Astronomers have discovered 128 never-before-seen moons orbiting Saturn — giving it almost twice as many moons as all the other planets in the solar system combined. The findings have further bolstered Saturn’s status as our solar system’s “moon king.” With an updated total of 274 known natural satellites orbiting the gas giant, it is leagues…

Without a doubt, since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our view of the early universe, but its new findings could put astronomers in a spin. In fact, it could tell us something profound about the birth of the universe by possibly hinting that everything we see around us is sealed…

PUNCH is a group of four satellites that will orbit Earth above the day-night terminator to study the Sun. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab UPDATE Wednesday, March 12, 2025: The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying PUNCH successfully launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 11:10 P.M. EDT on March 11. By…

An artist’s concept shows SPHEREx in orbit around Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech UPDATE Wednesday, March 12, 2025: The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying SPHEREx successfully launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 11:10 P.M. EDT on March 11. Following deployment, the SPHEREx observatory established a signal with ground controllers and its mission will soon begin. An…

A UC Irvine astronomer got a privileged view of the launch of a rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base on California’s central coast on Tuesday as a SpaceX thruster carried into orbit SPHEREx, NASA’s newest space telescope. Lead scientist Asantha Cooray, UC Irvine professor of physics & astronomy, was in the NASA control room as…

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) observatory and PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) satellites, launches from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Tuesday, March 11, 2025. SPHEREx will use its…

In the past three years, astronomers have discovered a mysterious new type of radio source. We call these long period transients. These objects emit bright radio signals that repeat every few minutes to every few hours. We have found about a dozen examples, but we still don’t understand which type of star could emit radio…

Astronomers have cracked the case of a mysterious repeating radio signal that has been a mystery since it was uncovered last year. The team tracked the signal back to a strange binary system containing a dead star or “white dwarf” and a red dwarf stellar companion. The radio pulse repeats every 2 hours and was…

The objects around the ringed planet are tiny, but some of them may have formed relatively recently in the solar system’s history. Astronomers say they have discovered more than 100 new moons around Saturn, possibly the result of cosmic smashups that left debris in the planet’s orbit as recently as 100 million years ago. The…