Explore the Space section of The Pulse for science-driven coverage of astronomy, cosmic research and exploration missions.
Many space telescopes are made up of one individual spacecraft. NASA’s future SunRISE mission has chosen a different approach. Instead of sending a single observatory into…
Telescopes in space usually discover exactly what scientists expect them to discover. Euclid is a European Space Agency mission designed to create detailed maps of billions…
Deep inside a distant galaxy called Mrk 501, something has been orbiting quietly for eons — and for decades, astronomers looking directly at it had no…
Mars has two moons, and after decades of spacecraft flying past them, scientists still can’t agree on where they came from. Phobos and Deimos remain, in…
Hidden behind the dense curtain of the Milky Way, a colossal structure glows in radio waves — and it looks almost exactly like a musical treble…
Ten billion years ago, the universe was still in its adolescence — galaxy clusters existed, but the largest and most organized among them were only beginning…
The Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation have captivated astronomers and casual stargazers alike for decades — towering columns of gas and dust stretching light-years into space,…
Virgo III barely registers against the night sky. One of the Milky Way’s faintest satellite galaxies, it was discovered less than a decade ago and has…
Alien world 320 light-years away mirrors its own star — and astronomers say that reshapes the search for Earth-like planets WASP-189b is not a place anything…
Mars today is a frozen desert — barren, thin-aired, and brutally cold. Yet carved into its surface are river valleys, delta fans, crater lakes, and what…
NASA is no longer just visiting the Moon — it’s preparing to move in. The agency has selected three scientific investigations tasked with solving the most…
Saturn’s North Pole has long been known for having one of the Solar System’s most peculiar weather conditions. For more than four decades, a massive six-sided…
From orbit, Lake Powell doesn’t look like a reservoir. In a photograph captured by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station in 2016, the winding body…
Somewhere across the galaxy, a world the size of Mars is being ground to dust. Not slowly — in a collision violent enough to vaporize rock,…
Building on prior disk observations from the ALMA telescope, scientists have used archival W. M. Keck Observatory data to confirm the direct near-infrared detection of the…
From the window of the International Space Station, a patch of southern Madagascar doesn’t look like it belongs there. Bright and roughly circular, it stands out…
Fast radio bursts are among the universe’s most baffling phenomena: millisecond flashes of radio energy that erupt from billions of light-years away, then vanish before astronomers…
Citizen scientists examining archived photometric data collected by NASA’s K2 mission have found a potential cold exoplanet candidate around a remote star. This exoplanet known as…
On Sol 5,006 — its 5,006th day on Mars — NASA’s Curiosity rover turned its cameras back toward where it came from. The resulting panorama stretches…
NASA is building a “neighborhood network” on the Moon so astronauts can stay connected 5G is the technology that keeps smartphones connected on city streets. Soon,…
Using combined observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found 27 new trans-Neptunian objects that have been orbiting past Neptune…
For less than a quadrillionth of a second, lead ions colliding at nearly the speed of light inside CERN’s Large Hadron Collider recreate a droplet of…
Moon glass from Chang’e-6 holds a rare iron mineral that recorded the Moon’s ancient magnetic field The Moon has been magnetically silent for billions of years.…
Enceladus sorts its own ocean into chemically distinct ice grains before firing them into space — and that process may concentrate the building blocks of life…
Gravitational lens candidates have been found in the process of examination of ground-based deep sky images covering the Euclid Deep Field North area. More than 10,000…
Volunteers studying ground-based optical survey data have found several dozen high-energy stellar outflows in a large interstellar star-forming nebula. The study included the participation of more…
On March 30, 2025, a steadily brightening object was spotted in publicly accessible SWAN data. At the time, the object was little more than a steadily…
NASA Satellites Capture Canada’s Northernmost Agricultural Island in the Saskatchewan Delta Amid the winding channels and marshes of the Saskatchewan River Delta, something doesn’t belong. NASA’s…
Planet Hunters citizen science project participants made the discovery of a single 10-hour dip in starlight using NASA’s archived Kepler space telescope data. This dip is…
A citizen astronomer in Tokyo had been assisting NASA-supported projects analyzing large sets of astronomical data for years. Then came the strange candidate (SIPS J2045-6332) out…
Ariel is one of the smallest moons in the Uranian system — only 720 miles across — yet its surface tells a story of extraordinary violence.…
Citizen science volunteers recently carried out an extensive search using outdated images taken by space telescopes. Sorting through 37,000 images from the archives of the Hubble…
Identification of a fast-moving celestial body amid the bright solar glare involved the analysis of hydrogen emissions detected by the Solar Wind Anisotropies instrument. The comet…
Hubble captures NGC 4698, a spiral galaxy whose arms never reach its eerily calm, structure-free core At first glance, NGC 4698 looks exactly like a spiral…
Dead star RXJ0528+2838 has been blasting a “cosmic wake” into space for over 1,000 years — with no known power source to explain it. Seven hundred…
Astronomers at the University of New Mexico detected a dense gas giant exoplanet around 400 light-years away from Earth. The first orbiting data from NASA’s Transiting…
On October 24, 2025, Robert Wagner was doing what he’d done countless times before — scanning composite maps of the Moon for subtle changes in the…
Volunteers analyzing space telescope data have identified thousands of dim objects in the neighborhood of our Sun. By analyzing the infrared data acquired by NASA’s WISE…
Joël Lapointe, an amateur astronomer, was looking through satellite maps to identify possible summer campgrounds in Quebec’s Côte-Nord area. He observed a unique 15-mile circular ring…
Pluto ranks among the coldest, most remote worlds in the solar system — temperatures plunge to nearly –230°C, and the surface was long assumed to be…
Venus may have swallowed its own moon — and its slow 243-day rotation could be why Earth has a moon. Venus doesn’t. That alone might not…
Venus looks pale and featureless in visible light — a smooth yellow-white sphere that reveals almost nothing. Switch to ultraviolet, and the planet transforms: sweeping dark…
Beyond Neptune, in a region so remote that sunlight arrives as little more than a faint glimmer, tiny ancient objects drift in near-silence — remnants of…
Astronomers find a gravitational-wave imprint that may be the first “dark star” signal from the dawn of the Universe For years, astronomers have been listening to…
The camera pointed at the horizon and waited. At a spot on the western rim of Jezero Crater called Witch Hazel Hill, a rover was watching…
160,000 light-years away, a vast cavity haunts the nebula N44 in the Large Magellanic Cloud — one of the small galaxies orbiting our Milky Way. This…
Mars has long been cast as a geological afterthought — a cold, quiet world where volcanism was modest, short-lived, and far less dramatic than the churning…
A black hole shredded a star, releasing 400 billion times the Sun’s energy A black hole doesn’t always swallow a star whole. Sometimes, astronomers say, it…
Japan is sending a probe to Mars’ moon Phobos to solve its origin mystery Across dozens of missions to Mars, humanity has never returned a single…
Near Jupiter’s orbit, a frozen body is waking up into a comet Three billion miles from Earth, in the cold darkness beyond Jupiter’s orbit, a small…
The Pulse Newsletter
Once a week we send our best reporting on energy, climate and nature. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
