be due for some enhanced activity in the late 2020s going into the early 2030s.

  • Euclid's First Data Release: A Stepping Stone to its 3D Map of the Sky

    This graphic gives an overview of Euclid's first data release, DR1-Foundation. The two main survey regions are shown in the middle, overlain on the Milky Way's plane. A full Moon is shown on the left for reference. Each of the boxes are zoom-ins progressing from large regions down to individual objects. Overall, it illustrates how the Wide and Deep surveys work together to image large regions of the sky and to zoom-in on smaller objects. Image Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA Standard Licence

    The ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has released its first huge batch of data. It's all part of the telescope's mission to study dark energy and dark matter. The telescope is busy creating the largest ever 3D map of the Universe with its huge 600 megapixel camera, and new images give us some highlights.