Cosmos
Cosmos reporting, written for the person reading it.
Cosmos · · 1 min
Planetary Collisions Will Revolutionize Cosmic Understanding
Scientists predict we'll soon witness the catastrophic collision of two exoplanets, an event that could fundamentally reshape our understanding of planetary systems and stellar dynamics across the universe.
Cosmos · · 1 min
Planetary Collisions Transform Cosmological Understanding
Scientists prepare to witness the dramatic collision of two alien planets, revolutionizing our comprehension of planetary dynamics and stellar evolution.
Cosmos · · 1 min
Roman Telescope Launch Set Sunday
NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is stacked for a SpaceX Falcon Heavy liftoff from Kennedy Space Center's Pad 39A at 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, Aug. 30, after Saturday's go briefing. Coverage starts 6:20 a.m.; weather odds sat near 50%. The wide-field infrared observatory uses a 2.4-meter mirror originally built for a canceled NRO spy-sat program and will cruise about 100 days to Earth-sun L2 to hunt dark energy, dark matter, and thousands of exoplanets with a 300-megapixel camera plus a coronagraph tech demo. Managers say it is launching nearly nine months ahead of its formal readiness date and under long-running budget drama that once saw cancelation attempts. First science images are eyed for early 2027, making Sunday's heavy-lift attempt the space community's must-watch.
Cosmos · · 1 min
Dragon Oxidizer Leak Delays Crew-13
NASA and SpaceX are adjusting the Crew-13 launch to the International Space Station after an oxidizer leak on Dragon’s propulsion system was found during standard prelaunch processing, NASA said August 29, 2026. Joint NASA and SpaceX teams are running additional tests and data review and will complete any necessary rework before flight; a new target date will be announced once available. NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney will serve as commander and pilot, joined by CSA astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov as mission specialists. After docking, Crew-13 joins Expedition 75. The crew enters quarantine about two weeks before flight from Johnson Space Center in Houston. Liftoff is planned aboard SpaceX’s Dragon on a Falcon 9 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. An August 5 training photo shows the four with their mission plaque inside a station-module mockup.
Cosmos · · 1 min
Dead Star Proves Empty Space Isn't Empty
A city-sized magnetar 13,000 light-years away, spinning every 2.1 seconds, has given the strongest evidence yet for a 1936 prediction by Heisenberg and Euler: empty space is not empty. In fields hundreds of millions of times stronger than Earth's best magnets, the quantum vacuum should act like a crystal, refracting two polarizations of light differently—vacuum birefringence. NASA's IXPE watched magnetar 1E 1547.0−5408 for more than 140 hours. Soft X-rays stayed as much as nearly 80 percent polarized at some rotational phases, far more orderly than ordinary surface models allow if light travels through a non-refractive vacuum. Radio polarization from Parkes locked down the star's magnetic geometry, closing a loophole that weakened earlier hints. Switch the vacuum effect on in the models and the X-ray pattern fits; switch it off and it does not. NASA said IXPE 'may have' shown the effect. The Nature paper calls it a marked advance, not final proof. Space is not an ether. It is a quantum vacuum that can bend light.
Cosmos · · 1 min
Astronomers Find a Galaxy Without Stars
Cloud-9, 14 million light-years away near Messier 94, looks like a galaxy that never switched on. Radio telescopes first found a compact, nearly spherical cloud of about a million solar masses of hydrogen. Hubble saw almost no starlight in January. Now Ignacio Trujillo's team used HiPERCAM on the Gran Telescopio Canarias, the world's largest optical telescope, to take images about ten times deeper than before. In 2.36 hours they found zero stellar emission and set an upper limit of just 16,000 solar masses of stars even if the population is old and metal-poor. 'Most objects in the universe leave some trace of light. Cloud-9 does not,' Trujillo told Space.com. Theory says ultraviolet light after reionization can keep gas in low-mass dark-matter halos too hot to collapse into stars. The object sits in that sweet spot: enough mass to hold gas, not enough to ignite. The jury is still out pending deeper space imaging, but Cloud-9 is the best failed-galaxy candidate yet.
Cosmos · · 1 min
NASA's Hubble Rival Launches Sunday
NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is due off Kennedy Space Center pad 39A at 7:26 a.m. ET Sunday, Aug. 30 (4:26 a.m. PT) on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, nine months early after surviving repeated White House cancellation attempts. Its 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same size as Hubble's, was donated by the National Reconnaissance Office from a canceled spy-satellite program and refigured for deep-space infrared work. A 300-megapixel camera will scan the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble; one full image would fill a half-million 4K TVs. From Earth-sun L2, Roman will census a billion galaxies, hunt dark energy and the Hubble Tension, and use microlensing to find tens of thousands of exoplanets. A coronagraph aims to see Jupiter-class worlds 100 million times fainter than their stars. Project scientist Julie McEnery said the surveys may show the standard cosmological model is wrong. Weather for Sunday is only about 50 percent favorable; Monday is the backup.