Astronomy news

• NASA fuels its next-gen Roman Space Telescope for August launch

  28-07-2026 23:00 via space.com
  
  NASA announced on Tuesday (July 28) that it has officially fueled-up the Roman Space Telescope — a magnificent new observatory expected to generate over 500 terabytes of cosmic data per year. By comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope, in its 35 years of service, has created over 400 terabytes in total.At present, the Roman Space Telescope's launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is scheduled to occur on Aug. 30 at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). And considering the project is sort of the gol
  
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• Our Milky Way galaxy appears to have flipped 90 degrees long ago. But why?

  28-07-2026 21:00 via space.com
  
  The Milky Way's spiral disk may have flipped over by 90 degrees, in turn altering the solar system's orbit around the center of the galaxy.Spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way have two main, visible, structural components: a disk that encapsulates most of its stars, gas and the central black hole, and a more diffuse halo of older stars that encapsulates the disk.However, the Milky Way's stellar halo has always been a bit of an oddity. The European Space Agency's Gaia mission measured the motion
  
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• 'Silo' season 3's Ashley Zuckerman and Jessica Henwick share the secret to their on-screen chemistry (interview)

  28-07-2026 19:00 via space.com
  
  In Apple TV’s "Silo" season 3, we lunge back 352 years to the Before Times to see how the greatest engineering project in the history of the world began… and would end. Center stage in this dark sci-fi drama are ambitious Congressman Daniel Keene (Ashley Zukerman) and journalist Helen Drew (Jessica Henwick), the pre-apocalypse duo we were first introduced to in Season 2's final episode.In that scene, the handsome couple met on a first date in a Washington, D.C. restaurant in the aft
  
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• SpaceX launches 24 Starlink satellites to orbit in wake of Starship test flight (video)

  28-07-2026 17:00 via space.com
  
  SpaceX launched 24 more satellites for its Starlink network on Saturday (July 25), a day after demonstrating it could do the same on its next-gen rocket.A Falcon 9 rocket carrying Starlink group 17-51 lifted off at 11:51 a.m. EDT (1521 GMT or 8:51 a.m. PDT local time) on Saturday from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. About an hour later, the 24 broadband internet satellites were deployed into low Earth orbit (LEO), as planned.Previous Booster B1100 launch
  
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• On this day in space! July 28, 1851: The 1st photo of a total solar eclipse was taken by a Prussian daguerreotypist

  28-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  On July 28, 1851, the first-ever photo of a total solar eclipse was recorded by a Prussian daguerreotypist named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski. Daguerreotypy is an old photographic process that uses silver-plated copper treated with chemical fumes that make it light-sensitive. Previous attempts to take photos of solar eclipses failed to show the contrast between the sun's corona and the dark disk of the moon. Using a small, 6-centimeter telescope, Berkowski captured an 84-second exposure sta
  
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• On this day in space! July 28, 1851: The 1st photo of a total solar eclipse was taken by a Prussian daguerreotypist

  28-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  On July 28, 1851, the first-ever photo of a total solar eclipse was recorded by a Prussian daguerreotypist named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski. Daguerreotypy is an old photographic process that uses silver-plated copper treated with chemical fumes that make it light-sensitive. Previous attempts to take photos of solar eclipses failed to show the contrast between the sun's corona and the dark disk of the moon. Using a small, 6-centimeter telescope, Berkowski captured an 84-second exposure sta
  
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• ISS meets Venus in incredible daylight photo | Space photo of the day for July 28, 2026

  28-07-2026 16:00 via space.com
  
  Venus beside the International Space Station as captured by photographer A.J. Smadi from Edmonds, Washington on July 18, 2026. (Image credit: AJ Smadi)An astrophotographer captured a breathtaking scene as the International Space Station zoomed by Venus in the daytime sky.A post shared by AJ Smadi (@aj.smadi)A photo posted byon What is it?Photographer AJ Smadi set up the scene on July 18 in a park near Seattle, Washington. Smadi used a 9.25" (23.5 cm) Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope and a
  
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• BALLS on the moon: China set to launch Africa's 1st lunar science mission in 2029

  28-07-2026 15:00 via space.com
  
  China's Chang'e-8 moon lander mission scheduled for 2029 could send Africa's first space exploration mission to the lunar south pole.Under the Africa2Moon venture, the Bounced African Low Lunar Sphere, or BALLS for short, is a technology demonstrator in which a trio of spherical probes on the lunar surface will form a radio astronomy array at the moon's south pole region. Each of the metal spheres contains low-frequency radio telescope antennas that will search for signals from some of the oldes
  
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• Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! Astronomers capture clearest image yet of famous star's elusive companion

  28-07-2026 14:00 via space.com
  
  Astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile to discover the strongest evidence yet that the famous star Betelgeuse has a companion star. That means after a century of investigation, scientists are closer than ever before to conclusively identifying Betelgeuse as a binary system composed of two stars, Betelgeuse A and Betelgeuse B. Betelgeuse is a red colored star visible with the naked eye in the constellation of Orion and located around 65
  
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• 'Crazy idea' succeeds: Scientists monitor space junk with radio telescopes

  28-07-2026 12:00 via space.com
  
  Radio telescopes are designed to listen for signals from the stars and from distant galaxies, but scientists are also pointing out that these instruments can also track objects somewhat closer to home: junk in Earth's orbit.Engineers have used the famed radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in the U.K. as part of an international plan to watch high-altitude space debris. Normally, old satellites and bits of spacecraft stuck up in geostationary orbit are too high up for our normal ways of watching spac
  
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• The unique DJI Lito X1 drone is packed full of functionality and you can't buy it in the USA

  28-07-2026 11:00 via space.com
  
  Key specsCamera: 48MP 1/1.3-inch CMOSVideo resolution: Up to 4KFrame rates: 4K 100 FPS / 2.7K vertical up to 60 FPS / FHD up to 200 FPSBattery: 2788 mAh up to 36 minutes flightCharger type: USB-C cable/battery charging hubModes: Cine, Normal, SportVideo transmission range: 9.3 miles (IC) / 4.97 miles (CE/SRRC/MIC)Dimensions: : Folded 5.67 x 3.70 x 2.44 in / 144 x 94 x 62 mm / Unfolded 7.20 x 9.88 x 3.11 in / 183 x 251 x 79 mmWeight: 8.78 oz/ 249 gDrones are more accessible than ever before, and
  
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• Starship in space! See highlights of SpaceX megarocket's epic Flight 13 test launch (video)

  28-07-2026 00:00 via space.com
  
  The 13th test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket went pretty well — and provided some amazing visuals, too.Flight 13 launched on Friday (July 24), sending the 408-foot-tall (124 meters) Starship Version 3 (V3) vehicle aloft from SpaceX's Starbase site in South Texas.Starship's Super Heavy booster had some engine issues on its way back to Earth. But the Ship upper stage hit all of its marks, successfully deploying 20 next-gen Starlink satellites, re-igniting one of its Raptor engines in
  
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