A team of researchers is advocating to use the moon as a secure site for biocontainment of extraterrestrial samples, particularly those from Mars, but also from other potential worlds like Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.
The researchers contend that our moon offers a naturally sterile and isolated environment that can act as humanity’s first line of biological defense against organisms perhaps…
The Leo Triplet shines in deep space. (Image credit: ing. Cornelis van Zuilen)
Astrophotographer ing. Cornelis Van Zuilen has shared a staggeringly detailed image of the galaxies known as the “Leo Triplet”, after spending 60 hours capturing the light of the…
A triple star system in which the stars all eclipse one another from our vantage point is standing out as one of the best studied stellar trios; as the stars age, they could even merge.
The triple system, known as TIC 295741342, is 3,080 light-years from Earth and was found…
Massive boom over northeastern US was a meteor explosion as powerful as 300 tons of TNT, NASA confirms
June 3, 2026
A sonic boom heard throughout the northeastern United States last week was caused by a meteor, NASA confirmed after consulting satellite imagery.
The meteor’s boom, heard widely on Saturday (May 30) at 2:06 p.m. EDT (local time), was audible over the northeastern U.S. NASA made the determination that it was a meteor based on both eyewitness reports to the American Meteor Society as well as…
Impulse Space just got a lot more money to help finance its big ambitions in the final frontier.
The California-based company — which was founded in 2021 by propulsion expert Tom Mueller, the first person Elon Musk ever hired at SpaceX — announced today (June 2) that it…
On May 20, SpaceX filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) key documentation for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock.
An IPO signals that a private company is now selling shares to the public on a stock exchange. SpaceX’s long-anticipated…
Astronomers have struck “black gold” — a treasure trove of black hole mergers. And the discovery was made by analyzing ripples in the very fabric of space and time, or spacetime, called gravitational waves.
This massive haul of mergers contained within the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalogue-5.0 (GWTC-5), released on Tuesday (May 26), could change our understanding of how black…
May's Blue Moon wows stargazers worldwide — see these stunning photos of the smallest full moon of 2026
June 2, 2026
May’s full Blue Moon put on a dazzling display over the weekend, flooding the night sky with moonlight as the red supergiant star Antares glowed nearby.
A Blue Moon is the name given to the second full moon in a single calendar month — a rare occurrence that only…
'A pretty significant setback': How Blue Origin's rocket explosion affects NASA's moon plans
June 2, 2026
The recent explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket during a routine test is a big setback for the private spaceflight company, and will likely have implications for NASA’s Artemis program timeline and the nation’s efforts to return astronauts to the…
Astronomers have discovered the first signs that tiny red dwarf stars can devour their own planets.
Scientists had previously suspected that red dwarfs, which are considerably smaller and dimmer than the sun, could consume their own planetary systems — but evidence has been elusive. Until now, that is.
Researchers have used data from the Gaia-ESO Spectroscopic (GES) survey to discover red…
