We aren’t the authors of our thoughts. We’re just the user interface. We look at the universe and see a solid reality. The universe looks at us and sees a line of code. We spend our lives trying to leave a mark on the surface of reality. Oblivious to the fact that our existence is being computed from beneath. We aren’t separate individuals. We’re just the localized tips of a single, massive mathematical architecture.👇
NASA announced on June 30, 2026, that it is considering sending PROMISE, an engineering test rover built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a stand-in for the Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers, to the lunar surface. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, announcing the concept alongside a batch of new lunar lander contracts, framed the pitch as a matter of hardware already paid for. “We’ve had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars, and we’ve got this hardware that the taxpayers have invested a lot in,” Isaacman said, according to Space.com. “So the question was posed: what if we send it to the moon?” He introduced the idea with a line borrowed from Yoda: “There is another.”
The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescopes have spotted the aftermath of three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. By measuring the distance to these echoes, they found the outer arms to be up to 10% farther away than previously thought.
Perhaps surprisingly, we don’t know much about the structure of our galaxy’s outer regions. It’s difficult to observe our galaxy from the inside: The solar system is well embedded in its disk, preventing a bird’s-eye view, and many regions are obscured by thick clouds of cosmic dust.
But this is changing: We have learned a huge amount since the launch of ESA’s star-surveying Gaia space telescope. Using data collected by Gaia, scientists are mapping the Milky Way galaxy in more detail than ever before by measuring precise distances to its stars. Before Gaia, we weren’t even sure whether our galaxy had two or four spiral arms (we now know the answer to be four).
As humans, our eyes take in two-dimensional images that our brains convert to three-dimensional experiences. This ability enables us to be aware of our position in space, judge distances, possess depth perception, and visually examine and enjoy all manner of objects and happenings.
But trying to envision subvisible structures and high-dimensional processes that our human-engineered scopes can’t capture is a challenge for data scientists and visualization experts, who turn to machine learning and AI tools to amplify visual exploration.
“Biological processes are an example of complex, high-dimensional data,” says Kevin Moon, director of USU’s Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI) Center and associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
Researchers have pinpointed a super-Earth in the habitable zone of a nearby M-dwarf star only 18 light-years away. Sophisticated instruments detected the planet’s gentle tug on its star, hinting at a rocky world that could hold liquid water. Future mega-telescopes may be able to directly image it—something impossible today.
On Jan. 26, 2026, the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Maunakea crossed an important threshold for time-domain astronomy. For the first time, scientists from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) demonstrated a new rapid-response capability at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, zooming in on a gamma-ray burst (GRB) within minutes of its discovery and capturing the earliest observations of such an event ever made at these frequencies. The successful demonstration is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
GRBs are the brightest explosions in the universe—brief but staggeringly immense flashes produced by jets launched in the collapse of massive stars or the merger of compact objects like neutron stars. Their initial burst is followed by a glow that X-ray and optical telescopes have long been able to chase within seconds or minutes of the event, but millimeter-wave telescopes have historically lagged behind in observing it.
That changed in January of this year, when the SMA rapidly responded to an automated alert from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which detected a flash of gamma rays. The sequence played out almost entirely without human intervention. Within 90 seconds, the on-duty operator had been alerted. Within four minutes, the telescope was moving to start observations.
Astronomers have revealed new details about how young stars shape their galactic surroundings in a new study. Researchers analyzed about 18,000 star-forming regions in nearby spiral galaxies using data from powerful instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, whose observations were made as part of the PHANGS survey—a collaboration aimed at better understanding galactic evolution.
They found that in normal galaxies, pressure from ionized gas drives the expansion of young star-forming regions. However, whether these zones continue to grow or remain stagnant depends strongly on their surrounding environment, said Debosmita Pathak, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University.
“When young massive stars are born, they’re very energetic and pump out a ton of photons into their surroundings,” said Pathak. “In that process, they disrupt their local environments and start to drive interstellar material out of the area.”
Within their planetary systems, stars are continuously shaping their orbiting planets through gravity, radiation and magnetic forces. So far, this relationship has appeared to be a one-way street.
But through new research published in Science, an international research team has found compelling evidence that the dynamic can run in reverse: A giant exoplanet orbiting very close to its star appears to be leaving a measurable magnetic imprint on the star itself.
