NASA is planning a mission to demonstrate the ability to repair and upgrade satellites in Earth orbit. The mission, called OSAM-1 (On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing-1), will send a robotic spacecraft equipped with robotic arms and all the tools and equipment needed to fix, refuel or extend satellites' lifespans, even if those satellites were not designed to be serviced on orbit.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, its greatly improved infrared resolution, and sensitivity will allow it to view objects too old, distant, and faint for the Hubble Space Telescope, which Nasa designed primarily to conduct infrared astronomy launched on 25 December 2021.

New for 2022, the tau Herculid meteor shower may make an appearance on the night of May 30-31. Sometimes, astronomy can be full of surprises. Take the case of a tiny comet, normally far too faint to be seen without the help of a telescope. But in 1995, it suddenly and quite unexpectedly brightened up to become dimly visible with the naked eye.

Scientists have a new, more accurate, measurement of the expansion of the universe thanks to decades worth of data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

There may be a problem with the first image of a black hole. After three years of analysis, a group of researchers in Japan has produced an image of M87* – the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy – that looks markedly different from the one released by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration in 2019. The researchers claim that the EHT group may have made a major mistake.

On 15 August 1977 at 10:16PM EST, Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope scanned the Sagittarius constellation and detected a signal that was 20 times stronger than average, background emissions. When astronomer Jerry Ehman reviewed the findings the next morning, he wrote “Wow!” next to it, unknowingly naming the signal and its subsequent mystery.

After nearly 13.8 billion years of nonstop expansion, the universe could soon grind to a standstill, then slowly start to contract, new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests. In the new paper, three scientists attempt to model the nature of dark energy — a mysterious force that seems to be causing the universe to expand ever faster — based on past observations of cosmic expansion. In the team's model, dark energy is not a constant force of nature, but an entity called quintessence, which can decay over time.

There are few people in the world as qualified to talk about the black hole at the center of our galaxy as 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Reinhard Genzel. It was his decades-long research into this odd object called Sagittarius A* that gathered enough evidence to prove "beyond any reasonable doubt" that this radio wave-emitting body is indeed the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole.

Astronomers have revealed the trails of nearly 1,500 new asteroids hidden in data gathered by NASA's most venerable space telescope. In a new study, astronomers and a team of amateur scientists have worked together to comb through archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The project began on International Asteroid Day in 2019, when a team of astronomers launched the "Hubble Asteroid Hunter" project on Zooniverse, a popular platform for crowdsourcing science. The project's aim was to identify asteroids in old data from Hubble; signals that, in other studies, might have just been filtered out as noise.

Scientists from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research have used computer modeling to show how a hypothesized type of supernova would evolve on the scale of thousands of years, giving researchers a way to look for examples of supernovae of this model, known as "D6."

You may have heard that black holes, hyper-dense objects that lurk in outer space, are notoriously hard to spot—let alone hear. But scientists have found a way to peer into the environments around these extreme entities, and even convert some of their so-called “echoes” into eerie sounds for the first time, shared in the below video, using an algorithm named the “reverberation machine,” reports a new study.

Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley have conducted experiments that measured the physical limits for the existence of liquid water in icy extraterrestrial worlds. This blend of geoscience and engineering was done to aid in the search for extraterrestrial life and the upcoming robotic exploration of oceans on moons of other planets.

If you’re an aspiring life-form, you might want to steer clear of planets around orange dwarf stars. Some astronomers have called these orange suns “Goldilocks stars” (SN: 11/18/09). They are dimmer and age more slowly than yellow sunlike stars, thus offering an orbiting planet a more stable climate. But they are brighter and age faster than red dwarfs, which often spew large flares.

The Drake equation is one of the most famous equations in astronomy. It has been endlessly debated since it was first posited in 1961 by Frank Drake, but so far has served as an effective baseline for discussion about how much life might be spread throughout the galaxy. However, all equations can be improved, and a team of astrobiologists and astronomers think they have found a way to improve this one.

A powerful telescope in South Africa has detected a space laser, known as a "megamaser," that is 5 billion lightyears from Earth. Scientists named it Nkalakatha, an isiZulu word meaning "big boss." Nkalakatha is the most distant hydroxyl megamaser of its kind ever detected, and it was discovered by the MeerKAT telescope on the first night of a survey that was expected to include 3,000 hours of observation. The team of scientists, working for the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, published their work in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

It's no coincidence that the headlines have been full of solar flares and storms: Solar cycle 25, as astronomers call it, is now well under way. Solar activity, which space weather experts measure by the number of visible sunspots, rises and falls on a cycle that lasts roughly 11 years from minimum to minimum, although one cycle can be as short as nine years or as long as 13. The sun's new cycle is about two years in and should peak around 2025; although cycle 25 is expected to be stronger than its predecessor, it is still predicted to be feebler than average.

A team of astronomers, with the help of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), have observed a new type of stellar explosion—a micronova. These outbursts happen on the surface of certain stars, and can each burn through around 3.5 billion Great Pyramids of Giza of stellar material in only a few hours.

April has already been an exciting month for night sky watchers, with the full pink moon last weekend, several asteroid flybys, and the alignment of four planets throughout the month. Top that off with the Lyrid meteor shower, which first appeared over the Northern Hemisphere on April 14.

Telescopes that observe the universe in the most energetic form of light may help scientists detect the "fingerprints" of gravitational waves, new research reveals. Gravitational waves form when massive objects such as black holes collide, creating ripples in space-time that wash over Earth. Although current gravitational wave observatories, such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo interferometer...

A huge comet with a solid center more than twice the width of Rhode Island is on an orbital path that will swing it inside our cosmic neighborhood, astronomers say. The icy interloper is traveling 22,000 mph from the edge of the solar system toward the sun. In a study published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists said the comet is no cause for concern because it will not pass anywhere near Earth.