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Analysis

Deep dives and explainers

Mission breakdowns, science context, and the bigger picture behind the headlines. Written for curious minds, not aerospace engineers.

Artist's impression of two black holes orbiting each other before merging.
black holesgravitational waves

The forbidden zone for black holes just got confirmed

LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA's fourth catalog shows a clean gap in black-hole masses starting near 44 solar masses, exactly where stellar theory says collapsing stars should fail to leave a remnant. Anything heavier had to be built from smaller mergers.
Total solar eclipse with the sun's corona visible around a dark moon.
historygeneral relativity

107 years ago today, a solar eclipse made Einstein famous

On May 29, 1919, two British expeditions photographed stars near the eclipsed sun and measured a number that Newton could not produce. The light bent by 1.75 arcseconds, general relativity passed its first real test, and a Swiss patent clerk became a household name overnight.
Artist rendering of a planet with a bright star in the background.
exoplanetsTESS

An AI just validated 118 new exoplanets in old TESS data, including the rarest planets in the galaxy

A Warwick-led team built an automated vetter called RAVEN, ran it across hundreds of thousands of TESS light curves, and confirmed 118 new worlds. Among them is the first direct measurement of just how empty the Neptunian desert really is.
A reddish, cratered planet hangs against deep black space, sunlight catching one limb so the rest sits in shadow.
psycheasteroid

Psyche borrowed 1,000 mph from Mars and is now headed for a metal world

NASA's Psyche spacecraft skimmed 2,864 miles above the Martian surface on May 15, stole a velocity kick from the planet's gravity, and turned its instruments on Mars as a free dress rehearsal. Its real target, the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, is still three years out.
Artist's concept of a rocky exoplanet orbiting a small, dim star.
exoplanetshabitable zone

A temperate super-Earth turns up 28 light-years away

Astronomers report Ross 318 b, a 6.2 Earth-mass world circling a nearby red dwarf inside the conservative habitable zone.
A long-tailed comet streaking across a dark, star-filled night sky.
interstellarcomets

3I/ATLAS carries water unlike anything in our solar system

Half a year after the third interstellar visitor swung past the Sun, the data is in. The comet's water chemistry suggests it formed in a planetary system far colder than our own, and a coordinated observation by Juice and Europa Clipper gave us our first stereo view of an interstellar object.
A faint, distant galaxy field with thousands of background galaxies of varying color and brightness.
jwstcosmology

Webb's early-galaxy puzzle is partly a black-hole problem

Two years of JWST spectroscopy have firmed up the picture: many of the brightest, most surprising galaxies in the early universe owe their light to overgrown black holes, not implausibly fast star formation. The puzzle is not solved, but it has changed shape.
An observatory dome silhouetted against a star-filled night sky.
rubin-observatorylsst

Vera Rubin's discovery alert system fires 800,000 times in a single night

On February 24, 2026, the Rubin Observatory's real-time alert pipeline went live and produced 800,000 transient detections in one observing session. That output is roughly what the rest of the sky-survey world combined produces in a year, and it is now happening every clear night in Chile.
SpaceX Starship stacked at Starbase ahead of an integrated flight test
starshipspacex

Starship V3 flies, completes its splashdown, and loses its booster in the Gulf

Flight 12, the V3 vehicle's debut, deployed 22 Starlink-class satellites and stuck a soft landing in the Indian Ocean. The Super Heavy booster failed its landing burn and hit the water at speed.
Artist rendering of a small dark asteroid against deep space, faintly lit from one side.
tianwen-2asteroids

China's Tianwen-2 is closing on Earth's quasi-moon, with samples due back in 2027

Launched May 2025, Tianwen-2 is on final approach to 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, a 40-to-100-meter rock that loops the Sun in lockstep with Earth and may be a fragment of our own Moon. Sample collection is scheduled for July 2026.
Artist concept of a hot rocky exoplanet, partially molten and orbiting close to its star.
jwstexoplanets

Webb takes the first close look at a rocky exoplanet's surface

JWST mid-infrared spectroscopy of LHS 3844 b, 48.5 light-years away, points to a dark basalt-like crust and no detectable atmosphere.
A Mars rover on the rust-colored surface of the planet
marsperseverance

The tubes on Mars: why bringing them home is quietly falling apart

Perseverance has been quietly filling little titanium tubes with Martian rock since 2021. The plan to fetch them back to Earth was supposed to be the most scientifically valuable robotic mission ever flown. It is now over budget by billions, behind schedule by a decade, and possibly about to lose a race to China.
The Milky Way galaxy arcing across a dark night sky
voyagerinterstellar

Voyager 1 is 24 billion kilometers away and still talking

Voyager 1 launched in 1977 with computers less powerful than a modern thermostat. It is now in interstellar space, more than a light-day from Earth, and last year NASA engineers patched a corrupted memory chip remotely from across that distance. The probe still works.
Earth seen from orbit, blue oceans and white clouds visible
roundupweekly

Space roundup: what happened this week

Europa Clipper crosses the asteroid belt. Axiom Space prepares for its fourth ISS mission. The Dragonfly Titan drone passes its critical design review. China announces a second crewed lunar mission. What you need to know.
Europa, Jupiter's ice moon, showing its fractured icy surface from space
europaastrobiology

Why Europa is our best bet for finding life in the solar system

Jupiter's ice moon Europa has a subsurface ocean, a rocky seafloor, and an energy source that has kept water liquid for billions of years. This is a serious scientific argument, not wishful thinking.
Rocket on a launch pad preparing for launch
launchcommercial-space

The New Space Race Isn't US vs. China. It's Everyone vs. the Launch Cost Curve.

Launch costs have fallen by roughly 90 percent in the last decade. That change is democratizing access to orbit in ways that are reshaping every other space industry, from Earth observation to communications to scientific missions.
The Milky Way galaxy arching across a clear night sky
carl-saganastrobiology

What Sagan Got Right and Wrong About the Search for Life

Carl Sagan died in 1996. In the thirty years since, we have discovered thousands of exoplanets, found water ice on the Moon and Mars, confirmed subsurface oceans on multiple moons, and built telescopes he never imagined. How do his ideas hold up?