The astronomical nano-satellite VERTECS, launched on June 12, 2026, has completed its initial operations and confirmed that it meets its specified performance requirements. Its first images of nebulae and a 3-degree-wide field in Boötes demonstrate high-precision attitude control, resolution and sensitivity. Routine observations to study visible extragalactic background radiation have now begun.

Findings could help researchers understand how spaceflight affects brain and heart health over time

SAN ANTONIO — October 13, 2026 — A Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)-led team has developed an improved model for predicting solar events that incorporates activity on the far side of the Sun. The team studied near-simultaneous maps of the whole solar surface from 2010 to 2014, combining Earth observations with data from space-based assets showing the opposite side. The resulting framework constructs surface flux transport (SFT) models that are more complete and accurate than any previous model.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Oulu sheds light on a poorly understood part of space weather: where powerful waves form at the edge of Earth’s magnetic shield, and where the solar wind can find a way through.

Turbulence is ubiquitous and occurs in our everyday lives on Earth, such as when milk is stirred into coffee, or in the stormy motions of the ocean and the atmosphere. Media in space and astrophysical systems can also develop turbulence, but the physics is different because the medium is in an ionized state (known as the plasma state) and the flow motion is strongly coupled to electromagnetic fields. Furthermore, space plasma is collisionless because the medium is so dilute that the particles do not collide with each other. How does plasma develop into turbulence? How is the fluctuation energy distributed in collisionless turbulence? Turbulence in space plasma remains a mystery in physics.  

An international research team from the Technische Universität Braunschweig and University of Tokyo in cooperation with Tohoku University, Kyushu University, Osaka University, and multinational research institutes has now demonstrated, for the first time, a reversal phenomenon of magnetic field rotation in space turbulence. A structure emerges within the unstructured space plasma. The results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

IISc researchers & collaborators have simulated how strong internal magnetic fields could allow white dwarf stars to exceed the Chandrasekhar mass limit – challenging assumptions about Type Ia supernovae and the Universe’s expansion.

A Jupiter-sized world just 7.5 light-years away is cloudy, chemically complex, and, it turns out, more like home than anyone expected.