Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News

The Great Water Mystery: Jezero Crater and the Hunt for Mars' Hidden History

Perseverance drove to the edge of an ancient Martian lake expecting a beach and found the inside of a volcano — rock that water has been through at least three separate t

What Keeps a Galaxy Churning: Andromeda's Supernova Secrets Revealed

Supernovae keep galaxies churning A new study led by Fan Yi Meng from Tsinghua University provides the first comprehensive census of superbubbles in the Andromeda Galaxy,

The Unifying Mystery of Black Hole Jets: Stellar and Supermassive Connections

SHOW NOTES Black hole jets follow one universal rule Adelle Goodwin (Curtin University / ICRAR, Forrest Research Foundation Fellow) and Andrew Mummery (Institute for Adva

The Youngest Planet Ever Found

Astronomers have confirmed the youngest planet ever found - Elias 2-24 b, less than a million years old, sitting inside a gap it is carving in its own birth disc 450 ligh

Roman Opens Its Eye

First starlight from Roman, a shorter fuse on the Solar System, weapons in orbit, and a globular cluster hiding behind the dust Roman opens its eye — and finds it has twi

The Evolving Enigma of Dark Energy and the Sun's Mysterious Past

An Australian-led team has rebuilt thirty years of supernova observations into one consistent catalogue — and it adds fresh weight to the idea that dark energy is not con

The Planet That Keeps Shrinking plus the Weekend Wrap

Today's episode — The Weekend Wrap, Saturday 12 September 2026: OUR LEAD: A SMALLER MERCURY Mercury has been contracting for four and a half billion years as its huge iro

Half the Neutron Stars

Today's episode — S05E191, Friday September 11, 2026: Main story: A population-synthesis study published in Nature Astronomy on 10 September argues that magnetars make up

A Hundred and Nine Flashes

Today's episode — S05E190, Thursday September 10, 2026: Main story: 109 fast radio bursts have been used to measure how much galactic feedback has smoothed out the matter

The Smallest Things Remember

Everything beyond Neptune is a leftover. The icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt never got assembled into a planet, and out there — dark, cold and empty enough that things most

The Moon in Five Hours

For fifty years the story has been that the Moon assembled slowly out of a disc of debris. New simulations from Southwest Research Institute add one thing everybody left

Europe Launches From Europe — And Two White Dwarfs Six Minutes Apart

A German rocket lifted off from an Arctic island on Saturday and became the first vehicle ever to reach orbit from Western European soil. Plus: the gaps in stellar stream

The Hydrogen Map: How a Radio Telescope Heard Half the Universe

Anna and Avery open the Weekend Wrap with a genuine first: South Africa's MeerKAT has detected the 21-centimetre hydrogen signal from four to five billion light years awa

One Flash in the Xenon: The Dark Matter Event Nobody Can Explain

Links & sources Brown University — LZ experiment sees surprising result in search for dark matter — https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-09-01/lz-dark-matter-results US Depart

BepiColombo Lets Go: Eight Years, Nine Flybys, One Irreversible Moment

Anna and Avery cover BepiColombo's arrival at Mercury beginning today, as the ESA/JAXA mission jettisons the transfer module that has carried it for nearly eight years an

There's Something Molten Under Mars's South Pole

Today's episode — S05E183, Wednesday September 2, 2026: Main story: A thermal anomaly beneath Mars's south pole. Writing in Nature on August 27, a team led by Alexander B

Catching the Uncatchable: Starship's Boldest Test Yet

Today's episode — S05E182, Tuesday September 1, 2026: Main story: SpaceX cleared Booster 21's static fire at Starbase's Pad 2 on August 30, the last major milestone befor

Roman Launches: A Telescope's Countdown Ends

🚀 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is safely away — Anna and Avery recap Sunday's clean Falcon Heavy launch, what happens next on the road to L2, and a surprise Aust

The Weekend Wrap, August 29: Roman's Countdown Begins

Today's episode — S05E180, Saturday August 29, 2026, The Weekend Wrap: Main story: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches tomorrow, Sunday August 30, with a prima

Forty Times Brighter Than the Full Moon: Inside the Space-Mirror Fight

Today's episode — S05E179, Friday August 28, 2026:   Feature story: US startup Reflect Orbital has FCC approval for Eärendil-1, a demonstration satellite carrying a 60-fo