Space

White dwarfs — the superdense, slowly cooling embers left behind when stars like our sun die — are usually quiet cosmic relics. A rare few, however, are anything but. In recent years, astronomers analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft identified a handful of white dwarfs hurtling through the Milky Way at breakneck speeds of up to 1,240 miles per second (2,000…

With shiny new next-generation spacecraft come the complex systems required to track their technologically advanced systems. When it comes to NASA’s Orion spacecraft, that need is a whole extra room of monitors. NASA has opened a new complex in the Mission Control Center at its Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston ahead of the Artemis 2 mission to send astronauts around the moon aboard the…

For researchers seeking answers to the question of whether we are alone in the universe, one event nearly half a century ago lingers even today — the so-called “Wow! Signal” detected back in 1977. That strong, baffling radio episode was captured by Ohio State University’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, also known as the “Big Ear.” It has…

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has observed the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS for the first time. The powerful space telescope trained its infrared vision and its Near-Infrared Spectrograph instrument (NIRspec) on the comet on Aug. 6, 2025. Discovered on July 1 by the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) survey telescope, 3I/ATLAS is just the third-ever object found…