US space company Virgin Galactic announced Thursday it is exploring the possibility of opening a new base in Italy, potentially bringing suborbital flights to tourists in Europe for the first time.

Founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, the company is currently in a two-year hiatus to upgrade its fleet, following seven commercial flights to the edge of space from its US base at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic said it had signed an agreement with Italy’s ENAC civil aviation authority to study the feasibility of operating missions from Grottaglie Spaceport, located in the Puglia region of southern Italy.

By searching sparsely populated regions of the galaxy, astronomers have for the first time found the source of a kind of signal that has puzzled them for years.

An unusual approach to spotting tiny asteroids uses James Webb Space Telescope data in a boost for planetary defense research.

What can solar eclipses teach us about the Sun and how it interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere? This is what a recent press briefing conducted at the American Geophysical Union 2024 Fall Meeting hopes to address as a team of scientists from the Citizen CATE 2024 (Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse) project reported on findings that were obtained during the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse over North America.

“Scientists and tens of thousands of volunteer observers were stationed throughout the Moon’s shadow,” said Dr. Kelly Korreck, who is the NASA Program Manager for the 2023 and 2024 Solar Eclipses. “Their efforts were a crucial part of the Heliophysics Big Year – helping us to learn more about the Sun and how it affects Earth’s atmosphere when our star’s light temporarily disappears from view.”

Consisting of a combination of both professional and citizen scientists using a combination of images, spectroscopy, and ham radios, the large team comprised of Citizen CATE 2024 made groundbreaking observations of the 2024 solar eclipse, along with ascertaining how radio signals were influenced during the eclipse. In the end, the team of more than 800 individuals discovered that eclipses produce atmospheric gravity waves, or ripples within the Earth’s atmosphere. Additionally, the ham radio operators, comprised of more than 6,350 individuals, discovered that radio communications improved both within and outside the eclipses’ path of totality at frequencies between 1 to 7 Megahertz, whereas communications became worse at frequencies above 10 Megahertz.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has for the first time captured an image of what our galaxy likely looked like just as it was forming — and it’s got space scientists feeling very Christmassy.

“I just love the sparkle galaxy with its Christmas lights shining as it was when the Universe was just 600 million years old,” Prof Catherine Heymans, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal, told BBC News.

The image shows ten balls of stars of different colours, appearing like Christmas tree baubles hanging in the cosmos.