Category
Space
39articles
Did Claude Help an Amateur Astronomer Find a New Planet?
A star 116 light-years away dims by a hair every 3.18 days. Pavel Rabtsevich, a 28-year-old product manager in Spain with no astronomy training and no telescope, says…
NASA’s Webb spots signs of Mars-sized worlds smashing together
Only about 1% of young stars show any sign of the violent phase astronomers call an extreme debris disk. Theory says that number should be higher. A new…
SpaceX now targets September 28 for Starship’s first orbital flight
Starship has flown 13 times and never once gone around the planet. Flight 14 is the one where that changes, and SpaceX says it’s now aiming for Monday,…
Rocket Lab is furious about NASA’s $700 million Mars orbiter pick
NASA just handed Blue Origin a $700 million contract to build, launch and operate a communications spacecraft at Mars. On Friday, the company that lost filed a protest…
Have we found alien life? We asked hundreds of scientists
Only 6.6% of astrobiologists surveyed after the K2-18b announcement agreed that scientists had probably found extraterrestrial life. Nearly two-thirds disagreed outright. That gap between the headlines and the…
3I/ATLAS is packed with methanol, and ALMA just proved it
Two measurements, taken on two separate dates in late 2025, put a number on how strange this thing is: methanol-to-hydrogen-cyanide ratios of roughly 70 and 120. That’s not…
Astronomers pulled an ancient hydrogen signal out of 96 hours of old MeerKAT data
The data was sitting on a disk for seven years before anyone found the signal in it. That’s the part of this result worth sitting with. An international…
Isar Aerospace gave Europe its first commercial orbital rocket
The last time Isar Aerospace put a rocket in the air, the flight lasted 30 seconds before the vehicle fell into the sea and exploded. That was in…
Isar Aerospace just put Europe’s first fully commercial rocket in orbit
Seven minutes. That’s how long it took a 92-foot rocket built by three former students to do something no privately funded European launch company had ever managed. Isar…