The Early Career Workshops are organized by the Physics of the Cosmos Program and the Physics of the Cosmos Program Analysis Group Executive Committee to support and empower the next generation of astrophysics leaders and principal investigators. Workshops provide insights into the Program’s work, demonstrate available tools and opportunities

Two research teams have proposed competing locations for Luna 9, the Soviet lander that made the first soft touchdown on the moon in 1966. Anatoly Zak cautioned, “One of them is wrong,” underscoring how the precise resting places of several early lunar spacecraft remain uncertain. Vitaly Egorov revived a crowdsourced

A team will improve open-source tools to test how well the Roman Space Telescope’s time-domain surveys can measure stellar rotation periods, infer gyrochronological ages, and distinguish magnetic structures on stellar surfaces. Roman is planned to perform infrared time-domain observations, focusing on the Galactic bulge and also covering high latitudes.

A Wide Field Science program will develop community software to simulate and analyze Roman surveys of nearby galaxies. Roman’s wide field, sensitivity to faint stars and compact sources, and near-infrared bandpasses will permit panoramic mapping of hundreds of nearby galaxies out to their virial radii, revealing star formation histories

The Hubble Space Telescope reveals the clearest view yet of the Egg Nebula, a structure of gas and dust created by a dying, Sun-like star about 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. A central star sits hidden inside a dense cloud of dust — a “yolk” within an opaque

NASA and SpaceX are now targeting no earlier than 5:15 a.m. EST Friday, Feb. 13, for the Crew-12 launch to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Mission teams completed a weather review Tuesday morning and waived off the Thursday, Feb. 12, launch

The scientific community has welcomed the cancellation of INNA, a proposed $10bn, 3,000-hectare green hydrogen and ammonia production facility in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The plan included a port, transport links to the coast and three solar power plants, and had been under evaluation by Chile’s environmental regulator

Placid chords of a Debussy prelude filled a darkened auditorium during a recital by the pianist Nicolas Namoradze at the University of California, San Francisco. Above him a translucent model of his brain displayed electrical currents as colorful activity moving like storm fronts; as he moved through Bach, Beethoven and

Our universe is filled with galaxies, complex three-dimensional structures of stars, dark matter, gas and dust. Seen in projection they present a bewildering ‘zoo’ of morphologies—flat disks, spiral arms, central bulges and linear bars—that hold clues to how galaxies assembled and changed over time. The Roman Space Telescope

Walking up a winding trail in the Dobratsch nature park in Carinthia, I followed ranger Birgit Pichorner amid snowy slopes dotted with pines. For residents of Villach this is their Hausberg, a much-loved locals’ mountain; until 2002 it was a ski resort. After successive bad winters the town faced the

PI Mutlu-Pakdil of Dartmouth College has proposed a Wide Field Science program to develop a Roman dwarf galaxy pipeline. The project has two main goals: create a large set of simulated dwarfs to forecast Roman’s scientific output and optimize survey strategies, and deliver an automated dwarf detection algorithm to

Photometric information will be central to Roman cosmology and galaxy evolution studies, used both to estimate redshifts and to measure distributions and scaling relations of luminosity, stellar mass, and specific star formation rate. Those same quantities can enhance cosmology analyses by separating populations with different intrinsic alignments or clustering for

Regular M dwarfs are the most common type of star in our Galaxy, with the stellar mass function peaking around 0.23M☉ (T* = 3200 K, M4V). Given Roman’s deep sensitivity, these stars will dominate both the sources and the lenses of exoplanet microlensing events observed in Roman’s Galactic

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will measure weak gravitational lensing and galaxy clustering to study dark energy and cosmic acceleration. Accurate redshifts for millions of galaxies are required and will come from slitless spectroscopy. But slitless spectra across the field face overlapping spectra, contamination from nearby sources, and galaxy

A large Wide-Field Science program will develop a next-generation crowded-field stellar photometry tool for Roman. It will support native Roman data formats and pipeline, enabling seamless interoperation with the Roman Research Nexus. Studies of resolved stellar populations are crucial to all four of the community-defined Roman surveys. Roman will encounter

Principal Investigator Lin Yan (California Institute of Technology) and Institutional PI Ori Fox (Space Telescope Science Institute) are leading a wide-field science effort focused on high-redshift transients. The team proposes a Roman hIgh-redshift transient SciencE (RISE) end-to-end pipeline with two primary objectives. The first objective is to provide the community

A gray wolf known as BEY03F arrived in Los Angeles County on Saturday, the first documented presence of the species in the region in nearly a century. She roamed more than 500 miles from Northern California after being born in 2023 in Plumas County and is believed to have spent

The three Roman Core Community Surveys and the first announced General Astrophysics Survey (the Galactic Plane Survey) together are expected to obtain multi-band photometry for tens of billions of stars, an order of magnitude more than all other existing surveys combined. This Roman photometry will enable stellar classification en masse

Team Atomic trekked deep into Iceland’s landscapes in search of geothermal activity that could help unlock secrets about Mars. Their mission was to hunt for both relic and newly formed geothermal vent deposits and then compare those features to what the Perseverance rover is seeing on the Martian surface.

During a stretch of frigid weather in late January 2026, ice choked the Hudson River along Manhattan’s western shore. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 captured the scene around midday on Jan. 28. The image uses representational color to set ice apart as light blue, with open

A giant wildlife crossing due to open outside Los Angeles this year has become a focal point in efforts to protect mountain lions. The story of P-121, a cub found in a roadside ditch in the Simi Valley with a broken hind leg, illustrates the pressures the animals face. At

Elon Musk said SpaceX is shifting its focus from Mars to creating a "self-growing city" on the Moon, arguing that launch cycles are much faster. "It is only possible to travel to Mars when the planets align every 26 months (six month trip time), whereas we can

NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev answered questions Sunday from the Astronaut Crew Quarters inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During their virtual briefing with the

NASA’s Curiosity rover has used its last drop of tetramethylammonium hydroxide (TMAH) in methanol to analyze a Martian rock sample that may contain organic molecules. The rare experiment, performed only once before in Curiosity’s 13-year mission, mixes the solvent with powdered rock to help reveal certain carbon-based compounds

Russia’s invasion has not only inflicted suffering on people; it has also changed the country’s pets. In a study published in December in the journal Evolutionary Applications, researchers reported that exposure to the conflict rapidly transformed former pets into animals resembling wild canids. The team collected data from