A Falcon 9 launched a new crew to the International Space Station Feb. 13 to start a busy schedule of arriving and departing vehicles at the station.
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NASA has selected commercial space station company Vast to fly a private astronaut mission to the International Space Station in 2027.
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India has unveiled plans to build two new optical-infrared telescopes and a dedicated solar telescope in the Himalayan desert region of Ladakh. The three new facilities, expected to cost INR 35bn (about £284m), were announced by the Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on 1 February.
First up is a 3.7 m optical-infrared telescope, which is expected to come online by 2030. It will be built near the existing 2m Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT) at Hanle, about 4500m above sea level. Astronomers use the HCT for a wide range of investigations, including stellar evolution, galaxy spectroscopy, exoplanet atmospheres and time-domain studies of supernovae, variable stars and active galactic nuclei.
“The arid and high-altitude Ladakh desert is firmly established as among the world’s most attractive sites for multiwavelength astronomy,” Annapurni Subramaniam, director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Bangalore, told Physics World. “HCT has demonstrated both site quality and opportunities for sustained and competitive science from this difficult location.”
The 3.7-m telescope is a stepping stone towards a proposed 13.7 m National Large Optical-Infrared Telescope (NLOT), which is expected to open in 2038. “NLOT is intended to address contemporary astronomy goals, working in synergy with major domestic and international facilities,” says Maheswar Gopinathan, a scientist at the IIA, which is leading all three projects.
Gopinathan says NLOT’s large collecting area will enable research on young stellar systems, brown dwarfs and exoplanets, while also allowing astronomers to detect faint sources and to rapidly follow up extreme cosmic events and gravitational wave detections.
Along with India’s upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, a planned gravitational-wave observatory in the country and the Square Kilometre Array in Australasia and South Africa, Gopinathan says that NLOT “will usher in a new era of multi-messenger and multi-wavelength astronomy.”
The third telescope to be supported is the 2m National Large Solar Telescope (NLST), which will be built near Pangong Tso lake 4350m above sea level. Also expected to come online by 2030, the NLST is an advance on India’s existing 50cm telescope at the Udaipur Solar Observatory, which provides a spatial resolution of about 100 km. Scientists also plan to combine NLST observations with data from Aditya-L1, India’s space-based solar observatory, which launched in 2023.
“We have two key goals [with NLST],” says Dibyendu Nandi, an astrophysicist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata, “to probe small-scale perturbations that cascade into large flares or coronal mass ejections and improve our understanding of space weather drivers and how energy in localised plasma flows is channelled to sustain the ubiquitous magnetic fields.”
While bolstering India’s domestic astronomical capabilities, scientists say the Ladakh telescopes – located between observatories in Europe, the Americas, East Asia and Australia – would significantly improve global coverage of transient and variable phenomena.
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Chinese launch firm iSpace has secured a record D++ funding round to accelerate its reusable rocket development efforts and expand its industrial footprint.
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A faint flash of infrared light in the Andromeda galaxy was emitted at the birth of a stellar-mass black hole – according to a team of astronomers in the US. Kishalay De at Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute, and colleagues, noticed that the flash was followed by the rapid dimming of a once-bright star. They say that the star collapsed, with almost all of its material falling into a newly forming black hole. Their analysis suggests that there may be many more such black holes in the universe than previously expected.
When a massive star runs out of fuel for nuclear fusion it can no longer avoid gravitational collapse. As it implodes, such a star is believed to emit an intense burst of neutrinos, whose energy can be absorbed by the star’s outer layers.
In some cases, this energy is enough to tear material away from the core, triggering spectacular explosions known as core-collapse supernovae. Sometimes, however, this energy transfer is insufficient to halt the collapse, which continues until a stellar-mass black hole is created. These stellar deaths are far less dramatic than supernovae, and are therefore very difficult to observe.
Observational evidence for these stellar-mass black holes include their gravitational influence on the motions of stars; and the gravitational waves emitted when they merge together. So far, however, their initial formation has proven far more difficult to observe.
“While there is consensus that these objects must be formed as the end products of the lives of likely very massive stars, there has remained little convincing observational evidence of watching stars turn into black holes,” De explains. “As a result, we don’t even have constraints on questions as fundamental as which stars can turn into black holes.”
The main problem is the low key nature of the stellar implosions. While core-collapse supernovae shine brightly in the sky, “finding an individual star disappearing in a galaxy is remarkably difficult,” De says. “A typical galaxy has a 100 billion stars in it, and being able to spot one that disappears makes it very challenging.”
Fortunately, it is believed that these stars do not vanish without a trace. “Whenever a black hole does form from the near complete inward collapse of a massive star, its very outer envelope must be still ejected because it is too loosely bound to the star,” De explains. As it expands and cools, models predict that this ejected material should emit a flash of infrared radiation – vastly dimmer than a supernova, but still bright enough for infrared surveys to detect.
To search for these flashes, De’s team examined data from NASA’s NEOWISE infrared survey and several other telescopes. They identified a near-infrared flash that was observed in 2014 and closely matched their predictions for a collapsing star. That flash was emitted by a supergiant star in the Andromeda galaxy.
Between 2017 and 2022, the star dimmed rapidly before disappearing completely across all regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. “This star used to be one of the most luminous stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, and now it was nowhere to be seen,” says De.
“Astronomers can spot supernovae billions of light years away – but even at this remarkable proximity, we didn’t see any evidence of an explosive supernova,” De says. “This suggests that the star underwent a near pure implosion, forming a black hole.”
The team also examined a previously-observed dimming in a galaxy 10 times more distant. While several competing theories had emerged to explain that disappearance, the pattern of dimming bore a striking resemblance to their newly-validated model, strongly suggesting that this event too signalled the birth of a stellar-mass black hole.
Because these events occurred so recently in ordinary galaxies like Andromeda, De’s team believe that similar implosions must be happening routinely across the universe – and they hope that their work will trigger a new wave of discoveries.
“The estimated mass of the star we observed is about 13 times the mass of the Sun, which is lower than what astronomers have assumed for the mass of stars that turn into black holes,” De says. “This fundamentally changes out understanding of the landscape of black hole formation – there could be many more black holes out there than we estimate.”
The research is described in Science.
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Young space companies are gaining more ways to cash out or raise larger pools of capital as the industry matures and investors grow more comfortable with the sector.
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The more powerful version of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket successfully placed a group of Amazon Leo broadband satellites into orbit on the vehicle’s inaugural launch Feb. 12.
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Axiom Space has raised $350 million to advance development of a commercial space station and new spacesuits for NASA.
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The contract will examine the performance of ThinKom’s “portable gateway” for use by dismounted forces
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The International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ) has officially closed following a two-day event in Accra, Ghana. The year has seen hundreds of events worldwide celebrating the science and applications of quantum physics.
Officially launched in February at the headquarters of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, IYQ has involved hundreds of organizations – including the Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics World.
The year 2025 was chosen for an international year dedicated to quantum physics as it marks the centenary of the initial development of quantum mechanics by Werner Heisenberg. A range of international and national events have been held touching on quantum in everything from communications and computing to medicine and the arts.
One of the highlights of the year was a workshop on 9–14 June in Helgoland – the island off the coast of Germany where Heisenberg made his breakthrough exactly 100 years ago. It was attended by more than 300 top quantum physicists, including four Nobel prize-winners, who gathered for talks, poster sessions and debates.
Another was the IOP’s two-day conference – Quantum Science and Technology: The First 100 Years; Our Quantum Future – held at the Royal Institution in London in November.
The closing event in Ghana, held on 10–11 February, was attended by government officials, UNESCO directors, physicists and representatives from international scientific societies, including the IOP. They discussed UNESCO’s official 2025 IYQ report as well as heard a reading of the IYQ 2025 poetry contest winning entry and attended an exhibition with displays from IYQ sponsors.
Organizers behind the IYQ hope its impact will be felt for many years to come. “The entire 2025 year was filled with impactful events happening all over the world. It has been a wonderful experience working alongside such dedicated and distinguished colleagues,” notes Duke University physicist Emily Edwards, who is a member of the IYQ steering committee. “We are thrilled to see the enthusiasm continue through to 2026 with the closing ceremony and are proud that a strong foundation has been laid for the years ahead.”
The UN has declared “international years” since 1959, to draw attention to topics deemed to be of worldwide importance. In recent years, there have been a number of successful science-based themes, including physics (2005), astronomy (2009), chemistry (2011), crystallography (2014) and light and light-based technologies (2015).
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Science fiction became science fact in 2022 when NASA’s DART mission took the first steps towards creating a planetary defence system that could someday protect Earth from a catastrophic asteroid collision. However, much more work on asteroid deflection is needed from the latest generation of researchers – including Rahil Makadia, who has just completed a PhD in aerospace engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, Makadia talks about his work on how we could deflect asteroids away from Earth. We also chat about the potential threats posed by near-Earth asteroids – from shattered windows to global destruction.
Makadia’s stresses the importance of getting a deflection right the first time, because his calculations reveal that a poorly deflected asteroid could return to Earth someday. In November, he published a paper that explored how a bad deflection could send an asteroid into a “keyhole” that guarantees its return.
But it is not all gloom and doom, Makadia points out that our current understanding of near-Earth asteroids suggests that no major collision will occur for at least 100 years. So even if there is a threat on the horizon, we have lots of time to develop deflection strategies and technologies.
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Astronomy and commercial space are often portrayed as being on a collision course, yet their futures are deeply intertwined. As satellite constellations expand, astronomers raise concerns about trails across images, interference with radio telescopes and the loss of dark skies. At the same time, commercial operators point to the enormous economic, scientific and national security […]
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The company developed a collaborative project management platform designed to operate in classified environments
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Flowing fluids that act like the interlocking teeth of mechanical gears offer a possible route to novel machines that suffer less wear-and-tear than traditional devices. This is the finding of researchers at New York University (NYU) in the US, who have been studying how fluids transmit motion and force between two spinning solid objects. Their work sheds new light on how one such object, or rotor, causes another object to rotate in the liquid that surrounds it – sometimes with counterintuitive results.
“The surprising part in our work is that the direction of motion may not be what you expect,” says NYU mathematician Leif Ristroph, who led the study together with mathematical physicist Jun Zhang. “Depending on the exact conditions, one rotor can cause a nearby rotor to spin in the opposite direction, like a pair of gears pressed together. For other cases, the rotors spin in the same direction, as if they are two pulleys connected by a belt that loops around them.”
Gears have been around for thousands of years, with the first records dating back to 3000 BC. While they have advanced over time, their teeth are still made from rigid materials and are prone to wearing out and breaking.
Ristroph says that he and Zhang began their project with a simple question: might it possible to avoid this problem by making gears that don’t have teeth, and in fact don’t even touch, but are instead linked together by a fluid? The idea, he points out, is not unprecedented. Flowing air and water are commonly used to rotate structures such as turbines, so developing fluid gears to facilitate that rotation is in some ways a logical next step.
To test their idea, the researchers carried out a series of measurements aimed at determining how parameters like the spin rate and the distance between spinning objects affect the motion produced. In these measurements, they immersed the rotors – solid cylinders – in an aqueous glycerol solution with a controllable viscosity and density. They began by rotating one cylinder while allowing the other one to spin in response. Then they placed the cylinders at varying distances from each other and rotated the active cylinder at different speeds.
“The active cylinder should generate fluid flows and could therefore in principle cause rotation of the passive one,” says Ristroph, “and this is exactly what we observed.”
When the cylinders were very close to each other, the NYU team found that the fluid flows functioned like gear teeth – in effect, they “gripped” the passive rotor and caused it to spin in the opposite direction as the active one. However, when the cylinders were spaced farther apart and the active cylinder spun faster, the flows looped around the outside of the passive cylinder like a belt around a pulley, producing rotation in the same direction as the active cylinder.
Ristroph says the team’s main difficulty was figuring out how to perform such measurements with the necessary precision. “Once we got into the project, an early challenge was to make sure we could make very precise measurements of the rotations, which required a special way to hold the rotors using air bearings,” he explains. Team member Jesse Smith, a PhD student and first author of a paper in Physical Review Letters about the research, was “brilliant in figuring out every step in this process”, Ristroph adds.
Another challenge the researchers faced was figuring out how to interpret their findings. This led them to develop a model involving “gear-like” and “belt-like” modes of induced rotations. Using this model, they showed that, at least in principle, a fluid gear could replace regular gears and pulley-and-belt systems in any system – though Ristroph suggests that transmitting rotations in a machine or keep timing via a mechanical device might be especially well-suited.
In general, Ristroph says that fluid gears offer many advantages over mechanical ones. Notably, they cannot become jammed or wear out due to grinding. But that isn’t all: “There has been a lot of recent interest in designing new types of so-called active materials that are composed of many particles, and one class of these involves spinning particles in a fluid,” he explains. “Our results could help to understand how these materials behave based on the interactions between the particles and the flows they generate.”
The NYU researchers say their next step will be to study more complex fluids. “For example, a slurry of corn starch is an everyday example of a shear-thickening fluid and it would be interesting to see if this helps the rotors better ‘grip’ one another and therefore transmit the motions/forces more effectively,” Ristroph says. “We are also numerically simulating the processes, which should allow us to investigate things like non-circular shapes of the rotors or more than just two rotors,” he tells Physics World.
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