technical updates

An extraordinary exploding star has been spotted in a distant galaxy, and astrophotographers are racing to capture it before it fades from view. The supernova, called SN 2026aaiv, was first seen by the ATLAS survey on Sept. 1 in NGC 7331 (also known as Caldwell 30), a spiral galaxy about 45 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, visible in the Northern Hemisphere and at mid-latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere. That makes this supernova a prime target for amateur astrophotographers and astronomers worldwide to capture an image of this rare event. Hundreds of astrophotographers have already captured it, including Andrew McCarthy, who posted his image on Instagram on Sept. 7 with the message, "As luck would have it, I happened to be in the middle of a massive project with this galaxy, and caught the supernova." He shot four hours of data, two before and two after the su...

Rocket Lab just launched a mystery mission to orbit. An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site on Thursday (Sept. 10) at 11:28 p.m. EDT (0328 GMT and 3:28 p.m. local New Zealand time on Sept. 11). The launched kicked off a mission the company called "Happily Ever Faster," which we know little about. 'Happily Ever Faster' to orbit 🌌✨ Today we launched our 95th Electron at 3:28 pm NZST and deployed a single Earth observation satellite to a 500km LEO for a confidential customer - our 16th mission of the year with 100% mission success. pic.twitter.com/xAsy30uyNP September 11, 2026 Rocket Lab did not livestream the mission or reveal who booked it, saying only that it aimed to loft "a single commercial satellite to a 500 km low Earth orbit ." That did indeed happen successfully, the company announced via X about 80 minutes after launch. Specul...

The Star Trek franchise has hit the ripe old age of 60 this week. September 8 is the official 'Star Trek Day' and marks the anniversary of the 'Original Series', which first broadcast in 1966. For fans of all things Star Trek, Paramount+ is the place to be with all seasons of the 'Original Series', plus the new series ' Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ', which is currently in Season 4 and hits its exciting finale on September 24. If you travel regularly, a regional lock can cut off your Paramount+ subscription the moment you step abroad. A reliable VPN solves this instantly — masking your location so you can stream all your favorite Star Trek content without interruption, just like you’re sitting on your couch at home. NordVPN is our top choice among the best VPN services, and right now, they have great deals on 2-year plans, offering a bonus three months free whe...

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object – compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies – four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). "We've never encountered a group of objects that act like this," said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in a statement . Compact objects, in the form of black holes , neutron stars and white dwarfs , are the remains of stars that have died. Their small size and powerful gravity means that they're adept at getting close to orbiting companion stars and ripping the stars' outer layers of gas away. The gas swir...

On clear September evenings, I often find myself looking up just after dusk, expecting the sky to feel a little less like summer. Yet there, still commanding the overhead darkness, are Vega, Altair , and Deneb — the three brilliant stars of the famous Summer Triangle. Their familiar pattern can make the season feel as though it is lingering above us, even as cooler nights and earlier sunsets suggest otherwise. In fact, even as late as mid-November, the Triangle is still nearly overhead soon after sunset at dusk. That contrast raises a simple but intriguing question: if this bright celestial landmark remains so prominent well into autumn, why do we still call it the Summer Triangle? Why not simply call it the Autumn Triangle? Why it belongs to summer The answer lies not in the calendar, but in how the Triangle moves across the sky over the course of a summer night. The chief reason is that, at ...

On Sept. 10, 2011, NASA's GRAIL spacecraft launched on a mission to the moon! GRAIL, which stands for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, was sent to the moon to map its gravitational fields . Scientists could study the moon's interior structure by looking at maps of the moon's gravity. Asteroid impacts from billions of years ago left dense pockets of material under the lunar surface, which can exert extra gravitational pull on spacecraft orbiting the moon . So by measuring that gravitational pull, the GRAIL mission could reveal information about what lies beneath the surface. The mission actually consisted of two twin spacecraft named Ebb and Flow , which would fly in tandem around the moon to map variations in its gravitation field. Both lifted off on the same Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida and arrived in lunar orbit almost four months later. They mapped the mo...