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Fresh off a successful second mission, Blue Origin is throttling up. CEO Dave Limp has announced "incredible upgrades" to the New Glenn heavy-lift rocket starting as soon as mission No. 3. By pushing their BE-4 and BE-3U engines to new limits, and introducing a future super-heavy variant, Blue Origin is positioning itself as a serious contender against SpaceX's Starship and NASA's SLS.

Cellular communication, GPS, and weather monitoring now rely on mega-constellations like Starlink and Kuiper. But as these networks swell to tens of thousands of satellites, the traditional method of managing them—where ground stations talk to every single satellite—is creating a massive data bottleneck. A new paper proposes a radical shift: let the satellites manage themselves.

Cosmic rays constantly bombard Earth, but their energy spectrum isn't a smooth line. Around 3 PeV (quadrillion electron volts), the number of rays drops sharply, creating a "knee" in the graph. The cause of this drop has been a mystery for nearly seven decades. Now, groundbreaking results from the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) have pinpointed the source of these high-energy particles: micro-quasars within our own Milky Way.

On November 5, 2025, NASA's Europa Clipper was busy testing its Stellar Reference Units—star-tracking cameras used to keep the spacecraft oriented. In a single frame, covering just 0.1% of the sky, it captured a field of stars... and something else. A tiny, pale dot near the edge was actually the planet Uranus, floating 2 billion miles away.

Ancient Mars was wet, but is there liquid water today? In 2018, the MARSIS radar instrument detected a bright reflection under the south polar ice, suggesting a 20km-wide buried lake. This would be huge for habitability. But keeping water liquid there requires impossible amounts of salt or heat. Now, a second radar instrument, SHARAD, has taken a closer look using a special maneuver, and the results challenge the "lake" theory.

A visual representation of recent discoveries and questions regarding the Kuiper Belt's structure. The analysis of 1,650 objects reveals a 'kernel' with circular orbits, raising possibilities of a larger structure or an additional distinct entity. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory aims to provide further clarity on this cosmic mystery.

Despite eons of gazing at the "Man in the Moon," many of us miss the fact that our celestial neighbor is still under construction. While the massive, basin-forming impacts ended billions of years ago, the Moon is still struck by asteroids and comets today. Catching these impacts is a challenge, but thanks to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), we can now spot fresh craters that appeared almost overnight.

While skywatchers from Florida to northern Europe marveled at brilliant auroras, researchers at NJIT's Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (CSTR) were watching a different kind of light show. Their network of radio telescopes captured how a relentless barrage of X-class flares jolted the ionosphere—the layer of Earth's atmosphere critical for GPS and radio signals.

For years, astronomers have hunted for Population III (Pop III) stars. These are the first stars ever born, composed *only* of the hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang. They were massive, lived short, violent lives, and died out long ago. Now, a team led by Ari Visbal believes they've spotted their signature in a distant galaxy called LAP1-B, and it's the first candidate to match all theoretical predictions.

Sagittarius B2 (Sgr B2) is a titan of star formation, a dense cloud near our galactic center churning out new stars at a furious pace. Using the unprecedented power of the James Webb Space Telescope's infrared eyes, astronomers have pierced through the obscuring dust to get their clearest view yet of this stellar nursery, revealing hidden structures and challenging previous assumptions about how stars form in extreme environments.

The OSIRIS-REx mission has successfully brought back pieces of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and the findings are extraordinary. More than just a simple space rock, Bennu is a composite object, assembled from the rubble of a much larger parent body. Its chemistry tells a story of materials gathered from the hot inner solar system, the icy outer reaches, and even from ancient stars that died long before our sun ignited.

Building on the wild success of its predecessor, CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Observatory and Radio-transient Detector (CHORD) will be an order of magnitude more powerful. This homegrown telescope will leverage cutting-edge technology to detect thousands of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) in real-time, giving astronomers an unprecedented tool to map the cosmos and understand the enigmatic sources of these fleeting, powerful signals.