Kuiper Belt

Neptune is the solar system's most distant planet, a cold, blue ice giant sitting nearly 30 times further from the sun than Earth. At that remote distance, temperatures plunge to nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius and a single year lasts 165 Earth years. Yet despite its isolation, Neptune is a world whipped by the fastest winds in the solar system and home to one of its most bizarre moons.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that the spinning of a small comet slowed and then reversed its direction of rotation, offering a dramatic example of how volatile activity can affect the spin and physical evolution of small bodies in the solar system. This is the first time researchers have observed evidence of a comet reversing its spin.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has started releasing its first discoveries: including supernovae, variable stars and asteroids, which will from now on be discovered at an astonishing rate as it begins its Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a ten-year survey probing the deepest reaches of the universe.

It's been about eight months since the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) saw first light. Now the telescope is scanning the night sky to detect transient changes and sending alerts to astronomers and observatories around the world so they can perform follow-up observations. This alert system is one of the last milestones before the VRO starts its primary endeavor: the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

There have been plenty of attempts to resolve the "Hubble Tension" in cosmology. This feature describes how one of the most important variables in cosmology, the expansion of the universe, takes on different values depending on how you measure it. A new NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I report on the Cosmic Positioning System (CPS) details another potential solution to it—this one involving a network of five far-flung satellites spread throughout the solar system. The paper […]