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The mystery of how the sun's corona, which is its outer atmosphere, reaches millions of degrees could have a surprising explanation: cosmic dust riding the magnetic waves carrying plasma on the solar wind."For decades, researchers have focused mainly on how electrons, ions, magnetic fields and plasma waves transport and dissipate energy in the solar atmosphere," said lead researcher Syed Ayaz of the University of Alabama in Huntsville in a statement. "Our work adds a new ingredient to this pictu

The U.S. just celebrated its 250th birthday, and Americans living off the planet had a great view of some of the parties down below."The International Space Station orbited over Los Angeles on July 4th as America marked 250 years of independence with a burst of fireworks lighting up the city below — a celebration so bright it reached all the way to space!" NASA officials said on Monday (July 6) via the agency's ISS X account.That post featured a 15-second video captured from the orbiting lab, wh

SpaceX launched a passel of satellites to orbit early Tuesday morning (July 7).A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 81 payloads lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday at 3:12 a.m. EDT (0712 GMT; 12:12 a.m. local California time), kicking off a mission SpaceX called Transporter-17.As that name suggests, Transporter-17 was the 17th flight of SpaceX's Transporter rideshare program. The company operates another rideshare series as well, called Bandwagon, which has launched four mi

More evidence that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is much older than our solar system has come to light, along with clues that it formed on the outskirts of the protoplanetary disk belonging to its parent star long ago.Earlier this year, researchers led by Martin Cordiner of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center revealed that data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggested that 3I/ATLAS is between 10 and 12 billion years old, based on the ratios of its carbon and deuterium isotopes. This

NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) has a new method for detecting worlds beyond the solar system. The technique relies on a phenomenon introduced by Einstein in his 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity, called gravitational microlensing. The exoplanet in question is called Gaia23bra b. The first hints of this exoplanet were found in 2023 by the now-retired Gaia space telescope via the slight brightening of a star caused by a microlensing event.

Mysterious "little red dots" discovered in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope could harbor buried black holes that fire high-energy cosmic "ghost particles" through the cosmos.Neutrinos are referred to as ghost particles because as chargeless and near-massless particles, hundreds of trillions of them stream through your body every second at nearly the speed of light. Plus, the source of high-energy neutrinos frequently detected on Earth is something of a mystery. And another co

Mysterious metallic-looking spheres have appeared on a northeastern Australian beach, prompting the Australian Space Agency to warn residents to be on the lookout for what they state is likely space debris.Australia is investigating the possible space debris incident in conjunction with authorities in Queensland as well as the National Emergency Management Agency, the country's space agency wrote on X late on Sunday (July 5)."The recovered objects appear to be pressure vessels from a space launc

New Zealand company Zenno Astronautics has tested the first of its kind thruster based on superconducting magnets to maintain the position of a satellite in space.Superconducting magnets can convert solar energy directly into momentum in space and provide a source of acceleration that needs no fuel, but until recently, the technology was too large and complex to fit on a satellite. That's no longer the case. Zenno Astronautics, a spin-off from the University of Auckland, has flown its new "Super

A Japanese spacecraft has gotten up close and personal with yet another asteroid, beaming home stunning new imagery of the distant space rock.On Sunday (July 5), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)'s Hayabusa2 probe performed a close flyby of asteroid Torifune, a 1,475-foot (450-meter) space rock currently traveling through space some 62 million miles (100 million kilometers) from Earth. It was expected to be one of the closest-ever high-speed passes a spacecraft has had with an astero

The Artemis 2 astronauts look up at footage from their flight during a visit to Capitol Hill. (Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)As we reflect on this past July 4 weekend, and America's 250th birthday, we look to NASA's Artemis II astronauts, who recently reflected on their historic mission during a visit to Capitol Hill.What is it? Following their return to Earth from a 10-day journey around the moon in April, NASA's Artemis II astronauts headed to Capitol Hill. This photograph, captured on May

PASADENA, California — NASA's new alien-hunting telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), will be serviceable out in space (and it will have gamma-ray detectors, to boot).Do you remember seeing NASA's space shuttle astronauts working on the Hubble Space Telescope out in space? Well, it will likely be robots this time around, but NASA is planning for HWO to be serviceable, which means that they will need to figure out a way to work on, repair, and maintain the observatory while it operat

Silent neutron stars at the center of supernova blast sites may actually be whispering softly, following the detection of faint radio emissions coming from one such object for the first time. The discovery raises the prospect that there could be many more pulsars in our galaxy than we thought.When a massive star explodes as a supernova, the devastation leads to the star's core collapsing under its own gravity to form either a neutron star or a black hole. When a neutron star is formed, it is bor

Three years before the skyscraper-size asteroid Apophis makes its very close (but safe) flyby of Earth, scientists have already begun charting exactly when and where billions of people can watch it sweep across the sky.Speaking at an "Apophis T-3 Years" workshop held earlier this month at the University of Padua in Italy, retired cartographer Michael Zeiler and astronomer Rick Fienberg shared detailed visibility maps charting the asteroid's passage across Earth's skies. According to their calcul

A new rover prototype is teaching NASA scientists how to design robots that can think for themselves and navigate terrain that would leave old rovers stuck in the lunar or Martian dust.The Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain (ERNEST), developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently completed a 16-mile (26 kilometers) trek through the desert in Southern California. The journey took more than 37 hours of driving time over the course of seven days, and ERNEST completed i

Kids who grew up in the '80s and '90s couldn't enjoy the massive selection of live-action sci-fi TV available right now. With the biggest out-of-this-world adventures likely to be found in theaters, many of the most memorable — and undoubtedly the weirdest — concepts tended to be found in Saturday morning cartoons.This is a realm of exposition-heavy opening credits, relentlessly earwormy theme tunes, and heroes who, for no obvious reason, choose to hang out with cute/annoying [delete as appropri

For the Aug. 12, 2026, total solar eclipse, Spain's great cities will be pulling in eclipse-chasers from across Europe, but not every famous destination is equally well placed. In Barcelona and Madrid, the eclipse is a near miss — dramatic on paper, yet ultimately disappointing. Madrid gets a 99.96% partial eclipse, which means no totality, so no corona, no twilight sky and no plunge in temperature. Cue a mass exodus from Spain's two biggest cities in search of totality.To experience a total sol

Happy Fourth of July, Space Fans! As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, we here at Space.com got to thinking. How have things changed in space since 1776? What was the night sky like? What have we learned and where might we go in the next 250 years?The results are what you see below. A series of stories (some serious and some less so) about the last 250 years of space exploration, NASA and American achievements in space and what lies ahead. We even took a look at what Space.com mig

On Episode 217 of This Week In Space, Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik discuss the progression of American space efforts.Since 1958, the United States has been part of the spaceflight adventure, and since the mid-1960s has led in just about any category that counts. In this episode, we review which flights launched or landed on July 4, and relive some of our very favorite US space missions of all time!Download or subscribe to this show at: https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space.Get episodes ad-free

Humanity has likely dreamed of flight since the very beginning, marveling at birds soaring overhead and trying to puzzle out their seemingly magical secret. We made some halting steps over the centuries — getting kites aloft in ancient China, for example, and drawing up ambitious but unrealized flying machines during the Renaissance — but our boots were still firmly rooted on the ground when the United States of America was born on July 4, 1776.Things changed just a few years later, however. In

What did the evening sky look like for Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and their contemporaries on July 4, 1776? As the United States marks its 250th birthday, many astronomy enthusiasts may be asking exactly that. If you stepped outside around 9 p.m. local time on July 5, 1776, the sky would look much as it does today. Only careful measurements would show that the stars were not in quite the same positions they occupy in 2026.To understand the sky more fully, it helps to look at how people