…Primordial black holes (PBHs) are only hypothetical, but they generate a lot of interest. If they’re real, they formed immediately after the Big Bang from direct collapse of dense clumps of subatomic matter, without the need for any stellar progenitor. Researchers have long thought that they could be the prime component, or even the only component, of dark matter…
…In April 2018, a team led by Oxford planetary physicist Patrick Irwin reported the first clear detection of hydrogen sulfide gas sitting above Uranus’s main cloud deck…
Warwick University researchers have led an international effort to uncover some of the faintest debris in geosynchronous orbit that have ever been observed, finding fragments as small as 5 cm in size and obtaining valuable data for characterising their behaviour.
The *Tianwen-2 probe launched in 2025 and traveled 620 million miles (1 billion kilometers) to reach a safe distance about 12 miles (20 km) away from Kamo’oalewa, more formally known as asteroid 2016HO3. The spacecraft will spend nearly a year studying the asteroid* with a suite of 11 different scientific instruments before attempting to collect a sample from its surface, which will be sent back to Earth.
…"Once you have super-conducting technology available in space, you can then create very strong magnetic fields and you can use them for various use cases,” he said. “You can accelerate things in space very fast or change the trajectory of a satellite completely without fuel.”…
…a Yale-led team measured the internal motions of a faint, diffuse galaxy called NGC 1052-DF9 and found its stars moving too slowly to hide a normal dark matter halo. The galaxy joins two earlier oddballs, DF2 and DF4, and all three lie along the same narrow line of galaxies in the NGC 1052 field…
…After a long, challenging cruise phase with nine planetary flybys (one by Earth, two by Venus and six by Mercury), BepiColombo finally closed this chapter last Monday by permanently switching off its SEP thrusters…
In 2025, astronomers reported one of the largest rotating structures ever found: a cosmic filament some 50 million light-years long, holding close to 300 galaxies, with many of them turning in step with the filament as a whole. The coordinated motion is difficult to reconcile with the way galaxies are thought to acquire their spin…
…In May 2026, a team of researchers reported evidence for primordial black holes (PBHs) by spotting a short-lived flicker of light from a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud. They monitored millions of stars in this galaxy using DECam. They spotted one star that briefly brightened for less than an hour. They interpreted this as a gravitational microlensing event. Microlensing occurs when a tiny object passes in front of a star and its gravity briefly bends and magnifies the star’s light like a lens.
While designing anything for operation in space has its challenges, there is at least one thing that is more of a problem for objects in Earth orbit than for deep-space probes: atomic oxygen. We like oxygen because we need it to live, but it is also highly reactive as a single atom. Luckily, on Earth, most of what we breathe is O2. [Space Daily] talks about the challenges of the International Space Station dealing with the “space weather” of atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit.
…That something has been named Phoebe. And working out what it actually is turns out to be one of the most intriguing puzzles in modern astronomy. The phenomenon at the heart of the story is called gravitational microlensing and it’s one of the most elegant predictions of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. When a massive compact object passes between us and a distant star, its gravity acts like a lens, briefly magnifying the star’s light in a very characteristic way. The shape of the brightening is distinctive and entirely unlike anything produced by a variable star, a flare, or an asteroid…
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