compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan

Jodrell Bank Observatory to open £21.5m visitor attraction The Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire is to open a new £21.5m interactive visitor attraction. The First Light Pavilion, due to open on 4 June, will showcase archives and artefacts together with animations and projections…more

Astronaut Tim Peake opens Space Park Leicester Space Park Leicester will act as a base for scientists, researchers and businesses to work collaboratively across laboratories and offices. Professor Richard Ambrosi, from the University of Leicester, said the site represented “one of the largest groupings of space-related researchers of any institution in the UK”…more

Nasa’s giant new SLS Moon rocket makes its debut The American space agency has rolled out its new giant Moon rocket for the first time. The vehicle, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), was taken to Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to conduct a dummy countdown…more

Eugene N. Parker, 94, Dies; Predicted the Existence of Solar Wind At first, almost no one believed his findings on gigantic eruptions from the sun. Today, a NASA mission to fly through its outer atmosphere is named after him. Eugene N. Parker, the astrophysicist who predicted the existence of the solar wind…more

Blue plaque to honour Cambridge University ‘Big Bang’ scientist A blue plaque will honour the astronomer and cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle, who coined the term “Big Bang”. It will be erected on a wall of the house where he lived in Great Abington, Cambridgeshire, from 1946 to 1956. Sir Fred discovered how carbon and all of the heavier elements…more

James Webb: ‘Fully focused’ telescope beats expectations The American space agency has achieved a major milestone in its preparation of the new James Webb Space Telescope. Engineers say they have now managed to fully focus the $10bn observatory on a test star. The pin-sharp performance is even better than hoped, they add…more

Making a Camera That Works a Million Miles Away When the James Webb Space Telescope sent its first images to Earth, no one was more excited than Marcia J. Rieke, who oversaw the design and construction of its camera. Being responsible for an instrument like NIRCam is like a repeated roller coaster ride…more

Scientists claim hairy black holes explain Hawking paradox Scientists say they have solved one of the biggest paradoxes in science first identified by Prof Stephen Hawking. He highlighted that black holes behave in a way that puts two fundamental theories at odds with each other…more

How a Tiny Asteroid Strike May Save Earthlings From City-Killing Space Rocks Movies that imagine an asteroid or comet catastrophically colliding with Earth always feature a key scene: a solitary astronomer spots the errant space chunk hurtling toward us, prompting panic and a growing feeling of existential dread as the researcher tells the wider world….more

Ice Volcanoes Reshape Pluto and Hint at a Hidden Ocean In July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft gave humanity its only close-up of Pluto. The spacecraft found that the dwarf planet, far from being a featureless and frigid orb, was an ostentatious world with epic impact craters, methane ice and nitrogen snow…more

Hubble: ‘Single star’ detected at record-breaking distance They’ve nicknamed it “Earendel” and it’s the most distant, single star yet imaged by a telescope. The light from this object has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us. It’s at the sort of distance that telescopes normally would only be able to resolve galaxies containing millions of stars…more