Image (Credit): Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. (MoMA)
This week’s image is from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. It shows Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night. Created during his time at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, it is believed Van Gogh painted the piece in June 1989. But is it a true recreation of the night sky that June?
In a recent study, scientists from South Korea stated they now believe the painting shows the night sky on July 22, 1989 with its portrayal of the Moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus. The team of scientists used various pieces of evidence, including letters from the artist, to get a better idea of the night sky and weather during that summer.
You can read more about this new study, The Actual Sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a Multidisciplinary Reconstruction, at this link.
If you are simply interested in the art itself, this link at MoMA will tell you more.
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) skimmed the very outer edge of Earth’s atmosphere on 28 September, using the gravity of our home planet to alter its route to Jupiter using very little fuel. The flyby deflected Juice by an angle of 20° compared to its pre-flyby path and increased its velocity by 3.5 km/s. In the four weeks before the flyby, spacecraft operators only had to give Juice one tiny nudge (out of six opportunities set aside) to put it on exactly the right approach trajectory to make the most of Earth’s gravity. They have been tracking the spacecraft extra carefully since 17 August, and will continue to do so until 10 October.
SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket blasted off from Texas Monday morning on its most ambitious test flight yet, aiming for a roughly 10-hour mission that would have sent the spacecraft around Earth six times, though the company ultimately decided to end the flight earlier than planned…The launch marks Starship’s 14th test flight and its first attempt to reach orbit, a major step beyond previous suborbital missions that ended with splashdowns about an hour after liftoff.
NASA is working with Boeing to launch an unpiloted Starliner capsule in the December-to-January time frame to test upgrades and improvements ordered in the wake of a 2024 mission that suffered multiple propulsion system failures, stranding two astronauts on the space station for more than nine months. If the unpiloted test flight goes well, NASA and Boeing hope to launch a piloted Starliner flight in the mid-2028 time frame, officials said Monday, incorporating redesigned propulsion system valves, more robust subsystems and other modifications expected to prevent the sort of failures that occurred in 2024. Veteran astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg will command the mission.
It’s a question that has perplexed planetary astronomers for decades: Why does Venus — so similar in size to Earth and not all that far from Earth’s orbit — have no moon, while our planet has such a relatively large one? Earth’s Moon likely formed after a massive collision early in solar system history. But according to calculations, Venus should have been even more likely than Earth to have experienced such a catastrophic crash during its formative years. Yet today it has no moon at all. Now, a series of simulations published in the September 20th Astrophysical Journal, have demonstrated that Venus might once have had a moon — but the planet’s relative proximity to the Sun and its massive atmosphere both created conditions under which no moon could have survived. If there ever was a moon, it would have disintegrated and fallen back to the surface long ago.
“At the moment, we are finalizing our agreement with NASA, but it is looking like they are not able to provide the radar…So that is why we are going full steam ahead with the European solution.”
–Statement by Anne Grete Straume-Lindner, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) project scientist for the Venus mission called Envision, regarding expected cuts in NASA support for the planned Venus mapping mission. Proposed NASA cuts may also impact other ESA missions, including the New Athena observatory, which would take over for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (also continually on the chopping block) and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) observatory designed to study gravitational waves.
An internal audit has slammed NASA over its handling of the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. The drone-like rotorcraft, which is designed to land on and gather samples from Titan, has been hit by a two-year delay, with costs surging by $1bn to $3.3bn. NASA now envisions a launch date of July 2028 with Dragonfly arriving at Titan in 2034.
NASA is far from immune to the effects of a looming government shutdown if congressional leaders fail to reach an agreement before midnight Oct. 1 to prevent one. At stake for the U.S. space agency if the federal government grinds to a halt? The progress of many of its science missions and access to its public outreach arm. NASA’s contingency plan for a shutdown, outlined in a guide from 2018, emphasizes that only “activities which are necessary to prevent harm to life or property” would be exempt from ceasing operations during a shutdown.
Astronomers across the globe are dedicated to identifying the near-Earth asteroids that could one day impact our planet. But there might be a group of potentially dangerous nearby asteroids that have remained invisible to astronomers so far. On September 24, 2025, an international team of researchers at the São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil said that a group of asteroids sharing Venus’ orbit could have remained undetected so far due to their location in the sky. And they could pose a threat to Earth within a few thousand years.
In response to recent flooding near Kerrville, Texas, NASA deployed two aircraft to assist state and local authorities in ongoing recovery operations. The aircraft are part of the response from NASA’s Disasters Response Coordination System, which is activated to support emergency response for the flooding and is working closely with the Texas Division of Emergency Management, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the humanitarian groups Save the Children and GiveDirectly.
Two remote-controlled Chinese satellites appear to have docked in high orbit to allow refueling and servicing for the first time. The achievement, which has yet to be matched by the U.S, involved autonomous spacecraft Shijian-21 and Shijian-25, completing the task in geostationary orbit earlier this month. Geostationary orbits occur at 22,236 miles above the surface, and are typically used for communications satellites so that they can move with the rotation of the Earth. However, the high orbit and need for satellites to maintain speeds with the Earth’s rotation makes docking extremely difficult.
The answer to whether tiny bacterial lifeforms really do exist in the clouds of Venus could be revealed once-and-for-all by a UK-backed mission. Over the past five years researchers have detected the presence of two potential biomarkers – the gases phosphine and ammonia – which on Earth can only be produced by biological activity and industrial processes. Their existence in the Venusian clouds cannot easily be explained by known atmospheric or geological phenomena, so Cardiff University’s Professor Jane Greaves and her team are plotting a way to get to the bottom of it. Revealing a new mission concept at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham, they plan to search and map phosphine, ammonia, and other gases rich in hydrogen that shouldn’t be on Venus.
