🚀 Universe Losing Speed

🌌 Universe slowdown surprise

💥 All-day gamma-ray burst

🛰️ Twin Mars probes launch

🤖 Space-based AI design

🔭 Shenzhou debris delay

A "remarkable" study by Professor Young-Wook Lee and colleagues at Yonsei University suggests the universe's expansion is slowing down, not accelerating, challenging the 27-year-old theory that dark energy is driving galaxies apart at an increasing rate.

Researchers identified a significant age-bias in Type Ia supernovae data, finding their brightness (and thus distance measurement) is affected by the age of their progenitor stars, a systematic flaw not properly addressed in previous studies.

This controversial result, if confirmed, could suggest a time-evolving, weakening dark energy in a universe that has already entered a phase of decelerated expansion.

Observers worldwide were alerted to the powerful Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) 250702B by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope on July 2, 2025, noting its extreme duration, which far exceeded the few hours typical for these most luminous cosmic explosions.

The event was extraordinary because it lasted almost a full day, showing three distinct pulses, observed across multiple X-ray and optical wavelengths, making it the longest GRB ever detected; subsequent observations by the JWST located its source galaxy five billion light-years away.

Astronomer Adelle Goodwin notes the event's duration cannot be explained by classical supernova models (collapsars), suggesting more exotic scenarios like a tidal disruption event involving an intermediate-mass black hole or a black hole-star merger.

The NASA ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission, led by UC Berkeley, will launch its twin satellites, Blue and Gold, to Mars this weekend on November 9, 2025, aboard a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket.

The core goal is to provide the first-ever stereo view (3D map) of Mars' upper atmosphere, ionosphere and patchy magnetic fields to determine how the solar wind has caused the planet to lose most of its atmosphere and water over time.

Beyond its science mission, ESCAPADE will pioneer a new, flexible trajectory to Mars, using a kidney-bean shaped path around a Lagrange point to avoid the restrictive 26-month launch windows of the traditional Hohmann Transfer, which is crucial for future human settlement fleets.

Google Research's Project Suncatcher team is designing a novel space-based infrastructure to scale artificial intelligence (AI) compute capabilities directly from low Earth orbit.

The design proposes a 500-satellite LEO (Low Earth Orbit) constellation hosting custom TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) to perform decentralized on-orbit training and inference using optical inter-satellite links capable of up to terabit-per-second (Tbps) data transmission.

Analysts expect this architecture could enable real-time, global-scale AI applications for Earth observation without reliance on ground stations for intensive data processing.

The return of China's Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has been delayed indefinitely after the vessel was suspected of being struck by space debris, marking the first time a Shenzhou return mission has been postponed due to this specific hazard.

The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) is urgently conducting an impact analysis and risk assessment to determine the extent of the damage and ensure the spacecraft is safe for the three astronauts' re-entry to Earth.

This incident highlights the growing threat of space junk in Low Earth Orbit; if Shenzhou-20 is deemed irreparable, protocols state the crew would return aboard the currently docked Shenzhou-21 capsule, or a backup vehicle launched from Earth.