The X-37B is a reusable robotic space plane operated by the US Space Force. It resembles a miniature space shuttle at just under 9 metres long with a 4.5 metre wingspan and is an uncrewed vehicle designed for long-duration missions in low Earth orbit.
The craft launches vertically atop a rocket, lands horizontally like a conventional aircraft and serves as a testbed for new technologies and experiments that can be returned to Earth for analysis.
It’s development was a collaborative effort between NASA, Boeing, and the US Department of Defence. It was originally conceived by NASA in the late 1990s to explore reusable spaceplane technologies but transitioned to the US Air Force in 2004 for military purposes.
We stand on the brink of a transformative era in space exploration: a shift from government-led to commercial-led activities off-planet. With this shift comes the need to recognize that the United States commercial space industry will play a pivotal role in maintaining the nation’s leadership in low Earth orbit (LEO). And while NASA has long shouldered this responsibility, its commitment to pass the torch, to foster commercial partnerships and support commercial space development, is falling short. The new Trump administration has a unique opportunity to ensure that American leadership is not usurped by our fiercest geopolitical adversary, China. To maintain U.S. leadership, the government must act with urgency to support a smaller number of companies most likely to achieve success in the critical foothold of LEO.
For a quarter of a century, the U.S. has benefited from sustaining a continuous human presence in space on the International Space Station (ISS), a strategy that China is emulating with its Tiangong space station, which has been continuously crewed since 2022. Through the ISS achievement, the U.S. not only advanced scientific understanding but also brought nations together and spurred economic growth through uncontested leadership. However, with the ISS set to retire by the end of this decade, it is imperative to transition from a government-run space station to a robust commercial space framework. This transition is essential to ensuring U.S. presence, enabling discovery, fueling our space economy and safeguarding our strategic priorities in space.
A commercial platform will continue to support the nation’s needs at a much lower cost than the ISS while stimulating a new generation of technologies that will revolutionize our economy and preserve the national asset that is our LEO workforce. Hard-working Americans in this microgravity industry are the lifeblood of what makes America great and will ensure the Chinese never surpass us in space technology.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have characterized the atmosphere of a hot super-Neptune exoplanet designated WASP-166 b. As a result, they found that the atmosphere of this alien world contains water and carbon dioxide. Their findings were reported Dec. 31 on the arXiv preprint server.
WASP-166 b is about seven times larger and 32 times more massive than the Earth. It orbits its host star every 5.44 days, at a distance of approximately 0.067 AU from it. The planet is relatively hot as its equilibrium temperature is estimated to be 1,270 K. The parameters of WASP-166 make it a representative of the so-called hot Neptune desert—a region of parameter space at high insolation fluxes and intermediate planet radii that is very sparsely populated.
The parent star WASP-166, which is located some 368 light years away, has a spectral type of F9V, and is about 20% larger and more massive than the sun. The star has an effective temperature of 6,050 K, metallicity at a level of 0.19 dex, and its age is estimated to be 2.1 billion years.
In the San Diego suburb of Carlsbad, a new plant to desalinate seawater is almost ready. For about a billion dollars, it will produce 7 percent of the area’s drinking water, courtesy of the Pacific Ocean. But in these times of record drought, two Texas entrepreneurs are advocating another solution: Instead of pulling fresh water out of the sea, they want to pull it out of the air. The machine they’re developing at Trinity University in San Antonio, called an atmospheric water generator, is still in its pilot phrase. But to hear Moses West tell it, if the climate conditions are right, the AWG has the potential to end drought.
West, who’s testing the machine along with business partner John Vollmer, calls himself “a water farmer.” He explains that there are three potential sources of human drinking water: groundwater, rivers and gas. Thanks to NASA’s GRACE satellite system, which measures the abundance and quality of aquifers, we know that the Earth’s groundwater supply is dwindling — and increasingly contaminated by pesticides and runoff. Rivers, at least near any major metropolitan area, are out of the question as sources for drinking water. That leaves water vapor, which West calls “the purest, cleanest, most abundant, recyclable source of water that exists on the face of the earth.”
The atmospheric water generator was first developed in Spain, another country with perpetual drought problems, but according to West, it performs best in high-heat, high-humidity areas. It can reliably produce between 2,000 and 3,000 gallons of water per day, and with the proper institutional support, West says, “I know how to scale this up to produce a million gallons a day, 30 million gallons a month.”
Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, have intrigued humans for decades. Now and then someone spots something strange in the sky and believes it to be extra-terrestrial. However, there is a kind of UFO that has only recently been seen in space. These are “UFO galaxies” that are a mystery to humans.
UFO galaxies are big, red and really dusty and can only be seen in infrared light, with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first to spot them in deep space.
This is why they were only discovered recently. They appear similar in size and shape to other galaxies but have never been caught on other telescopes, such as the Hubble. Scientists wanted to figure out more about these galaxies and why they were so red and dusty.
An international team of astronomers led by scientists from the Netherlands has shown that a white dwarf and a red dwarf orbiting each other every two hours are emitting radio pulses. Thanks to observations with several telescopes, the researchers were able to determine the origin of these pulses with certainty for the first time. Their results are published in Nature Astronomy.
In recent years, thanks to better analysis techniques, researchers have detected radio pulses that last from seconds to minutes and seem to come from stars in the Milky Way. There have been many hypotheses about what triggers these pulses, but until now there has been no hard evidence. An international study led by Iris de Ruiter of the Netherlands changes this.
De Ruiter, who received her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam in October 2024, is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney (Australia). During the last year of her Ph.D., she developed a method to search for radio pulses of seconds to minutes in the LOFAR archive. While improving the method, she discovered a single pulse in the 2015 observations. When she subsequently sifted through more archive data from the same patch of sky, she discovered six more pulses. All the pulses came from a source called ILTJ1101.
Each is calculated to be just 20 to 30% the mass of Earth and completes one full trip around the star in only a few days.
These findings have caught many people’s attention because they point to greater precision in detecting smaller, more elusive planets.
“It’s a really exciting find – Barnard’s Star is our cosmic neighbor, and yet we know so little about it,” said Ritvik Basant, Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and first author on the study. “It’s signaling a breakthrough with the precision of these new instruments from previous generations.”
Now, a new study combines meteorite data with thermodynamic modeling and determines that the earliest inner solar system planetesimals must have formed in the presence of water, challenging current astrophysical models of the early solar system.
Researchers study iron meteorites as samples from the early solar system. These meteorites represent the metallic cores of the earliest planetesimals that didn’t become planets but orbited the solar system before reaching Earth. By analyzing the chemical compositions of these meteorites, scientists can learn about the conditions in which they formed.
This helps answer questions about whether Earth’s building blocks formed far from the Sun, allowing the existence of water ice, or closer to the Sun, resulting in dry planetesimals. Even though the meteorites don’t contain water, scientists can deduce its past presence by examining its effects on other chemical elements.
Even light-speed signals can’t reach galaxies beyond 18 billion light-years due to space expanding too fast.
TL;DR
In an expanding Universe, galaxies beyond 18 billion light-years are unreachable, even if we send a light-speed signal today. The expansion of space, not objects themselves, causes these galaxies to appear as though they’re moving faster than light. As space expands, light is stretched, a process called redshift, making galaxies seem to accelerate away from us. This phenomenon doesn’t break the laws of relativity since space itself isn’t bound by the speed of light. The farther we look, the more we realize that many galaxies will remain beyond our reach forever.
A new study by Rice University researchers Sho Shibata and Andre Izidoro presents a compelling new model for the formation of super-Earths and mini-Neptunes—planets that are 1 to 4 times the size of Earth and among the most common in our galaxy. Using advanced simulations, the researchers propose that these planets emerge from distinct rings of planetesimals, providing fresh insight into planetary evolution beyond our solar system. The findings were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
For decades, scientists have debated how super-Earths and mini-Neptunes form. Traditional models have suggested that planetesimals—the tiny building blocks of planets—formed across wide regions of a young star’s disk. But Shibata and Izidoro suggest a different theory: These materials likely come together in narrow rings at specific locations in the disk, making planet formation more organized than previously believed.
“This paper is particularly significant as it models the formation of super-Earths and mini-Neptunes, which are believed to be the most common types of planets in the galaxy,” said Shibata, a postdoctoral fellow of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences. “One of our key findings is that the formation pathways of the solar system and exoplanetary systems may share fundamental similarities.”
