SPACE.com

3 days ago | space.com | Andrew Jones

China brought two spacecraft together high above Earth as part of a refueling demonstration mission, according to a space situational awareness company. China's Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 satellites had been moving toward each other in geosynchronous orbit, around 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above the equator, Spacenews reported on June 6. And now the pair appear to have had a brief first encounter, according to observations from the ground.

3 days ago | space.com | Andrew Jones

Japanese automaker Honda successfully launched and landed a prototype reusable rocket on Tuesday (June 17), marking a big step toward future spaceflight capabilities. The 56-second vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) test took place Tuesday at Honda's facility in Taiki, Hokkaido, often dubbed Japan's "space town." The rocket, developed by Honda R&D, reached an altitude of 271.4 meters (890 feet) and touched down just 37 centimeters (14.6 inches) from its target, according to a company statement.

3 days ago | space.com | Robert Lea

Astronomers have obtained a stunning new image of the Sculptor Galaxy, painted in thousands of colors that reveals the intricacies of galactic systems. The incredible image of the galaxy — located around 11 million light-years away and also known as NGC 253 — was collected with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. In addition to providing a galaxy-wide view of the Sculptor Galaxy, the image shows intricate details of NGC 253.

3 days ago | space.com | Tereza Pultarova

When astronomers first dreamt up the Vera Rubin Observatory in the 1990s, the sky above the Chilean Cerro Pachón, where the star-observing machine was to be located, looked different than it does today. Dotted with millions of stars, galaxies and nebulas, it was only occasionally crossed by a lone satellite.

4 days ago | space.com | Robert Lea

Primordial black holes that formed during the earliest moments of the universe could have swollen quickly to supermassive sizes, complex cosmological simulations have revealed. The discovery could lead to a solution for one of the biggest problems in modern cosmology: how supermassive black holes could have grown to be millions or billions of times more massive than the sun before the universe was 1 billion years old.