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Not what NASA scientists thought they would find, that’s for sure.

12 billion-year-old galaxies were 90% surrounded by glowing gas, igniting intense star formation.

In a monumental achievement for astronomy, scientists have, for the first time, observed a star explode in real time. The star in question, a red supergiant named SN 2020tlf, is located approximately 120 million light-years away. A team of researchers began studying the star more than 100 days before its violent collapse, using data from the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea.

A Q&A with the lead U.S. scientist of the mission, which will track changes in everything from wetlands to ice sheets to infrastructure damaged by natural disasters.

The upcoming U.S.-India NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission will observe Earth like no mission before, offering insights about our planet’s ever-changing surface.

The NISAR mission is a first-of-a-kind dual-band radar satellite that will measure land deformation from earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes, producing data for science and disaster response. It will track how much glaciers and ice sheets are advancing or retreating and it will monitor growth and loss of forests and wetlands for insights on the global carbon cycle.

Researchers at the University of Virginia are using advanced simulations to study electron behavior in electric propulsion thrusters.

Currently, 5,788 exoplanets have been confirmed in 4,326 star systems, while thousands more candidates await confirmation. So far, the vast majority of these planets have been gas giants (3,826) or Super-Earths (1,735), while only 210 have been “Earth-like”—meaning rocky planets similar in size and mass to Earth.

What’s more, the majority of these planets have been discovered orbiting within M-type (red dwarf) star systems, while only a few have been found orbiting sun-like stars. Nevertheless, no Earth-like planets orbiting within a sun-like star’s habitable zone (HZ) have been discovered so far.

This is largely due to the limitations of existing observatories, which have been unable to resolve Earth-sized planets with longer orbital periods (200 to 500 days). This is where next-generation instruments like the ESA’s PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission come into play.