Space-based solar panels could enable solar power to be harvested continuously instead of only when sunlight reaches Earth, reducing Europe’s need for Earth-based wind and solar by 80%, finds a study publishing August 21 in the Cell Press journal Joule. Using energy models, researchers estimate that in 2050, space-based solar power could cut the total costs of Europe’s total grid system by 7%–15%. However, these numbers hinge upon the rapid development of two NASA-designed technologies in order to meet Europe’s goal to achieve net-zero by 2050.  

The Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle “IBUKI GW” (GOSAT-GW), developed jointly by the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), the Ministry of the Environment of Japan (MOE), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), was successfully launched on June 29, 2025. The satellite has been in the initial functional verification operations phase. The first observations by the Total Anthropogenic and Natural emissions mapping SpectrOmeter-3 (TANSO-3) onboard this satellite were conducted from July 14 to July 20, 2025, and the proper operation of TANSO-3 was confirmed.

In a new study, researchers at Penn State and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory analyzed when and where human deep space transmissions would be most detectable by an observer outside our solar system and suggest that the patterns they see could be used to guide our own search for extraterrestrial intelligence 

Kyoto, Japan -- The size of our universe and the bodies within it is incomprehensible for us lowly humans. The sun has a mass that is more than 330,000 that of our Earth, and yet there are stars in the universe that completely dwarf our sun.

Stars with masses more than eight times that of the sun are considered high mass stars. These form rapidly in a process that gives off stellar wind and radiation, which could not result in stars of such high mass without somehow overcoming this loss of mass, or feedback. Something is feeding these stars, but how exactly they can accumulate so much mass so quickly has remained a mystery.

Observations of enormous disk-like structures that form around a star -- accretion disks -- had been proposed as the chief way of rapidly feeding young stars. However, a team of researchers from several institutions including Kyoto University and the University of Tokyo, has discovered another possibility.

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