NASA has given the go-ahead for SpaceX to work out a plan to adapt its Starlink broadband internet satellites for use in a Martian communication network. The idea is one of a dozen proposals that have won NASA funding for concept studies that could end up supporting the space agency’s strategy for bringing samples from Mars back to Earth for...

The JWST is astronomers’ best tool for probing exoplanet atmospheres. Its capable instruments can dissect the light passing through a distant world’s atmosphere and determine its chemical components. Scientists are interested in everything the JWST finds, but when it finds something indicating the possibility of life it seizes everyone’s attention....

First light for the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) is quickly approaching and the telescope is reaching milestone after milestone. A few weeks ago, the observatory announced that its digital camera, the largest one ever made, is complete. Now the observatory has announced that its unique primary/tertiary mirror has its first reflective coating....

A beautiful nebula in the southern hemisphere with a binary star at it’s center seems to break our standard models of stellar evolution. But new data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggests that there may once have been three stars, and that one was destroyed in a catastrophic collision. About 3800 light years away, in the...

The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and higher to get better views of the Universe. On Earth, the best locations are at places such as the Atacama Desert in Chile. So, that’s where the University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory just opened its high-altitude eye on the sky, atop Cerro Chajnantor....

The JWST keeps one-upping itself. In the telescope’s latest act of outdoing itself, it examined a distant exoplanet to map its weather. The forecast? An unending, blistering inferno driven by ceaseless supersonic winds. WASP-43b is a hot Jupiter orbiting a main sequence star about 261 light-years away. It has a slightly larger...