China Sends First Images of Earth's Mini Moon

🌑 China photographs Earth's mini moon

🕳️ Simplifying black hole mergers explained

🛸 New Horizons wakes from hibernation

🚀 Investors pour into Blue Origin

🌌 One-stop hub for universe data

CNSA (China National Space Administration) scientists operating Tianwen-2 captured the first image of quasi-satellite Kamo'oalewa, a 66-foot-diameter asteroid that may be a stray piece of our moon ejected by ancient impact.

Tianwen-2 traveled 621 million miles over 400 days to reach within 12 miles of the rapidly rotating asteroid, which completes one full rotation every 28 minutes on its axis.

CNSA plans sample return to Earth in 2027 via atmospheric flyby, followed by extended mission to comet 311P/PanSTARRS, potentially revealing lunar origin evidence according to agency statements.

Penn State physicists led by Monica Rincon-Ramirez developed a thermodynamic approach to predict black hole merger remnants, bypassing complex general relativity equations that typically require supercomputers to solve accurately.

The team's maximum entropy conjecture for mergers predicted final black hole mass and angular momentum within a few percent of numerical relativity simulations, according to Physical Review Letters publication.

B.S. Sathyaprakash suggests entropy maximization could be a fundamental organizing principle governing black hole interactions, potentially transforming understanding of gravity and black hole physics intersections.

Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory flight controllers confirmed NASA's New Horizons spacecraft safely awakened from 321-day hibernation period on June 23, its longest sleep cycle ever during the extended mission.

Radio signals from 5.9 billion miles away took 8 hours and 52 minutes to reach Earth via NASA's Deep Space Network station near Madrid, Spain, confirming nominal spacecraft health.

Mission operations manager Alice Bowman reports the ultraviolet spectrograph will study hydrogen gas distribution in the outer heliosphere within three weeks as active science operations resume.

Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's rocket company, is raising outside capital for the first time at a $130 billion valuation as it competes with SpaceX following the company's recent IPO.

Coatue Management leads with $4 billion commitment, while Bezos contributes $2 billion personally and institutional investors provide the remaining $4 billion in this inaugural external funding round.

Bezos told CNBC the company finally has enough visibility into financial success, suggesting Blue Origin may eventually exceed Amazon's value according to his 2026 interview statements.

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian astronomers led by post-doctoral researcher Mike Smith created the Multimodal Universe project, unifying astronomical data across incompatible telescope archives and formats.

The initiative reshaped over 80 terabytes of observations including galaxy images from radio to X-rays, stellar spectra, and variable star time-series into one consistent user-friendly system.

Smith writes that scientists and students can now pull data from many sky surveys using identical tools on laptops, eliminating the need for supercomputing access or survey-specific expertise.