Hubble has found a growing ten-sided atmospheric wave around Saturn’s south pole—the first large regular-sided jet seen there. Saturn has long been known for a strange shape in its clouds. A vast hexagon circles the planet’s north pole, holding its form for more than four decades. Now astronomers have found something that looks as if […]
Twenty-seven faint objects beyond Neptune are giving astronomers a rare look at the planet-building material that survived when the outer solar system stopped growing. The outer solar system is not empty. Beyond Neptune, in the cold region known as the Kuiper Belt, countless small bodies travel around the Sun. Most are so faint that even […]
The objects are unusually soft in X-rays but bright in extreme ultraviolet light—exactly the combination that makes them difficult to find and potentially important to the history of stars and galaxies. A galaxy can be full of powerful objects and still keep some of them hidden in plain sight. That is what makes a new […]
Look into the middle of N44 and the most striking feature is what seems to be missing. A vast opening interrupts the glowing gas, while stars crowd the surrounding scene. What could carve a cavity this large—and what happens to the material pushed out of the way? A Hubble image released by NASA on September […]
What might happen when the ingredients of life have an entire landscape in which to react? On Titan, NASA hopes to investigate that question by flying from one patch of ground to another. The Dragonfly rotorcraft is taking shape at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. In a September 2 mission update, NASA […]
Look up at the night sky and it is easy to imagine a few bright worlds hanging in an empty blackness. But what are we really looking at when we say “the Solar System”? It is a family shaped by one star’s gravity, built from the same ancient disk of gas and dust, and still […]
A brilliant X-ray source is not automatically a black hole. Matter falling toward a neutron star can also become intensely luminous, and some neutron stars have surprised astronomers by producing far more radiation than expected. Identifying the object requires evidence about its mass, its rotation and whether incoming gas encounters a material surface. The distinction […]
Venus can reach its greatest brilliance while a telescope shows only a crescent. A nearly full Venus exposes more of its sunlit hemisphere, yet that does not necessarily deliver more light to Earth. The missing part of the explanation is distance: a closer crescent can look much larger than a distant, almost fully illuminated disk. […]
Saturn’s south pole has a ten-sided atmospheric wave, giving astronomers a new counterpart to the planet’s famous northern hexagon. The southern pattern appears to be evolving, raising a question that a single striking image cannot answer: will it become another enduring feature of the planet’s weather? A study announced on September 2 traces the feature […]
Twenty-seven faint objects beyond Neptune have emerged from a deep James Webb Space Telescope survey, extending the search for the solar system’s building blocks to worlds only kilometres across. Hubble observations of part of the sample add a second clue: their colors resemble those of larger objects, suggesting that size alone has not erased the […]
Dark energy is one of the least satisfying names in astronomy because it sounds more specific than it is. Scientists did not discover a glowing substance called dark energy. They gave that name to the unknown influence associated with the accelerating expansion of the universe. The evidence is strong that the expansion is speeding up […]
In empty space, light travels at exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. That is about 300,000 kilometers per second, or 186,282 miles per second. It is the fastest speed at which matter, energy, or information can travel through the universe. The number is so large that it is easy to treat light as instantaneous. Across cosmic […]
A neutron star is what remains after the core of a massive star collapses. It is not a small ordinary star. It is the crushed core of a dead one, compressed until protons and electrons are forced together and most of the material becomes neutrons. The result is one of the strangest objects in the […]
From the rim of Jezero Crater, Earth is only a bright point in the sky. On July 2, NASA’s Perseverance rover watched that point vanish behind Phobos, Mars’ larger moon, and recorded the event with its Mastcam-Z camera. The sequence is the first time humanity has observed Earth disappearing behind an object from the surface […]
NASA’s Physics of the Cosmos Program, in collaboration with the Physics of the Cosmos Program Analysis Group Executive Committee, is pleased to announce the Third Early Career Workshop. Participants will benefit from engaging interactive sessions covering essential topics including grant opportunities, navigating data archives, and effective strategies for career advancement.
22-24 September 2026 1:00pm-4:00pm ET / 10:00am-1:00pm PT
Community
Physics of the Cosmos
Type
Workshop
Physics of the Cosmos
Inspiring the Next Generation of Astrophysicists
The workshop will be held on September 22 – 24, 2026, from 1:00PM to 4:00PM Eastern Time and will be fully virtual.
This workshop aims to provide early career scientists with valuable insights into the groundbreaking research conducted within the Physics of the Cosmos Program, demonstrate essential tools and resources available to them, and address their questions and concerns.
Physics of the Cosmos Third Early Career Workshop Poster
This third workshop will discuss three topics—Science, Missions, and Career Development— and will also showcase the importance of collaborations.
This workshop is tailored for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career scientists looking to enhance their professional trajectory in astrophysics.
Workshop Schedule
The workshop will include a tutorial on the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) Science Explorer (SciX), talks on upcoming missions including the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) and the Ultraviolet Explorer (UVEX), updates on NASA programs for students and postdocs, a CV writing mini-workshop, presentations by your fellow early career researchers on exciting science and technology development projects, and much more!
The full program will be coming soon.
Downloads
Physics of the Cosmos Third Early Career Workshop Poster
Moon dust looks soft in photographs, but it is a difficult material for machines and people. The grains are sharp, abrasive and electrically clingy. NASA engineers at Johnson Space Center are using a dedicated test facility to find out how tools, joints and spacesuits will cope with it before Artemis astronauts return to the lunar […]
NASA is testing the communications and radar hardware for a proposed Mars aircraft mission called SkyFall. The project is still on Earth, but its engineers are working through the details that would allow three small aircraft to fly in the thin Martian atmosphere and send useful data back to a rover or an orbiter. A […]
At Earth’s poles, much of the heat leaving the planet is invisible to human eyes. NASA’s two PREFIRE CubeSats are measuring that far-infrared energy directly, and a new animation built from two complete seasonal cycles shows just how differently the Arctic and Antarctic warm and cool. The Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment began […]
Empty space is not completely empty in the equations of quantum physics. Under an ordinary magnetic field, that distinction is impossible to notice. Near a magnetar—a neutron star with a magnetic field trillions of times stronger than Earth’s—space itself can alter the way light travels. NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has measured unusually strong […]
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