Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
China launched a Kuaizhou 11 carrier rocket on Saturday morning to deploy a privately developed experimental cargo ship and a satellite into space. The rocket blasted off at 9:08 am at the Jiuquan Space Launch Center in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and soon placed the DEAR 5 ship and the Xiwang 5B satellite into their preset orbital position, according to China Aerospace Science an

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
A Carnegie-led team using NASAs James Webb Space Telescope has obtained the strongest evidence so far for an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet, detecting a substantial gaseous envelope around the ultra-hot super-Earth TOI-561 b. The observations, reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, indicate that this ancient world is shrouded by a thick atmosphere above a global magma ocean. T

London, UK (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
Astronomers using new X ray data have found evidence that the structure of matter around supermassive black holes has changed over billions of years, challenging a quasar relationship that has been treated as a fundamental law for nearly 50 years. Quasars, identified in the 1960s, rank among the brightest known cosmic sources and are powered by supermassive black holes that draw in surroun

Berlin, Germany (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
Astronomers have directly imaged a giant exoplanet orbiting a pair of stars, in a configuration reminiscent of the fictional Tatooine system but with the closest-known directly imaged planet to its twin suns in a binary system. The planet orbits a spectroscopic binary in the Scorpius-Centaurus association and was found buried in data taken nearly a decade ago with the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI)

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
NASA's Center for Geospace Storms, or CGS, has released the Multiscale Atmosphere-Geospace Environment model, or MAGE, a supercomputer-based system that uses NASA mission data to show how different regions of geospace react to solar disturbances. The MAGE model links several existing predictive tools for Earth's magnetosphere, ring current, and upper atmosphere into a single framework, giv

Torrance, CA (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
K2 Space has closed a 250 million dollar Series C funding round that values the company at 3 billion dollars as it prepares to field a new generation of large high power satellites designed for the heavy lift launch era. The round follows 500 million dollars in signed contracts with commercial operators and U.S. government customers and is led by Redpoint, with participation from accounts advise

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
Jarosite, a sulfate mineral widely detected on Mars, records interaction between acidic, oxidizing waters and the planet's surface rocks, but the halogen chemistry of those fluids has been difficult to reconstruct. New experimental work examines how bromine and chlorine enter jarosite under Mars-like conditions, using them as tracers of fluid evolution and environmental conditions. Researc

Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
Researchers from China, Canada, and Japan have established a quantitative method to read the impact histories recorded in enstatite chondrites using micro X ray diffraction measurements. Enstatite chondrites are rare meteorites that formed in highly reducing conditions close to the young Sun and are chemically similar to the material that built Earth, making them key samples for reconstructing e

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Dec 12, 2025
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has released detailed plans for a major survey that will reveal our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in unprecedented detail. In one month of observations spread across two years, the survey will unveil tens of billions of stars and explore previously uncharted structures. "The Galactic Plane Survey will revolutionize our understanding of the Milky

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Dec 14, 2025
Images captured by NASA's Parker Solar Probe as the spacecraft made its record-breaking closest approach to the Sun in December 2024 have now revealed new details about how solar magnetic fields responsible for space weather escape from the Sun - and how sometimes they don't. Like a toddler, our Sun occasionally has disruptive outbursts. But instead of throwing a fit, the Sun spews magneti