All articles
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Astronomy
The most massive black hole pair ever found is hiding in a starless void
Two ultramassive black holes totalling roughly 60 billion solar masses sit at the heart of a distant galaxy, spiralling toward a merger that would create one of the largest black holes known.
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Science & Discovery
Saturn now has 285 moons — and the count keeps climbing
A 2026 batch of discoveries pushed Saturn's moon tally to 285 and Jupiter's to 101. The new satellites are tiny, faint, and a sign that a new generation of survey telescopes is just getting started.
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Astronomy
Webb peers into a nearby galaxy's heart and settles a 30-year argument
Using a clever masking technique, Webb resolved the dusty core of the Circinus Galaxy and found that almost all its hot-dust glow comes from right beside the black hole — overturning a long-standing assumption.
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Astronomy
Webb finds a black hole that grew too big, too fast, too early
Inside a 'little red dot' just 570 million years after the Big Bang, Webb has caught a supermassive black hole feeding voraciously — and far too large for its host galaxy, deepening a puzzle about early cosmic growth.
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Commercial
Why most satellites now fly on a faint blue glow
Electric propulsion trades thrust for efficiency, delivering specific impulses an order of magnitude beyond chemical rockets. It is why modern constellations and deep-space probes do more with far less propellant — and why patience is the price.
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Missions
Why Mars landings are an unforgiving engineering problem
Mars has just enough atmosphere to destroy a spacecraft and not enough to land one. Entry, descent, and landing compresses every hard problem in spaceflight into about seven autonomous minutes — and it sets a hard ceiling on how much mass we can put on the surface.
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NASA & Agencies
Mars Sample Return: the architecture, and the reckoning
Bringing Perseverance's cached samples to Earth would be the most complex robotic campaign ever flown. Its cost and schedule have forced NASA into a hard rethink — and, as of 2026, the agency is weighing competing architectures rather than committing to one.
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Science & Discovery
The Hubble tension: a 5-sigma crack in the standard model
Two rigorous ways of measuring how fast the universe expands disagree by about 9%, at better than five sigma. A decade of scrutiny — most recently with JWST — has failed to dissolve it, and the discrepancy may be pointing at physics beyond the standard cosmological model.
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Astronomy
Measuring a strain of 10⁻²¹: how gravitational-wave detectors work
LIGO detects spacetime distortions a thousandth the width of a proton across a four-kilometre arm. The instrument is an exercise in suppressing every other effect on Earth — and it has opened a genuinely new way of observing the universe.
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Missions
The long road back to the Moon
With Artemis II flown and a crewed landing now planned for Artemis IV in 2028, NASA's return to the Moon has shifted from promise to schedule. Here is where the program actually stands, and the dependency that still governs its timeline.
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Science & Discovery
From one solar system to six thousand worlds
Thirty years after the first planet was found around a Sun-like star, NASA's confirmed exoplanet count has passed 6,000 — almost none of them ever directly imaged. The methods that found them now drive a far harder pursuit: reading their atmospheres for signs of life.
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Astronomy
Why the most powerful telescope ever built has to freeze itself
Webb's gold mirror, tennis-court sunshield, and orbit a million and a half kilometres from Earth all follow from one requirement: to see the first galaxies, it must observe in the infrared — and an infrared telescope that is even slightly warm is blind.
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