Series 5 Episode 60 is one for the ages. NASA has detected a neutron star collision in a location that has left astronomers stunned, DART mission data reveals a slow-motion cosmic snowball fight between asteroids, Artemis II inches toward its April launch window, Starship V3 is almost ready to fly — and a decades-long mystery about why our neighbouring galaxies are speeding away from us has finally been cracked.
Episode at a Glance
1NASA discovers neutron star crash in unexpected tiny galaxy — and it may explain where your gold comes from.
2Artemis II Flight Readiness Review — NASA press conference Thursday, April launch window on track.
3Firefly Alpha 'Stairway to Seven' scrubbed again — third delay in 10 days; new date pending.
4DART mission reveals 'cosmic snowball fight' — first-ever direct proof of material transfer between asteroids.
5Starship Flight 12 about four weeks away — first launch of the more powerful V3 configuration.
6Giant dark matter sheet discovered around Milky Way — solves a 50-year mystery about our galactic neighbourhood.
Story 1
NASA · Neutron Stars · Astrophysics
A Collision Within a Collision — NASA Finds Neutron Star Crash in the Most Unexpected Place
Where does the gold in your jewellery come from? Not a mine. Not a volcano. According to a remarkable new finding published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, it comes from two incredibly dense dead stars smashing into each other inside a tiny, wandering galaxy billions of light-years away.
A fleet of NASA space telescopes — including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope — has likely uncovered a neutron star merger inside a small, faint galaxy embedded in a vast stream of gas, some 4.7 billion light-years from Earth. It is the first time astronomers have detected this type of violent event in such an unlikely environment.
Neutron stars are the cores left behind when a massive star exhausts its fuel, collapses, and explodes in a supernova. They pack more mass than our Sun into a ball roughly the width of a city. When two of them collide — a neutron star merger — the result is one of the most energetic events in the universe: a gamma-ray burst, gravitational waves rippling through space-time, and a kilonova explosion that forges heavy elements like gold, silver, and platinum through nuclear reactions that cannot happen anywhere else in the cosmos.
"Finding a neutron star collision where we did is game changing. It may be the key to unlocking not one, but two important questions in astrophysics." — Simone Dichiara, Penn State University
Those two questions are: why gamma-ray bursts sometimes appear outside any galaxy entirely, and how precious metals ended up in stars far from galactic centres. This discovery suggests that tiny galaxies — formed from debris kicked out during much larger galactic collisions — can generate their own neutron stars and eventually merge them, scattering gold-forging material across the outskirts of galaxy clusters.
"We found a collision within a collision. The galaxy collision triggered a wave of star formation that, over hundreds of millions of years, led to the birth and eventual collision of these neutron stars." — Eleonora Troja, University of Rome
The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Story 2
NASA · Artemis · Moon
Artemis II Heads Toward Flight Readiness Review — April Launch on Track
NASA will host a Flight Readiness Review press conference on Thursday 12 March at Kennedy Space Center in Florida — a critical formal milestone in the countdown to the first crewed Artemis mission.
Artemis II will carry four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen — on a ten-day journey around the Moon and back. It will be the first time humans have ventured to the Moon's vicinity since Apollo 17 in 1972, and will set a new record for the farthest humans have ever travelled from Earth.
The mission has navigated a series of technical delays. A hydrogen leak discovered during a February wet dress rehearsal was followed by a helium flow issue in the rocket's upper stage, requiring the SLS to be rolled back into the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs. The rollback resolved the March launch window, but NASA has confirmed the rocket should roll back out to Launch Complex 39B around 19 March, with an official launch target of no earlier than 1 April 2026.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has also announced a broader restructuring of the Artemis programme — adding a new mission in 2027, standardising vehicle configurations, and targeting annual crewed lunar missions with the first crewed landing in 2028. Thursday's press conference will provide the clearest picture yet of where things stand ahead of liftoff.
Story 3
Launch · Firefly Aerospace · Alpha Rocket
Firefly Alpha 'Stairway to Seven' Grounded Again After Third Scrub
Firefly Aerospace's long-awaited Alpha rocket return to flight hit another obstacle on 10 March, when the mission was scrubbed for a third time during fluid loading after off-nominal readings were detected. A new launch date will be confirmed once engineering teams have completed their review.
The mission — nicknamed "Stairway to Seven" for being Alpha's seventh flight — has faced delays since its original March 1 target, which was scrubbed due to high upper-level winds. A second attempt on March 9 was halted by a sensor reading outside the expected range.
The stakes are significant. Following the loss of the sixth Alpha mission in April 2025, when the first stage broke apart after separation, and a booster explosion during ground testing in September, the company has spent nearly ten months rebuilding confidence in the vehicle. "Stairway to Seven" is also the final flight of the Alpha Block I configuration — the upgraded Block II debuts on Flight 8, bringing a taller airframe, in-house avionics, and improved thermal protection.
Several Block II systems are flying on this mission in "shadow mode," validating their performance without controlling the flight. When Alpha eventually gets off the ground, it will be a significant moment for the small launch sector — and for Firefly, which already made history last year with Blue Ghost's successful private lunar surface mission.
Story 4
Planetary Science · DART · Asteroids
Asteroids Are Throwing 'Cosmic Snowballs' at Each Other — And DART Caught Them
Scientists at the University of Maryland have discovered something wonderful hiding in the pre-impact images from NASA's DART mission: the first-ever direct visual proof that asteroids can naturally exchange material with each other, in what researchers are calling a cosmic snowball fight.
When DART hurtled toward the asteroid moon Dimorphos in 2022, its cameras captured something odd — faint, fan-shaped streaks across the surface that nobody could immediately explain.
"At first, we thought something was wrong with the camera, and then we thought it could've been something wrong with our image processing." — Jessica Sunshine, University of Maryland
After months of detective work — stripping away boulder shadows, correcting for lighting effects, and building sophisticated three-dimensional models — the team confirmed the streaks were real. They are the imprint of debris thrown off the larger asteroid Didymos by the YORP effect, in which sunlight gradually spins a small asteroid faster until loose material flies off its surface. That material then drifts across to Dimorphos at a speed of just 30.7 centimetres per second — slower than a leisurely human walk — and lands, leaving these distinctive ray patterns on the surface.
It is the first visual confirmation of the YORP effect, and the discovery has direct implications for planetary defence: scientists modelling binary asteroid systems will now need to account for this constant, slow material exchange. The findings are published in The Planetary Science Journal.
ESA's Hera mission is set to arrive at Didymos in December 2026 and may reveal whether those fan-shaped streaks survived the DART impact — and whether the collision created new ones.
Story 5
SpaceX · Starship · Launch
Starship V3 — The Most Powerful Rocket Ever Built Just Got More Powerful
SpaceX is approximately four weeks from the launch of Starship Flight 12 — which will be the first flight of the upgraded V3 configuration, the most capable version of the already record-breaking vehicle.
Engineers at Starbase in Texas have completed propellant system tests on Ship 39, generating some remarkable imagery in the process. The team is working through final preflight checks ahead of what will be a significant milestone for the programme.
Starship already holds the title of the most powerful rocket ever launched. The V3 upgrade pushes that capability further — a key step toward the full range of missions on Starship's manifest, including NASA's Artemis lunar lander variant, which will carry astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon's surface in the Artemis IV mission currently targeted for 2028.
Flight 12 is not an Artemis mission — it's a continued integrated flight test — but every successful Starship launch builds the reliability record and technical heritage needed to support those future crewed operations. If the timeline holds, we should see Flight 12 lift off in mid-to-late April.
Story 6
Cosmology · Dark Matter · Milky Way
We're Sitting on a Giant Sheet of Dark Matter — And It Explains Everything
Here is a question that has puzzled astronomers for decades: if the Milky Way and Andromeda together exert an enormous gravitational pull, why are most of the galaxies just outside our Local Group speeding away from us rather than being drawn in?
An international team led by Ewoud Wempe at the Kapteyn Institute in Groningen, working with collaborators in Germany, France and Sweden, has published what may be the definitive answer in Nature Astronomy.
Using advanced computer simulations — starting from conditions in the early universe derived from the cosmic microwave background and evolving forward to today — the team produced what they call a "virtual twin" of our cosmic neighbourhood. The model successfully reproduced the positions and velocities of 31 galaxies surrounding the Local Group without being told where they should be. And the key ingredient that made it work? A vast, flat sheet of matter.
The matter surrounding the Local Group is not spread out evenly in a sphere, as had been assumed. Instead, it is arranged in an enormous, flat structure — dominated by dark matter — stretching tens of millions of light-years across. Above and below this cosmic plane lie enormous empty voids. The sheet's mass counterbalances the gravitational pull of the Local Group, keeping nearby galaxies drifting outward in an orderly, predictable way — exactly as observed.
"I am excited to see that, based purely on the motions of galaxies, we can determine a mass distribution that corresponds to the positions of galaxies within and just outside the Local Group." — Professor Amina Helmi, University of Groningen
The Milky Way, it turns out, is not floating freely in space. It sits embedded in a giant, invisible cosmic structure — a dark matter sheet flanked by vast emptiness — that has been quietly shaping our galactic neighbourhood for billions of years. We just didn't know it was there.