Space stories on Noozify — original reporting and curated links, ranked by the community.
Mainland Spain saw its first total solar eclipse since 1905 on Wednesday, August 12, and the images have started arriving: a pink solar prominence burning through cloud at La Coruña, the diamond ring breaking above the bell towers of Tarragona Cathedral, totality over the Stone Bridge in Zaragoza. Observers in Mallorca described a prominence bright enough to see with the naked eye. Europe had not had a total eclipse since 1999.
Europe's first total eclipse since 1999 reaches maximum at 5:46 PM UTC, with up to two minutes and 18 seconds of totality along the center line. The path runs across Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain and a corner of Portugal; much of the rest of Europe and North America gets a partial. NASA's livestream opens at 12:15 PM CT with telescope feeds from along the track and footage from a high-altitude aircraft flying inside the Moon's shadow.
A discarded rocket hit the Moon last Wednesday and left a chemical signature nobody expected. Next Wednesday brings a solar eclipse and the year's best meteor shower on the same date — and that pairing is not the coincidence it looks like.
Dormant black holes are invisible by definition — they emit nothing until something falls in. This one gave itself away by shredding a passing star, and the flare came from 30,000 light-years off-center rather than the galactic core where such objects are assumed to live. University of Maryland astronomers caught it using the Zwicky Transient Facility and an AI trained to spot the light signature of a star being torn apart.
A spent Falcon 9 upper stage, jettisoned during a January 2025 lunar-lander mission and left drifting for over a year, fell into the Moon's orbit and slammed into the surface early Wednesday, gouging a crater roughly 60 feet wide. The impact was too faint to observe directly, but astronomers say it's a reminder of how carelessly leftover space hardware often gets discarded.
A maybe-biosignature, a fleet of skeptical astronomers, and 33 days of the world's best radio telescopes listening for a reply that never came — the strange, still-unresolved case of K2-18b.
China landed its Long March 10B rocket booster at sea for the first time, following the vehicle's July 10 launch from Wenchang.