space

The Kreutz sungrazer broke apart approximately six hours before reaching its closest point to the Sun on April 4, peaking at magnitude -0.6 in coronagraph imagery before its nucleus shattered. Only submicron dust debris emerged on the far side, leaving nothing visible from the ground.

The farthest Kreutz sungrazer ever discovered will pass just 161,000 kilometers above the Sun's surface on Saturday, threading the inner solar corona in a make-or-break encounter that could produce a comet visible in broad daylight or end in total disintegration.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope caught comet C/2025 K1 fragmenting into at least four pieces across three days, marking the closest-to-breakup observation in the telescope's history.

The Y Combinator graduate plans an 88,000-satellite constellation for orbital AI compute, backed by Benchmark and EQT Ventures.

Scientists have detected all five canonical nucleobases in pristine samples from asteroid Ryugu, the first confirmation of a complete set of DNA and RNA building blocks in material collected directly from space.

Two March discoveries reveal a 10-billion-year-old lava world with a thick atmosphere and a sulfur-dominated planet unlike anything in existing classification systems.

A 30-fold expansion of the solar-twin catalog shows the Sun migrated 10,000 light-years outward from the galactic center between four and six billion years ago, carried by the forming central bar.

A University of Washington team identifies signs of a catastrophic planetary collision around star Gaia20ehk, offering the first real-time analog of the giant impact that created Earth's Moon 4.5 billion years ago.

The 1,300-pound radiation belt spacecraft burned up over the eastern Pacific Ocean on March 11, ending a 14-year journey that began with a two-year mission and yielded the discovery of a transient third radiation belt around Earth.

South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope has discovered a record-breaking hydroxyl gigamaser in a merging galaxy system, shattering the previous distance record by a factor of two.

Chinese Academy of Sciences spinoff CAS Space will attempt the first launch of its Kinetica-2 kerosene-LOX rocket from Jiuquan, carrying a prototype cargo spacecraft for the Tiangong space station.

Six months of observations of the third interstellar object ever detected have uncovered water, methane, and hydrogen cyanide in its coma--and a Jupiter flyby on March 16 could yield the closest-ever look at an interstellar visitor.