NASA says a “multi-year” budget shortfall even before the cuts in the fiscal year 2026 budget have led it to consider reductions in crew size and research on the ISS.
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The Golden Dome program represents one of the most ambitious missile defense initiatives in U.S. history.
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Canada’s MDA Space has increased its offer for SatixFy by 43% following a competing bid for the Israeli satellite chipmaker, bringing the total value of the deal to around US$280 million.
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Industry officials: Cuts of this magnitude would be a stunning reversal of policy
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China has continued an uptick in launch activity with a Long March 7A mission to geosynchronous orbit and sea launch of a Ceres-1 solid rocket.
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Washington, D.C. – SpaceNews is pleased to announce the expanded role of longtime commercial space reporter Jason Rainbow, who will now serve as Senior Staff Writer and Business Intelligence Manager. […]
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This is a bonus edition of Space Minds by SpaceNews. Our guest today is Robert Cardillo, president of the Cardillo Group.
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ST. LOUIS – Hyperspectral imagery startup Kuva Space is expanding its focus on maritime-domain awareness and preparing to launch its second satellite in June. Kuva has delivered Hyperfield-1B, a six-unit […]
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'While we've made some significant progress in the last 12 plus months, there's more work to be done'
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The universe’s maximum lifespan may be considerably shorter than was previously thought, but don’t worry: there’s still plenty of time to finish streaming your favourite TV series.
According to new calculations by black hole expert Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael Wondrak, and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom of Radboud University in the Netherlands, the most persistent stellar objects in the universe – white dwarf stars – will decay away to nothingness in around 1078 years. This, Falcke admits, is “a very long time”, but it’s a far cry from previous predictions, which suggested that white dwarfs could persist for at least 101100 years. “The ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected,” he says.
Writing in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Falcke and colleagues explain that the discrepancy stems from different assumptions about how white dwarfs decay. Previous calculations of their lifetime assumed that, in the absence of proton decay (which has never been observed experimentally), their main decay process would be something called pyconuclear fusion. This form of fusion occurs when nuclei in a crystalline lattice essentially vibrate their way into becoming fused with their nearest neighbours.
If that sounds a little unlikely, that’s because it is. However, in the dense, cold cores of white dwarf stars, and over stupendously long time periods, pyconuclear fusion happens often enough to gradually (very, very gradually) turn the white dwarf’s carbon into nickel, which then transmutes into iron by emitting a positron. The resulting iron-cored stars are known as black dwarfs, and some theories predict that they will eventually (very, very eventually) collapse into black holes. Depending on how massive they were to start with, the whole process takes between 101100‒1032 000 years.
Those estimates, however, do not take into account an alternative decay mechanism known as Hawking radiation. First proposed in the early 1970s by Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein, Hawking radiation arises from fluctuations in the vacuum of spacetime. These fluctuations allow particle-antiparticle pairs to pop into existence by essentially “borrowing” energy from the vacuum for brief periods before the pairs recombine and annihilate.
If this pair production happens in the vicinity of a black hole, one particle in the pair may stray over the black hole’s event horizon before it can recombine. This leaves its partner free to carry away some of the “borrowed” energy as Hawking radiation. After an exceptionally long time – but, crucially, not as long as the time required to disappear a white dwarf via pyconuclear fusion – Hawking radiation will therefore cause black holes to dissipate.
But what about objects other than black holes? Well, in a previous work published in 2023, Falcke, Wondrak and van Suijlekom showed that a similar process can occur for any object that curves spacetime with its gravitational field, not just objects that have an event horizon. This means that white dwarfs, neutron stars, the Moon and even human beings can, in principle, evaporate away into nothingness via Hawking radiation – assuming that what the trio delicately call “other astrophysical evolution and decay channels” don’t get there first.
Based on this tongue-in-cheek assumption, the trio calculated that white dwarfs will dissipate in around 1078 years, while denser objects such as black holes and neutron stars will vanish in no more than 1067 years. Less dense objects such as humans, meanwhile, could persist for as long as 1090 years – albeit only in a vast, near-featureless spacetime devoid of anything that would make life worth living, or indeed possible.
While that might sound unrealistic as well as morbid, the trio’s calculations do have a somewhat practical goal. “By asking these kinds of questions and looking at extreme cases, we want to better understand the theory,” van Suijlekom says. “Perhaps one day, we [will] unravel the mystery of Hawking radiation.”
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Satellite servicing company Starfish Space is ready to launch its second mission, a spacecraft that will attempt to dock with another spacecraft on the same launch.
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ST. LOUIS — Canadian hyperspectral startup Wyvern is publicly releasing 25 additional images including scenes of Afghanistan’s Kandahar Airfield and an Iranian port explosion. Wyvern launched its Open Data Program […]
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Subtle quantum effects within atomic nuclei can dramatically affect how some nuclei break apart. By studying 100 isotopes with masses below that of lead, an international team of physicists uncovered a previously unknown region in the nuclear landscape where fragments of fission split in an unexpected way. This is driven not by the usual forces, but by shell effects rooted in quantum mechanics.
“When a nucleus splits apart into two fragments, the mass and charge distribution of these fission fragments exhibits the signature of the underlying nuclear structure effect in the fission process,” explains Pierre Morfouace of Université Paris-Saclay, who led the study. “In the exotic region of the nuclear chart that we studied, where nuclei do not have many neutrons, a symmetric split was previously expected. However, the asymmetric fission means that a new quantum effect is at stake.”
This unexpected discovery not only sheds light on the fine details of how nuclei break apart but also has far-reaching implications. These range from the development of safer nuclear energy to understanding how heavy elements are created during cataclysmic astrophysical events like stellar explosions.
Fission is the process by which a heavy atomic nucleus splits into smaller fragments. It is governed by a complex interplay of forces. The strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, competes with the electromagnetic repulsion between positively charged protons. The result is that certain nuclei are unstable and typically leads to a symmetric fission.
But there’s another, subtler phenomenon at play: quantum shell effects. These arise because protons and neutrons inside the nucleus tend to arrange themselves into discrete energy levels or “shells,” much like electrons do in atoms.
“Quantum shell effects [in atomic electrons] play a major role in chemistry, where they are responsible for the properties of noble gases,” says Cedric Simenel of the Australian National University, who was not involved in the study. “In nuclear physics, they provide extra stability to spherical nuclei with so-called ‘magic’ numbers of protons or neutrons. Such shell effects drive heavy nuclei to often fission asymmetrically.”
In the case of very heavy nuclei, such as uranium or plutonium, this asymmetry is well documented. But in lighter, neutron-deficient nuclei – those with fewer neutrons than their stable counterparts – researchers had long expected symmetric fission, where the nucleus breaks into two roughly equal parts. This new study challenges that view.
To investigate fission in this less-explored part of the nuclear chart, scientists from the R3B-SOFIA collaboration carried out experiments at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany. They focused on nuclei ranging from iridium to thorium, many of which had never been studied before. The nuclei were fired at high energies into a lead target to induce fission.
The fragments produced in each fission event were carefully analysed using a suite of high-resolution detectors. A double ionization chamber captured the number of protons in each product, while a superconducting magnet and time-of-flight detectors tracked their momentum, enabling a detailed reconstruction of how the split occurred.
Using this method, the researchers found that the lightest fission fragments were frequently formed with 36 protons, which is the atomic number of krypton. This pattern suggests the presence of a stabilizing shell effect at that specific proton number.
“Our data reveal the stabilizing effect of proton shells at Z=36,” explains Morfouace. “This marks the identification of a new ‘island’ of asymmetric fission, one driven by the light fragment, unlike the well-known behaviour in heavier actinides. It expands our understanding of how nuclear structure influences fission outcomes.”
“Experimentally, what makes this work unique is that they provide the distribution of protons in the fragments, while earlier measurements in sub-lead nuclei were essentially focused on the total number of nucleons,” comments Simenel.
Since quantum shell effects are tied to specific numbers of protons or neutrons, not just the overall mass, these new measurements offer direct evidence of how proton shell structure shapes the outcome of fission in lighter nuclei. This makes the results particularly valuable for testing and refining theoretical models of fission dynamics.
“This work will undoubtedly lead to further experimental studies, in particular with more exotic light nuclei,” Simenel adds. “However, to me, the ball is now in the camp of theorists who need to improve their modelling of nuclear fission to achieve the predictive power required to study the role of fission in regions of the nuclear chart not accessible experimentally, as in nuclei formed in the astrophysical processes.”
The research is described in Nature.
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ST. LOUIS – In addition to offering tasking of its latest satellite, South Korea’s SI Imaging Services will invite customers to lease capacity. “Think of it as Airbnb for remote-sensing […]
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DNI Tulsi Gabbard announces "biggest shift in collection priorities in ODNI history" with focus on border security
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ST. LOUIS – At the June NATO summit in the Netherlands, allies will outline specific capabilities to contribute to the alliance. “It won’t just be a pledge,” UK Royal Marines […]
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This is a bonus edition of Space Minds by SpaceNews. Our guest today is Ronda Schrenk, CEO of the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation.
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SatVu's HotSat satellites use thermal cameras to detect infrared radiation emitted by objects on Earth.
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Scientists are urging NASA to act quickly on concepts for repurposing a pair of NASA smallsats to visit the asteroid Apophis ahead of an Earth flyby.
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A new type of coronagraph that could capture images of dim exoplanets that are extremely close to bright stars has been developed by a team led by Nico Deshler at the University of Arizona in the US. As well as boosting the direct detection of exoplanets, the new instrument could support advances in areas including communications, quantum sensing, and medical imaging.
Astronomers have confirmed the existence of nearly 6000 exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars other as the Sun. The majority of these were discovered based on their effects on their companion stars, rather than being observed directly. This is because most exoplanets are too dim and too close to their companion stars for the exoplanet light to be differentiated from starlight. That is where a coronagraph can help.
A coronagraph is an astronomical instrument that blocks light from an extremely bright source to allow the observation of dimmer objects in the nearby sky. Coronagraphs were first developed a century ago to allow astronomers to observe the outer atmosphere (corona) of the Sun , which would otherwise be drowned out by light from the much brighter photosphere.
At the heart of a coronagraph is a mask that blocks the light from a star, while allowing light from nearby objects into a telescope. However, the mask (and the telescope aperture) will cause the light to interfere and create diffraction patterns that blur tiny features. This prevents the observation of dim objects that are closer to the star than the instrument’s inherent diffraction limit.
Most exoplanets lie within the diffraction limit of today’s coronagraphs and Deshler’s team addressed this problem using two spatial mode sorters. The first device uses a sequence of optical elements to separate starlight from light originating from the immediate vicinity of the star. The starlight is then blocked by a mask while the rest of the light is sent through a second spatial mode sorter, which reconstructs an image of the region surrounding the star.
As well as offering spatial resolution below the diffraction limit, the technique approaches the fundamental limit on resolution that is imposed by quantum mechanics.
“Our coronagraph directly captures an image of the surrounding object, as opposed to measuring only the quantity of light it emits without any spatial orientation,” Deshler describes. “Compared to other coronagraph designs, ours promises to supply more information about objects in the sub-diffraction regime – which lie below the resolution limits of the detection instrument.”
To test their approach, Deshler and colleagues simulated an exoplanet orbiting at a sub-diffraction distance from a host star some 1000 times brighter. After passing the light through the spatial mode sorters, they could resolve the exoplanet’s position – which would have been impossible with any other coronagraph.
The team believe that their technique will improve astronomical images. “These images can provide context and composition information that could be used to determine exoplanet orbits and identify other objects that scatter light from a star, such as exozodiacal dust clouds,” Deshler says.
The team’s coronagraph could also have applications beyond astronomy. With the ability to detect extremely faint signals close to the quantum limit, it could help to improve the resolution of quantum sensors. This could to lead to new methods for detecting tiny variations in magnetic or gravitational fields.
Elsewhere, the coronagraph could help to improve non-invasive techniques for imaging living tissue on the cellular scale – with promising implications in medical applications such as early cancer detection and the imaging of neural circuits. Another potential use could be new multiplexing techniques for optical communications. This would see the coronagraph being used to differentiate between overlapping signals. This has the potential of boosting the rate at which data could be transferred between satellites and ground-based receivers.
The research is described in Optica.
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ST. LOUIS — Japan’s Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space, iQPS, plans to launch eight additional synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites through the end of 2026. Rocket Lab, the U.S. launch […]
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Seraphim Space announced the startups joining the 15th round of its networking and mentoring accelerator program May 19, reflecting the rising convergence of commercial innovation and national defense priorities.
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Iceye’s Eric Jensen: ‘Commercial SAR could be transformative for missile defense’
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ST. LOUIS – Sophia Space raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding to develop orbiting compute and data centers with key geospatial intelligence applications. The Southern California startup’s modular data centers […]
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At the end of April, I testified before the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. The hearing aimed to gather recommendations on how Congress can strengthen networks and ensure secure, […]
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