compiled by Arlene & David Kaplan

Nothing is as we thought Do we know everything about the Milky Way? A team of astronomers has arrived to change everything we know about our universe, and they have found strong evidence that super-Earths (planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune) could be much more common than previously thought! They discovered it thanks to a technique called gravitational microlensing…more

A Massive, Glow-in-the-Dark Cloud Lurking in Our Cosmic Backyard Stars and planets are born inside swirling clouds of cosmic gas and dust that are brimming with hydrogen and other molecular ingredients. On Monday, astronomers revealed the discovery of the closest known cloud to Earth, a colossal, crescent-shaped blob of star-forming potential…more

Measuring 1.3 billion light-years across, scientists have discovered the largest structure in the universe while scanning space. We thought we had identified the great structures of the universe with superclusters of galaxies such as Shapley or Laniakea, but Quipu has just stolen the show. Imagine a sort of giant web, a titanic network of interconnected galaxies stretching over…more

China Fires Laser at the Moon in Broad Daylight In a major leap for lunar navigation, China has successfully bounced a laser off a Moon-orbiting satellite in full daylight—a feat previously thought impossible due to intense solar interference. The breakthrough, carried out by the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) using the Tiandu-1 satellite, marks the world’s first Earth-Moon laser-ranging success under strong sunlight, according to a report…more

Soviet Spacecraft Crash Lands on Earth After a Journey of Half a Century After looping through space for 53 years, a wayward Soviet spacecraft called Kosmos-482 returned to Earth, entering the planet’s atmosphere at 9:24 a.m. Moscow time on Saturday, according to Roscosmos, the state corporation that runs the Russian space program….more

Yes, astronomers have captured real photos of alien worlds in deep space. The field of exoplanet study is one of the most rapidly advancing fields in astronomy, going from first confirmed discovery to the first direct images of exoplanets within less than 10 years. Up until the mid 1990s, astronomers could only hypothesize that, if there are planets around our own star, the Sun, then surely there must be planets around other stars…more

1 Astronaut, Many Cameras and 220 Days of Amazing Images From Space Don Pettit, NASA’s oldest active astronaut, returned to Earth on April 20, the day he turned 70 years old. That concluded his fourth trip to space — a busy 220 days at the International Space Station. Like other crew members on the space station, Mr. Pettit conducted experiments, talked with students and exercised for hours…more

Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew With Duct Tape, Dies at 95 Ed Smylie, the NASA official who led a team of engineers that cobbled together an apparatus made of cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape that saved the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 after an explosion crippled the spacecraft as it sped toward the moon, died on April 21 in Crossville, Tenn. He was 95…more

New Studies Dismiss Signs of Life on Distant Planet In April, a team of astronomers announced that they might — just might — have found signs of life on a planet over 120 light-years from Earth. The mere possibility of extraterrestrial life was enough to attract attention worldwide. It also attracted intense scrutiny from other astronomers,..more

Eccentric ‘Star’ Defies Easy Explanation, NASA’s Chandra Finds Scientists have discovered a star behaving like no other seen before, giving fresh clues about the origin of a new class of mysterious objects. As described in our press release, a team of astronomers combined data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the SKA [Square Kilometer Array] Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope on Wajarri Country in Australia to study the antics of the discovered object, known as ASKAP J1832−0911 (ASKAP J1832 for short)…more