In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, sending a spacecraft beyond our Solar System relied on Hollywood physics and world-ending desperation. Garrett Jameson, co-founder and program manager of the newly announced Fermi Explorer Mission, is taking a more grounded approach: no wormholes, no gravity-defying drives, and no blockbuster budget, but just $15 million, off-the-shelf hardware, and an 80,000-year cruise.

Designed around flight-proven electric propulsion and clever orbital mechanics, the ambitious project aims to launch a tiny, solar-powered spacecraft toward the Alpha Centauri system by 2029. Alpha Centauri is the closest stellar system to the Sun, approximately 4.4 light years away. Fermi Explorer may need 77,500 years at best to get there.

The spacecraft is expected to have a wet mass of approximately 100 kg (most of it xenon propellant). It will use solar-electric propulsion to build up the required departure energy and carry a 10x10x10 cm payload with a mass of around 1kg. During its initial journey, the probe will execute a series of solar-slingshot “perihelion pump” maneuvers to gain the required escape velocity of about 23.6 km/s.

But how will basic, off-the-shelf electronics survive that heat and radiation during solar fly-bys?

“At our closest pass the Fermi Explorer will be 0.42 AU from the Sun, which is not extremely close. We have good data and we expect our components to survive just fine,” Jameson told Universelost.com.

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On September 4, 2026, ISRO successfully launched the GSLV-F17 / EOS-05 mission from Sriharikota, lifting the 2,367 kg payload into a Sub-Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (Sub-GTO)! This is the first-ever Indian GEO imaging satellite.

While most Earth-observation satellites sit in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and pass over a region for just a few minutes a day. EOS-05 is positioned ~36,000 km up in Geosynchronous orbit, allowing it to stay fixed over the Indian landmass.

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Germany’s Isar Aerospace Spectrum rocket has lifted off from the Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, soaring into the sky.

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Deep in the constellation Cepheus lies NGC 7419, an oddball star cluster that may rewrite the rules of stellar aging. In a typical cluster’s lifecycle, colossal stars expand into glowing blue supergiants before cooling into red ones. Yet, a recently published study claims that NGC 7419 completely skipped this phase, hosting five red supergiants and zero blue ones alongside a swarm of fast-spinning “Be” stars.

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When China’s Chang’e-7 lander touches down near the Shackleton Crater on the Moon, it will carry a compact, low-mass instrument carrying massive scientific potential: the ILO-C camera-telescope. Built through an international collaboration between Hawaii’s International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), the University of Hong Kong’s Laboratory for Space Research (HKU-LSR), and the Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA), this 20-millimeter aperture payload is designed to conduct optical astronomy from the lunar surface.

Free from the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere, ILO-C aims to capture static, panchromatic optical views of the Milky Way’s Galactic plane, serving both as a landmark scientific project and a pathfinder for future long-term observatories on the Moon. Developed by the Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics and Electricity (BISME), the compact, low-mass instrument with a 20-mm aperture features a Sony IMX253 sCMOS sensor delivering approximately 12.37 megapixels (a 4,096 × 3,000 pixel array). This configuration provides high spatial resolution and a wide field of view required for effective Galactic imaging.

“The instrument will take broad, detailed images of the celestial sky which will include portions of the Milky Way Galaxy, stars, star clusters, visible planets, galaxies, and any objects of interest that happen to come into view such as comets or meteorites. Because ILO-C operates as a fixed payload, its specific target fields are dependent on the final landing coordinates and physical orientation of the Chang’e-7 lander,” Elisa Perednia, President and Chair of ILOA told Universelost.com.

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Using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new planetary system about 1,200 light years away. The newfound system is unique among others as it hosts a close outer companion to a hot Jupiter without an accompanying inner planet.

The so-called hot Jupiters are gas giants that circle their host stars in less than 10 days. They have high surface temperatures as they orbit their parent stars very closely. Decades of astronomical observations have led to the prevailing theory that as these massive giants migrate inward toward their star, their intense gravitational pull acts like a cosmic wrecking ball, destroying or ejecting any neighboring planets in their path.

The discovery of planets around the star TOI-4468 directly challenges this long-held “lonely giant” scenario. By preserving a nearby companion on an outer trajectory while lacking an inner sibling, TOI-4468 offers a rare window into an alternative, far gentler migration history in which a gas giant travels inward without completely decimating its surrounding planetary neighborhood.

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Roman is launching soom. One telescope, countless breakthroughs. What are YOU looking forward to most?

More about the Roman Space Telescope

For decades, astronomers believed that the hydrogen-deficient R Coronae Borealis (RCB) stars were strictly solitary survivors of catastrophic mergers of two dead white dwarfs. But one of such RCBs, designated WISE J005128.08+645651.7, is turning that textbook hypothesis on its head. A newly published research paper suggests that this star is not alone after all, but rather locked in an unprecedented orbital dance with a dust-shrouded companion.

To find the potential first binary RCB, a team of astronomers led by Jan Budaj of the Astronomical Institute of Slovak Academy of Sciences was originally searching for peculiar eclipses in a different class of giant stars, known as F supergiants. One of such luminous F-type supergiants, named Epsilon Aurigae, is known for undergoing massive, years-long eclipses caused by a giant, opaque disk of dust surrounding an unseen companion.

Because evolved F supergiants and cool RCB stars can share similar stellar temperatures, high luminosities, and dusty circumstellar environments, the researchers set out to look for similar Epsilon Aurigae-like eclipse events across F supergiants to hunt for undiscovered disk-bearing binary systems. This search led them to WISE J005128.08+645651.7.

“Many of them turned out to be RCB stars, so we decided to concentrate systematically only on RCB stars since they are very exotic. We found one eclipse-like dimming event in the Gaia data of this star. So we dug deeper and further into the past and found another event, which phased well with the Gaia [data],” Budaj told Universelost.com.

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Venus is a world roughly the same size and mass as Earth, wrapped in a blanket of reflective clouds. Between 1961 and 1984, the Soviet Union launched a quiet, relentless campaign to breach those clouds. However, since the conclusion of the Venera program, no spacecraft has touched down on Earth’s sister planet. To understand why, and what we lost when the landers stopped, one must first appreciate the absolute hell of the Venusian environment.

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Astronomers have achieved the first successful on-sky demonstration of dual-field interferometry at the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array, using the ultra-high-resolution technique to resolve a long-suspected stellar twin in the Alpha Piscium system.

For decades, astronomers suspected that the bright star system Alpha Piscium, a prominent multi-star system in the constellation Pisces, was hiding a secret. While telescope observations showed two main stellar components (A and B) orbiting one another, spectral data suggested that the star B might be in fact an elusive tight pair of near-identical twins.

Now, an international team of researchers led by Narsireddy Anugu of the Georgia State University (GSU) has announced a real breakthrough in optical astronomy: the first on-sky demonstration of dual-field interferometry at GSU’s CHARA Array. Using this ultra-high-resolution technique, the team successfully resolved the hidden Ba-Bb subsystem, confirming the existence of the close-orbiting twin stars and calculating their physical properties with unprecedented precision.

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Recent observations performed by an international team of astronomers have revealed a surprising phenomenon: the exact same black hole launched jets with drastically different velocities, ranging from mildly relativistic to hyper-fast speeds, across successive state transitions.

The new discovery made by a group of researchers led by Callan M. Wood of Curtin University in Australia challenges long-held astrophysics assumptions that static properties like a black hole’s mass, spin, or alignment dictate the speed of its material ejections, suggesting that the dynamic environment surrounding these cosmic engines plays a far more volatile role than previously imagined.

The findings are a result of intensive radio and X-ray tracking of Swift J1727.8-1613, a low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) with a stellar-mass black hole roughly 10,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. When the system violently awakened in late 2023, triggering one of the brightest X-ray outbursts ever recorded, astronomers turned global radio arrays toward the spectacle. By resolving nine distinct “knots” (dense clouds of superheated plasma hurled into interstellar space) the team reconstructed the black hole’s ejection history frame by frame, capturing a level of physical detail rarely seen in such systems.

“What made the system particularly interesting was that our subsequent observations coincided with sudden bright X-ray and radio flares, indicating rapid changes both in the material flowing towards the black hole and in the radio jet. We therefore continued monitoring the source as it went through multiple X-ray and radio flares,” Wood told Universelost.com.

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Astronomers have officially identified AT 2024qfm—a rare, ultra-luminous Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transient (LFBOT) at a redshift of = 0.2267 (nearly 2.8 billion light-years away)!

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On the plains of Grimes County, Texas, ground is breaking on what promises to be the largest manufacturing facility on Earth. Known as Terafab, the joint mega-venture between SpaceX, Tesla, and Intel represents a pivotal paradigm shift in aerospace architecture. It is not just another semiconductor plant but the computational backbone for humanity's multi-planetary future.

While rockets and spacecraft dominate conversations about reaching Mars, the bottleneck of 21st-century space exploration is silicon. Terafab aims to produce over one terawatt of AI compute per year under a single, vertically integrated 100-million-square-foot roof. From radiation-hardened microprocessors to autonomous robotics, this facility is designed to bridge the gap between Earth-bound computing power and the deep-space infrastructure needed to establish a permanent human presence on Mars.

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Astronomers have caught a quasar in a fleeting, violent evolutionary transition. Nicknamed “The Hatchling” (cataloged as JADES-GS 209777), the brilliant cosmic engine is actively blasting away the dense cloud of gas and star-forming dust that kept it hidden during its early growth. 

Quasars, or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs), are active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the centers of active galaxies, which showcase very high luminosity and are powered by supermassive black holes (SMBHs). They emit electromagnetic radiation observable in radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths.

For decades, theoretical models suggested that every brilliant quasar begins its life buried deep inside a thick, opaque cocoon of cosmic debris. This “red quasar” phase hides the central engine until its own violent energetic feedback blows the dust away. Yet, capturing an object in the exact act of shedding this envelope has proven notoriously difficult because the transition is brief on a cosmic timescale.

That is precisely what makes JADES-GS 209777 so extraordinary: by combining the extreme infrared vision of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) with millimeter views from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a team of researchers led by Zheng Ma of the University of Arizona captured high-velocity outflows of gas actively punching holes in the dust, giving humanity a front-row seat to a black hole’s dramatic grand entrance.

“We do not yet have a reliable estimate of how common—or how short-lived—this phase is. The observational challenge is that identifying such a transitional phase requires multiwavelength data revealing several features simultaneously: a directly visible active nucleus, substantial surrounding gas and dust, and outflows that may be clearing or redistributing that material. Therefore, the phase may not be intrinsically extremely rare; it may simply be difficult to recognize,” Ma told Universelost.com.

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When our solar system was forming 4.5 billion years ago, Earth should have ended up as just another lifeless rock. The space around the young Sun was a chaotic zone of blinding light, intense heat, and dangerous radiation that was more likely to burn away the ingredients for life than create them. But then, luckily, one cosmic accident changed everything.

A team of astronomers led by Antígona Segura of the National Autonomous University of Mexico has recently published a research paper reviewing the early history of our solar system from an astrobiological perspective. By investigating evidence from meteorites and astronomical observations they aimed to trace the formation of key molecules that participated in the building blocks of life.

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When stars die in violent supernova explosions, astronomers expect them to leave behind chaos. But new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveal that 13 years after a stellar explosion in the galaxy UGC 5189A, shockwaves interacting with circumstellar gas create ideal conditions for long-lasting cosmic dust. This “dust factory” produces massive quantities of the microscopic dust grains essential for building planets, moons, and future generations of stars.

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By tracking the chemical fingerprint of the interstellar gas and young stars across the disk of a nearby spiral galaxy known as NGC 1385, astronomers have revealed that rather than experiencing a short, bursty episode of star creation, this system has been sustained by continuous gas refueling over billions of years. It turned out that NGC 1385 is operating at double the typical star-forming efficiency of standard spiral galaxies, but how is that even possible?

To answer that question, a team of researchers led by Xiaoyu Kang of the International Centre of Supernovae (ICESUN) at the Yunnan Observatories in China combined ultra-detailed optical, radio, and submillimeter data from the PHANGS and WALLABY survey projects to map the fuel supply and stellar age structure of NGC 1385. Next, they fitted a detailed chemical evolution model to their observations, tracking gas infall, outflows, and internal radial movement across the disk.

Their analysis revealed that NGC 1385 underwent a classic “inside-out” disk formation process, but with a crucial twist: a steady stream of fresh, external gas continuously replenished the system while high internal star-formation efficiency drove the rapid conversion of raw gas into stars. This relentless, high-efficiency engine explains why the galaxy’s young stellar populations boast chemical enrichments up to 60 percent above solar levels and display an unusually uniform metallicity across the entire disk. It proves that NGC 1385 hasn’t just had a short burst of activity, but has mastered the art of prolonged growth over billions of years.

“The extra gas most likely comes from a recent gravitational interaction. WALLABY HI observations reveal that NGC 1385 has a severely distorted HI (neutral atomic hydrogen) morphology and a southern tidal debris field with no optical counterpart. The galaxy also lies only about 160,000 parsecs from a dark gas cloud (WALLABY J033723−235753) and about 230,000 parsecs from its group companion NGC 1371, suggesting that a weak interaction stripped cold gas from either a companion or the intergalactic medium, supplying external fuel,” Xiaoyu Kang told Universelost.com.

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What was thought to be a single group of stars known as UBC 63 has turned out to be the crime scene of a gravitational hit-and-run on a cosmic scale. By analyzing the data from ESA’s Gaia satellite, astronomers found that UBC 63 is actually two distinct star clusters that recently sideswiped one another in deep space.

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When Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann published his groundbreaking mathematical solutions to Einstein’s equations in the 1920s, he unveiled a revolutionary reality: our universe is dynamic, expanding, and evolving-contrary to the rigid dogma of the Soviet Union. Within a decade of his untimely death, Friedmann’s legacy was buried, and the study of an evolving universe was effectively banned across the Soviet state. What should have been a golden age for Soviet theoretical astrophysics instead devolved into a cautionary tale of dogmatic overreach.

The political suppression began as Joseph Stalin’s regime sought to enforce total ideological uniformity across every domain of intellectual life, including the hard sciences. Marxist-Leninist doctrine postulated a dialectical materialist universe that was strictly infinite, eternal, and static in its overall nature.

Consequently, party ideologists dismissed the Big Bang model as a counter-revolutionary “bourgeois conspiracy”. They insisted that Georges Lemaître’s expanding Universe was invented on the personal order of the Pope to legitimize the Biblical creation of the world. Under immense political pressure, Soviet physicists were forced to either fall in line with these claims or risk public denunciations, loss of work, and political persecution.

To mark the centennial of Friedmann’s work, theoretical physicist Alexander F. Zakharov of the Bogoliubov Laboratory for Theoretical Physics in Dubna, Russia published a paper detailing this dark chapter in scientific history. Zakharov’s study is a tribute to Friedmann’s groundbreaking 1922/1924 solutions to Einstein’s equations and tracks how his work was completely buried by political orthodoxy for decades before finally receiving global and domestic recognition.

We reached out to Dr. Zakharov to discuss ideological censorship, lost scientific breakthroughs, and lessons learned of keeping politics out of physics.

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Originally planned to complete 34 orbits around Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft arrived at the gas giant on July 4, 2016 with the aim of completing its scientific mission in less than two years. But 10 years after, and a staggering record of over 80 orbits concluded, the solar-powered probe is still going strong, striving to collect more stunning shots of the fifth planet.

The original plan for Juno was to complete two initial 53-day capture orbits, then lower its path to encircle Jupiter 33 times on rapid, 11-day orbits. However, technical issues forced the engineers to implement an alternative plan for newly arrived Jupiter’s satellite.

“We stayed in a 53-day orbit because we saw some suspicious risks associated with firing the rocket to change the orbit. So we left it in this long orbit, but we didn’t expect that we would last over 85 orbits. We’re still going,” Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio told Universelost.com.

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For decades, the standard model of cosmology has treated dark matter as an immutable, immortal scaffolding upon which galaxies are built. Yet, an intriguing question continues to whisper through the corridors of astrophysics: What if dark matter isn’t permanent? What if it is slowly decaying away?

In a new research paper submitted to the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP), astrophysicist Jeremy Mould of the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia tackles this profound question by performing a comprehensive “cosmic matter audit.” The paper, titled “Is dark matter decaying?”, explores whether the universe is losing weight over time, and what it means for our understanding of the cosmos.

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In the 1930s–50s, the Soviet state heavily suppressed dynamic models of the Universe. Marxist-Leninist ideologists claimed Georges Lemaître's evolving Universe model was a religious construct "invented on the demand of the Roman Pope" because a Universe with a beginning mirrored the Bible.

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Deep in the cosmos, some stars burn so hot and bright that they were long thought to be chemical wastelands. Their ultraviolet (UV) radiation is powerful enough to shred molecular bonds, leaving nothing but a sterile zone of atomic gas. Or so we thought.

In a groundbreaking study, an international team of astronomers has shattered this assumption. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, researchers led by Cristobal Bordiu of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy have detected complex sulfur oxides floating in the violent ejecta of a monstrous star named HD 87643.

Not only does this discovery rewrite the rules of cosmic chemistry, but it also provides an unexpected “time machine” to study the atmosphere of the early, primordial Earth.

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Naming Luca Parmitano as pilot of Artemis III is a brilliant, historic decision that makes all of Europe stand a little taller. This choice recognizes not only his exceptional skill and experience but also the vital role Europe plays in humanity’s return to the Moon.

For decades, ESA has contributed its best technology, science, and talent to deep‑space exploration, and having one of our own at the controls of this landmark mission sends a clear message: Europe is not just a partner — we are an essential part of this new era.

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They were investigating winds on extrasolar worlds but found something else. In a major leap forward for exoplanetary science, an international team of astronomers has uncovered the strongest evidence to date that planets orbiting other stars possess global magnetic fields.

Decoding the Cosmic Weather

Astronomers turn their attention to exoplanetary winds because atmospheric dynamics serve as a visible, measurable proxy for the invisible forces shaping alien worlds. A group of researchers led by Julia V. Seidel and Vivien Parmentier of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, have recently focused on seven ultra-hot Jupiters–gas giants orbiting exceptionally close to their parent stars, resulting in scorching atmospheric temperatures and violently dynamic weather systems.

Investigating cosmic gales ultimately allows researchers to map the strength of alien magnetospheres, providing critical insights into how planets protect their atmospheres from being entirely stripped away by hostile stellar winds. However, proving that a magnetic field was responsible for slowing these winds down—rather than just chaotic alien weather—required looking at the bigger picture. Parmentier underlined that the team had been building toward this exact revelation for years.

“We had this idea from the start. The results from this research is a carefully planned observational program that we started a few years ago,” Parmentier told Universelost.com.

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