Space

Starfish Space will make history next year, if all goes according to plan. The Washington-based company just scored a $52.5 million contract to deorbit satellites for the U.S. Space Force, the first deal ever signed for such end-of-life disposal services for a constellation in low Earth orbit (LEO). The agreement calls for Starfish Space to use one of its Otter spacecraft to haul down at least one…

Solar system comet C/2024 E1 (Wierzchos) makes its closest approach to the sun today (Jan. 20) during an event known as perihelion, when it will pass a little over half the Earth-sun distance from our parent star, causing it to brighten significantly. Comet Wierzchos makes its closest flyby at 1:24 p.m.EST (1824 GMT) on Jan. 20, passing the sun at a distance of 52.6 million miles (84.6 million…

Full-halo CME from the X1.9 flare. The three bright specks of light (left to right) are Venus, Mercury and Mars. (Image credit: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center) The sun sure has woken up this week, unleashing a powerful X-class solar flare on Jan. 18 that hurled a colossal, fast-moving coronal mass ejection (CME) directly toward Earth. That CME has now arrived, triggering severe (G4)…

Stars don’t start out fully formed. Instead, they begin when clouds of diffuse gas and dust clump together, becoming denser than their surroundings. Gravity does the rest, pulling material inward until a collapsing knot becomes a compact, warming core: a protostar, still feeding on the cloud that created it. That’s exactly what was seen in a recent image from NASA’s and the…