☆ Space Press Releases

SAN FRANCISCO—Gladstone Institutes has secured more than 105,000 square feet of future laboratory space in a newly constructed building at 1450 Owens Street, empowering its scientists with the tools and environment to create medicines of the future.  Located a block from Gladstone’s headquarters in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood, the new space will be home to approximately 300 scientists across 20 labs, with state-of-the-art equipment and computational abilities, starting in early 2027.   “We’re at a revolutionary moment in science ...

EDGE is one of two next-generation satellite missions announced in February. The mission will help NASA better understand changes to the Earth’s surface and will create detailed 3D maps of vegetation, as well as ice formations like glaciers and sea ice. It builds on the work of two existing NASA satellites, but will do it better and more precisely. This is particularly important for ecosystems in the semi-arid west, where measuring low-height vegetation such as shrubs and vegetation on steep slopes is challenging. Accurate measurement of vegetation ...

Cambridge, MA (March 23, 2026) — A team of astronomers led by the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian have for the first time used galactic archaeology, the study of detailed chemical fingerprints in deep space, to trace the history of a galaxy outside the Milky Way. The study, published today in the journal Nature Astronomy, demonstrates a new way to reconstruct the evolution of distant galaxies, and opens up a new field of astronomy, called “extragalactic archaeology.”  “This is the first time that a chemical archaeology ...

A Northwestern-led team measured the spin rates of six giant exoplanets and 25 brown dwarfs using Keck Observatory, finding a clear pattern: giant planets rotate at a larger fraction of their maximum possible speed than brown dwarfs, suggesting different formation histories.

The SuperCDMS experiment at SNOLAB in Ontario has reached its operating temperature - hundreds of times colder than outer space - marking the transition from construction to active science as researchers prepare to search for lightweight dark matter particles.

Oxford-led research identifies L 98-59 d as a potential new class of exoplanet - one sustaining a permanent magma ocean that stores massive sulfur reserves and maintains a thick, hydrogen-sulfide-rich atmosphere. Published in Nature Astronomy, the finding suggests planetary diversity may be greater than current models allow.

Using Gaia satellite data, Japanese researchers built the largest catalog of solar 'twins' ever assembled and found a population peak at 4-6 billion years old, providing evidence that our Sun migrated outward from the galactic center en masse.

A chirp-like signal in the light curve of superluminous supernova SN 2024afav reveals Lense-Thirring precession around a newborn magnetar, confirming the long-theorized engine behind the universe's brightest stellar explosions. Published in Nature.

Superluminous supernova SN 2024afav displayed a never-before-seen chirp pattern in its light curve, produced by a wobbling accretion disk around a newborn magnetar. The finding, published in Nature, is the first direct evidence that magnetars power these ultra-bright stellar explosions.

For the first time, researchers have found robust evidence that a black hole and neutron star merged from an oval orbit rather than the expected circular path, suggesting the pair was shaped by dense stellar environments rather than evolving in isolation.

Rice University will lead the U.S. Space Force's fourth Strategic Technology Institute, a $8.1 million center focused on advancing remote sensing technologies for space with partners from UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Georgia Tech, and Aegis Aerospace.

Researchers extended a Newtonian result to Einstein's general relativity, proving that the tidal vibrations of inspiraling neutron stars form a complete set of damped harmonic oscillators -- opening a path to reading neutron star interiors from gravitational wave data.

Scientists have grown and harvested chickpeas in mixtures of up to 75% simulated lunar soil by adding worm compost and symbiotic fungi, marking the first time this crop has been produced in such a medium.

The LVK collaboration's latest catalog adds 128 gravitational-wave events from just nine months of observing, more than doubling the previous total and exposing an unexpectedly rich variety of black hole collisions.

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration has released its largest gravitational-wave catalog yet, adding 128 new detections that more than double the previous total and reveal an unexpectedly diverse population of colliding black holes.

The New York Consortium for Space Technology Innovation and Development has selected five projects for its second round of defense-funded awards, ranging from a Cornell facility to test materials in simulated space environments to a Griffiss Institute program putting middle schoolers to work on rocket payloads.

For the first time, physicists have measured the turbulent magnetic structure of space at sub-parsec scales by studying gamma rays above 100 TeV pouring from the Geminga pulsar. The finding aligns with turbulence laws derived on scales billions of times larger.

By treating an entire region of sky as a single blurry source of light rather than cataloging individual galaxies, astronomers built the first large-scale 3D map of Lyman alpha emissions from the early universe. The technique captured structures too faint for conventional surveys to see.

Johns Hopkins scientists tested the desert bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans under pressures up to 2.4 gigapascals - equivalent to Mars-ejection forces - and found 60% survived, with gene expression showing active DNA repair. The PNAS Nexus study supports lithopanspermia theory and raises planetary protection concerns for Mars missions and its moons.

Paleomagnetic measurements of 28 particles from the asteroid Ryugu reveal magnetic signatures acquired during ancient water-driven mineral growth, offering a direct record of the solar nebula's magnetic field within the first 7 million years after solar system formation. The findings appear in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Fires across Alaska warm the planet through permafrost carbon release, while Canada fires produce net cooling via snowpack albedo, a 19-year Nature Geoscience analysis finds. That balance is expected to reverse as warming reduces snow cover and thaws deeper Arctic soils.

Beihang University researchers used deep learning and X-ray micro-CT to characterize 349,000 individual particles from China's Chang'e-6 far-side samples without destroying them, finding irregularly shaped regolith with an internal friction angle of 47.96 degrees - significantly stiffer than near-side soil and presenting new engineering challenges for lunar base construction.

Tsinghua researchers publish in eLight a far-field superresolution imaging method that achieves 2.1x better resolution than the diffraction limit without fluorescent labels or post-processing, using topology-optimized metalens designs that exploit momentum-space superoscillation instead of real-space approaches.

Oxford University geoscientists analyzing Apollo samples found a tight link between high titanium content and strong magnetic signatures, revealing that the strong field was not sustained but occurred in brief pulses - and that Apollo sampling geography concealed this for decades.

A study in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry found that mixing processed sewage effluent from NASA's BLiSS system with simulated lunar and Martian regolith released key plant nutrients and physically weathered the sharp mineral particles - preliminary steps toward extraterrestrial crop growth.