compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan

Our Galaxy Is Home to Trillions of Worlds Gone Rogue Free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs roaming the universe unfettered by any host star — don’t just pop into existence in the middle of cosmic nowhere. They probably form the same way other planets do: within the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding an infant star…more

Michigan State Finds an Observatory From 142 Years Ago Buried on Campus About two dozen men and one woman — all unknown — were photographed in front of an old astronomy building circa 1888. The round structure with a tiled roof had been the first observatory on the campus of Michigan State University, though no one knew exactly where it had once stood…more

What It Looked Like When India Landed on the Moon India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission landed on the moon on Aug. 23. There was no guarantee that the lander would make it in one piece. A previous Indian vehicle crashed in 2019 as it headed to the lunar surface, as did spacecraft from Russia and a Japanese company this year…more

The Biggest Question Mark in Astronomy? You’re Looking at It. The astronomers will tell you it is just an optical illusion, a pair of galaxies caught in the act of mating as seen from the wrong angle. Happens all the time. In the 1960 and 70s, Halton Arp, an astronomer at Hale Observatories in Southern California, caused a ruckus by asserting that galaxies…more

India’s Chandrayaan-3 takes the moon’s temperature On Aug. 23, thanks to the success of Chandrayaan-3, India made a strong mark in space history. Not only did it become the first nation to land a spacecraft near the south pole of the moon, but also the fourth to create imprints on Earth’s gleaming companion at all. However, the lunar lander’s touchdown was only step one of its ultimate story…more

Dying star analysed by Cardiff scientists Astronomers New images of a dying star have revealed structures that no previous telescope could detect, according to astronomers. The pictures are of a dying star at the centre of the Ring Nebula, 2,600 light years from earth…more

NASA Seeks a Nuclear-Powered Rocket to Get to Mars in Half the Time Avi Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University, followed the news about Oumuamua for months. Then one morning in the fall of 2018, he had an idea. For Oumuamua to accelerate as it did, something had to have given it a push…more

Mars rover Perseverance sees huge sunspot rotating toward Earth NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has caught a glimpse of a huge sunspot, indicating a region of high solar activity, on the far side of the Sun which will turn to face Earth in the coming days. The rover, whose mission is to analyse the surface of the Red Planet and look for potential ancient signs of life on Mars, took a moment from its usual tasks to take a look up….more

Russia’s Lunar Lander Crashes Into the Moon A Russian robotic spacecraft that was headed to the lunar surface has crashed into the moon, Russia’s space agency said on Sunday, citing the results of a preliminary investigation a day after it lost contact with the vehicle. It is the latest setback in spaceflight for a country that…more

Why Is the Red Planet Spinning Faster? NASA’s InSight lander fell silent in December after dust accumulated on its solar panels. But scientists continue to sift through the four years’ worth of data it gathered, learning more about what is deep inside the red planet…more