The Space Force is looking for opportunities to expand launch facilities at its West Coast range amid a surge in launch demand.
Category: space
Betelgeuse’s elusive companion star: Siwarha’s ‘wake’ detected
Using new observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, astronomers have tracked the influence of a recently discovered companion star, Siwarha, on the gas around Betelgeuse. The research, by scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), reveals a trail of dense gas swirling through Betelgeuse’s vast, extended atmosphere, shedding light on why the giant star’s brightness and atmosphere have changed in strange and unusual ways.
The results of the new study were presented Monday at a news conference at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix. The paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available on the arXiv preprint server.
Fault-tolerant quantum computing: Novel protocol efficiently reduces resource cost
Quantum computers, systems that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could soon outperform classical computers on some complex computational problems. These computers rely on qubits, units of quantum information that share states with each other via a quantum mechanical effect known as entanglement.
Qubits are highly susceptible to noise in their surroundings, which can disrupt their quantum states and lead to computation errors. Quantum engineers have thus been trying to devise effective strategies to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computation, or in other words, to correct errors that arise when quantum computers process information.
Existing approaches work either by reducing the extra number of physical qubits needed per logical qubit (i.e., space overhead) or by reducing the number of physical operations needed to perform a single logical operation (i.e., time overhead). Effectively tackling both these goals together, which would enable more scalable systems and faster computations, has so far proved challenging.
Astronomers Measure The Mass of a Planet With No Star For The First Time
Not all planets are lucky enough to live in a neighborhood like our Solar System – some are doomed to roam the cosmos alone. Astronomers have now, for the first time, measured the mass of, and distance to, one of these lonely worlds.
The planet packs about a fifth of the mass of Jupiter, and is located a little under 10,000 light-years away from Earth, towards the center of our galaxy. That size suggests it most likely formed as part of a planetary system, before being exiled by a game of gravitational billiards.
Related: Record-Smashing Rogue Planet Caught Growing at 6 Billion Tons Per Second.
NASA Confirms It Has Lost Contact With Mars Orbiter MAVEN
NASA has officially lost contact with a spacecraft that has been orbiting Mars since 2014.
The MAVEN spacecraft – Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution – abruptly lost contact with Earth on 6 December 2025 while passing behind the red planet in the normal course of its orbit. When MAVEN re-emerged from behind Mars, however, NASA ground control was unable to reestablish a connection.
On December 9, the space agency announced it is investigating the issue and attempting to locate a signal.
Astronomers measure both mass and distance of a rogue planet for the first time
While most planets that we are familiar with stick relatively close to their host star in a predictable orbit, some planets seem to have been knocked out of their orbits, floating through space free of any particular gravitational attachments. Astronomers refer to these lonely planets as “free-floating” or “rogue” planets.
Recently, a new rogue planet was identified, and, unlike previously identified rogue planets, astronomers were able to calculate both its mass and distance from Earth. A new study, published in Science, describes how a few lucky observations from both ground-based and space-based telescopes made these calculations possible.
