SAN ANTONIO — March 12, 2025 — Four small suitcase-sized spacecraft, designed and built by Southwest Research Institute headquartered in San Antonio, launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on March 11. NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, or PUNCH, constellation has spread out in a low-Earth orbit along the day-night line, providing a clear view in all directions for its two-year primary mission.

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, has achieved a major milestone with the installation of the LSST Camera on the telescope. With the final optical component in place, Rubin enters the last phase of testing before capturing long-awaited and highly-anticipated First Look images, followed by the start of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

An international team of astrophysicists led by the Netherlands and the UK have discovered that radio pulses lasting seconds to minutes are due to two stars coming together – rather than emissions from a single star. The results are published today (12 March) in Nature Astronomy.  

A white dwarf and a red dwarf star have been discovered closely orbiting each other emitting radio pulses every two hours. Their findings means we know it isn't just neutron stars that emit such pulses, but these are spaced unusually far apart.

Lior Shamir, a computer scientist in the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering at Kansas State University, published a study of James Webb Space Telescope images that suggests astronomers should factor the Milky Way's rotational velocity in observations of deep space galaxies.

UChicago astronomers have revealed new evidence that there are not just one but four tiny planets circling around Barnard’s Star, the second-nearest star system to Earth.