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Just before Halloween, ESA and NASA released paired Hubble and Webb views of the Cat's Head Nebula, a dust pillar in Carina 7,500 light-years away that is being carved by massive stars and may hold a young star as its glowing eye.
On the 100th US spacewalk from the ISS, NASA's Anil Menon and CSA's Joshua Kutryk spent 7 hours 11 minutes outside installing and deploying the seventh IROSA. One array remains before the station reaches about 215 kW.
NASA has joined the Artemis III core stage to its twin boosters inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, the start of a launch campaign that will also need SpaceX's Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn to fly.
Four CHAPEA Mission 2 volunteers leave NASA's 3D-printed Mars Dune Alpha habitat in Houston on Oct. 31 after 378 days of isolation, delays and rationed supplies, and the data they gathered will feed into Artemis and Moon Base planning.
Over 1,645 sols, Perseverance tracked dust grains as small as about 100 nanometers clinging to spacesuit swatches and calibration targets. A new PNAS paper finds the big clumps shake off, but the finest particles stay put, which matters for suits, airlocks and crew lungs.
CRISTAL, Europe's next polar ice altimetry satellite, is fully assembled, has passed its first solar-array deployment and launch-adapter checks, and moves to ESA's Netherlands site for a year of environmental testing ahead of a late-2027 to early-2028 launch.
NASA has dropped the near-rectilinear halo orbit from its lunar landing plans. Starship will now dock with Orion in Earth orbit and push it to the Moon, while Blue Moon reaches an elliptical polar orbit on three transfer stages, with a crewed landing targeted for 2028.
Rubin Observatory's first dwarf planet candidate, 2026 ED138, is a tilted world about 46 au out that may be 600 to 1,500 km across. It turned up in survey data a search code had already logged.
WD J1328-1450 is the first white dwarf whose gas disc shows four-peaked emission lines instead of the usual two, a sign of two separate concentric gas rings that may be shepherded by two planetary bodies somewhere between a few kilometers across and the size of Pluto.
Leiden astronomers propose that Orion's most massive star, Theta-1 Orionis C1, came from a recent merger triggered by its companion. A sudden jump in brightness could explain why the nebula's planet-forming disks and its expanding shell both look far younger than the stars around them.
GRB 220706A kept flaring in X-rays for about 51 days, or roughly 27 days in its own rest frame. That beats the previous record by about three weeks and leaves astronomers arguing over what could keep a cosmic explosion going that long.
A new Physical Review Letters paper finds that primordial black holes heavier than about 100 billion suns would have left a grainy imprint on the cosmic microwave background that Planck doesn't see. That rules them out as a major part of dark matter.
Two years after Rubin's stand-in camera began engineering tests, a newly released ComCam image of the Seagull Nebula's head is, for now, the deepest and sharpest view of the region on record.
After nine months grounded over two GEM 63XL nozzle failures, ULA's Vulcan returns Nov. 13 on its first six-booster flight, carrying 40 Amazon Leo satellites on a redesigned nozzle that has to work.
SpaceX ran a full-duration 33-engine static fire of Booster 22 on Oct. 25, moving Starship Flight 15 closer to its first attempt to catch the upper stage with the tower. The FAA license is still being negotiated, and no launch date is official yet.
Before a single photon reaches it, the privately funded 3-m Lazuli telescope has a plan: a new paper names 27 known giant exoplanets, including 55 Cancri d and beta Pic b, as first targets for its starlight-blocking coronagraph.
Rocket Lab's 'We're Not Hawking Around' Electron mission lifted off from New Zealand on Oct. 23 and dropped three HawkEye 360 radio-frequency-sensing satellites into a 520 km orbit. It was the 98th Electron flight and Rocket Lab's 19th launch of 2026.
After nearly three months of environmental testing at NASA JPL, the 1,265-kg Griffin-1 lander is back for final assembly, headed for a Falcon Heavy launch later this year to Nobile Crater with 10 payloads, including Astrolab's FLIP rover.
SpaceX says Starship Flight 15 will try to catch both the Super Heavy booster and the never-caught Ship upper stage, and Musk wants weekly flights in early 2027. The milestone is real; the timeline still has to be earned.
Reid Wiseman, who commanded Artemis II around the Moon, will become JPL deputy director and a Caltech associate vice president on Nov. 30, with responsibility for running the lab's operations. He is the last of the four Artemis II astronauts to announce a new job.
Vietnam signed the Artemis Accords at a digital-tech conference in Ha Long on Oct 28, becoming the 78th signatory, and Washington is presenting the move as the US-Vietnam strategic partnership extending into space.
NASA has confirmed UVEX, its all-sky ultraviolet survey telescope, after Key Decision Point C. The agency is committing to a launch by January 2031 and a $590 million lifecycle cost, later and pricier than the 2030 launch and $300 million first cited in 2024.
ESA's 350th Council has cleared the way for December's ministerial meeting in Rome, and Euronews reports that the plan on the table is a roughly EUR 10 billion, ten-year effort to give Europe its own way to fly astronauts.
NASA's Competition Model 2.0 cuts roughly half the material from first-round proposals and shortens selection for Discovery, New Frontiers and Astro-Probes from about 35 months to about 19.5, with tighter cost discipline promised once missions are picked.
At its 350th Council in Paris, ESA moved the Director General's LEO-Moon-Mars exploration proposal toward the Dec. 15 Rome ministerial, worked through how its role splits from the EU's, and named two new directors. The binding money decisions are still set for CM28.
Five years of VLA and ALMA images show Betelgeuse's radio atmosphere stretching and relaxing in step with the predicted orbit of its proposed companion Siwarha, the strongest evidence yet that the red supergiant has a close partner.
Lumina, a record-sized simulation from Harvard & Smithsonian, follows a 1.5-billion-light-year cube through hydrogen and helium reionization. It predicts that hydrogen reionized late and mostly by starlight, that quasars ionized the helium, and it gives JWST and Roman specific predictions to test.
Parker Solar Probe data from 0.1 to 0.8 au show the solar wind's magnetic field twisting one way at large scales and the opposite way at small ones, and that boundary drifts to longer wavelengths farther from the Sun. It's a new clue to the helicity barrier and the coronal heating puzzle.
InSight marsquake S0976a has been traced to faults 20 to 40 km beneath Valles Marineris. A Nature Communications study finds strike-slip motion on ancient faults, which is direct seismic evidence that the solar system's largest canyon is still tectonically active.
Two LaserSETI stations at AlUla Manara in Saudi Arabia are now installed, commissioned and observing. They are the network's fifth site and its first in Asia, using off-the-shelf cameras and diffraction gratings to watch wide areas of the night sky for brief single-color laser flashes.
After a planned commercial boost fell through and solar activity made drag worse, NASA has ended science on Swift. The two-year mission ran for more than two decades, logged over 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and fed about 7,000 papers. Its last observation was Oct. 20.
The Sun has gone almost blank, but an Oct. 26 filament eruption could deliver a glancing blow late Oct. 30 into Halloween, while the waning Moon moves from the Pleiades to Castor and Pollux and Mars closes in on Jupiter before dawn.
A waning Moon skims the Pleiades and Aldebaran on Oct. 27-28, then moves past Capella and on to Castor and Pollux before third quarter on Nov. 1. Before dawn, Mars is closing on Jupiter ahead of a 1.2-degree pass on Nov. 15.
Only two of Earth's temporary mini-moons have ever been confirmed, but an EPSC 2026 abstract by Grigori Fedorets says Rubin's survey should find one every one to four years, offering cheap targets for sample-return and asteroid-mining test missions.
One lonely sunspot is sliding off the Sun's western edge and an Oct. 21 CME may graze Earth on Oct. 25, but forecasters disagree on whether it will push aurora past Kp 4. Here's what sky-watchers can realistically expect.
A glowing "space jellyfish" over the East Coast before dawn on Oct. 13 was the exhaust plume from NASA's CRS-35 Dragon launch, lit by a sun still below the horizon, the same reason satellites shine before sunrise.
Sunspot AR4560 grew fast and developed a delta magnetic configuration on Oct. 23, pushing M-flare odds to 20%. Coronal-hole wind and a glancing CME may stir Earth's magnetic field around Oct. 25, but NOAA expects no G1 storm, so aurora chances stay at high latitudes.
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