All articles
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Astronomy
Webb is revolutionizing the science of brown dwarfs — objects that blur every boundary we use to define a star
Too massive to be planets but too small to fuse hydrogen, brown dwarfs occupy an awkward middle ground. Webb is now probing their atmospheres with unprecedented depth — and finding objects that challenge everything from the definition of 'star' to the origin of Jupiter-mass bodies floating freely in space.
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Commercial
The satellites won. Now astronomers are learning to live with 40,000 of them.
Starlink, OneWeb, and their competitors have fundamentally changed the night sky. The question is no longer whether to stop the constellations — it's whether engineering fixes and international regulation can preserve professional astronomy before Vera Rubin comes online.
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Stargazing
The Night Sky for the Rest of June 2026: A Planet Parade, a Venus Occultation, and the Strawberry Moon
Mercury joins Venus and Jupiter in the evening twilight, the crescent Moon lines up with all three on June 16, then occults Venus on the 17th. Add the solstice, noctilucent clouds, and the low-riding Strawberry Moon on June 29 — your night-by-night guide to the rest of the month.
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Missions
Still to Fly in 2026: Roman, a Moon-Lander Wave, India's Crew Capsule Test, and Japan's Phobos Grab
Artemis II is done — but 2026's manifest isn't. NASA's Roman Space Telescope launches August 30, four lunar landers chase year-end windows, Gaganyaan-1 rehearses India's first crewed flight, and JAXA's MMX departs for Phobos. What's still scheduled, what slipped, and which dates to believe.
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Commercial
With the ISS nearing retirement, the race to build its replacement is on
The International Space Station is slated to retire around 2030, and NASA is betting that private companies will build what comes next. A wave of record funding in 2026 is fueling a contest among several rival stations to be first.
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Astronomy
The coldest planet we've ever photographed seems to have icy clouds
JWST directly imaged Epsilon Indi Ab, a frigid super-Jupiter next door, and found less ammonia than models predict. The likely culprit — patchy water-ice clouds — would make it the first such clouds spotted on a giant world beyond the Solar System.
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Missions
Japan's veteran asteroid hunter lines up a 5-kilometer-per-second flyby
Years after returning samples from Ryugu, Japan's Hayabusa2 is still flying — and on July 5 it will scream past a 450-meter asteroid called Torifune at five kilometers per second, a rehearsal for the planetary-defense techniques of the future.
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Astronomy
Webb stares at a rocky exoplanet and sees nothing — which tells us plenty
JWST's mid-infrared look at the rocky world LHS 3844b found a dark, featureless surface and no sign of an atmosphere. For exoplanet scientists, a bare rock is a data point about which small worlds can hold onto air at all.
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Science & Discovery
A strange gravitational wave is reviving an old idea: black holes older than the stars
A peculiar signal recorded by LIGO has astronomers entertaining a radical possibility — that it came from primordial black holes born in the universe's first instants, which could also help solve the dark matter problem.
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Science & Discovery
After 11 years reading the Martian air, MAVEN goes quiet
NASA has ended its MAVEN mission after more than a decade studying how Mars lost its atmosphere. The orbiter rewrote our understanding of why a once-wet world dried out — and found auroras nobody expected.
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Missions
NASA's Moon base stops being a slogan and starts signing contracts
At a Moon Base event in Washington, NASA named the commercial hardware that will build out a lunar surface presence — pressurized rovers for crews to drive and uncrewed cargo landers — with the first robotic delivery targeted for as soon as this fall.
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NASA & Agencies
Six toaster-sized satellites are about to become one giant radio telescope
NASA's SunRISE mission, targeting a summer 2026 launch, will fly six small satellites in formation so they act as a single radio telescope ten kilometers wide — built to trace the solar storms that threaten astronauts and power grids.
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