Dead stars in our cosmic backyard: Astronomers spot four white dwarfs hiding under our noses
Direct detection of four new white dwarfs within 20 parsecs of Earth
image:
An artist impression of a red dwarf with a white dwarf binary companion peeking out from behind. The diameters of the two stars are shown to scale. Credit: Mark A. Garlick / University of Warwick
view moreCredit: Mark A. Garlick / University of Warwick
Researchers at University of Warwick and University of Colorado Boulder have directly observed, for the first time, four white dwarfs stars orbiting in double star systems in our nearby region of space. These stellar binaries are all located within 65 light-years of Earth, and one of them is the ninth closest white dwarf to our Sun.
The four systems all have red dwarf star companions, larger and brighter stars, making it look like these were single star systems. The new results, published in MNRAS, have identified that each of these nearby red dwarfs stars were hosting a hidden white dwarf companion star.
First author, Dr Mairi O’Brien, Research Fellow, University of Warwick said: “Nearby isolated white dwarfs are usually easy to find, but we couldn't see these four stars directly in visible wavelengths because their red dwarf companions were drowning out their light. It's a reminder that even in our own cosmic neighbourhood, we can still find surprises if we look in the right way, at the right wavelengths.”
Astronomers have performed detailed surveys of the local neighbourhood of stars for decades, but white dwarfs like these have been notoriously hard to find. These four nearby systems were of interest because they showed a substantial radial wobble, a phenomenon in which a star subtly wobbles backwards and forwards, indicating a massive companion object is orbiting.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope's ultraviolet spectrograph data the team then obtained detailed observations from the four systems. White dwarfs usually stand out in ultraviolet observations, but red dwarfs complicate things due to their intense flaring that can often mimic a white dwarf signal. The researchers deployed custom calibration techniques to officially confirm the presence of the four white dwarf stars.
One system, G 203-47, has proven particularly enigmatic. Despite being only 25 light-years away, it has taken 27 years after its initial radial wobble observation to find the companion white dwarf. It is now officially the ninth closest white dwarf to the Sun.
G 203-47 is also unusual because its red dwarf rotates once every 100+ days but orbits its white dwarf every 14.9 days. Normally, gravitational forces would tidally lock them in sync, like the Moon and Earth, where the same face always points toward each other. Instead, the red dwarf rotates far too slowly for that to happen.
Coauthor Dr David Wilson, Research Associate, University of Colorado Boulder, said: "What's fascinating is that G 203-47 shouldn't be rotating this slowly if it formed the same way as similar systems. This suggests that these binaries have had very different evolutionary histories. Some underwent violent, prolonged interactions early on that locked them tidally. Others, like G 203-47, experienced gentler, briefer encounters that left them in this unusual state.”
These four new white dwarfs have allowed researchers to update the local white dwarf census within 20 parsecs (65 light-years). Crucially, population models had previously predicted roughly 4 to 5 closely orbiting white dwarf-red dwarf pairs should exist, and the team found exactly 4, comparable to the theoretical work.
Professor Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, Astronomy and Astrophysics Group, University of Warwick said: “Only about 30 per cent of red dwarfs within 20 parsecs have been systematically surveyed for hidden white dwarf companions. We think there could be as many as 9 or 10 additional binary systems in our local stellar environment that we haven’t found yet. If we put more targeted effort into observing red dwarfs, perhaps we will find more surprises like this.”
ENDS
Notes to Editors
The paper, ‘Direct detections of white dwarfs in four WD+dM post-common envelope binaries within 20 pc’ is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag1195
For more information please contact:
Matt Higgs, PhD | Media & Communications Officer (Warwick Press Office)
Email: Matt.Higgs@warwick.ac.uk | Phone: +44(0)7880 175403
About the University of Warwick
Founded in 1965, the University of Warwick is a world-leading institution known for its commitment to era-defining innovation across research and education. A connected ecosystem of staff, students and alumni, the University fosters transformative learning, interdisciplinary collaboration and bold industry partnerships across state-of-the-art facilities in the UK and global satellite hubs. Here, spirited thinkers push boundaries, experiment and challenge convention to create a better world.
Journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Method of Research
Experimental study
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Direct detections of white dwarfs in four WD+dM post-common envelope binaries within 20 pc
Article Publication Date
13-Jul-2026
How supermassive black holes feed themselves
image:
An image of elliptical galaxy NGC4696 located at the center of the Centaurus Cluster taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. This image shows dusty filaments surrounding the center of the galaxy.
view moreCredit: NASA, ESA/Hubble, A. Fabian
Astronomers are closer to solving the mystery of how supermassive black holes feed themselves thanks to new images from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST.
The images provide the clearest view ever seen of gaseous filaments connecting a galaxy’s hot atmosphere to the rotating disk of gas that feeds its central supermassive black hole.
Michigan State University helped an international team, led by the Université de Montréal, perform the observations and interpret the data, finding answers to a question that has stumped scientists for decades. The results were reported in the July 14 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“JWST observations are offering us thousands of new facts and measurements, and I can report it’s a lot to absorb,” said Megan Donahue, MSU University Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy. “We are all working together to solve the astrophysics questions about how these black holes get their fuel and how they interact with their host galaxy.”
Self-regulating black holes
Nearly every large galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole, or SMBH, at its center millions or even billions of times more massive than the sun. When these black holes are actively pulling in surrounding material, they switch on like cosmic engines, blasting powerful jets of energy outward that can sculpt the entire galaxy around them, slowing down the birth of new stars and influencing how the galaxy grows over time. Astronomers call these types of black holes active galactic nuclei, or AGN.
But if an AGN’s jets heat up the surrounding gas, it should, in principle, shut off the black hole's food supply. So how does it keep feeding and growing?
The leading hypothesis is that the gas eventually cools back down, condenses into long thin streamers called filaments, and falls back toward the galaxy's center in a self-regulating process.
To test this hypothesis, the team pointed JWST at galaxy NGC 4696, the central galaxy of the Centaurus Cluster, a dense group of galaxies located about 145 million light-years from Earth and one of the best laboratories for studying AGN mechanisms.
With nearly eight hours of observing time using JWST's NIRSpec instrument, the team produced detailed maps of the gas's motion deep inside the black hole's sphere of influence, at a resolution sharp enough to pick out features roughly 30 light-years — a tiny slice of a galaxy hundreds of thousands of light-years wide.
These maps showed that the S-shaped swirl is actually a spinning disk of gas wrapped around the SMBH, nearly 800 light-years across, with material whipping around at up to 600 kilometers per second. And critically, that disk appears physically connected to one of the large infalling filaments stretching outward into the galaxy. The observations showed gas flowing along the filament and pouring into the disk that feeds the SMBH.
Closing the loop
The study helps astronomers paint a better picture of the full feeding cycle of a SMBH. Jets from the black hole pump energy into the galaxy's surrounding gas. That gas eventually cools, becomes unstable, and collapses into long filaments, some only a few hundred light-years wide but stretching thousands of light-years long. Magnetic forces slow the gas’s rotation as it falls, steering it inward. It accumulates into a spinning disk around the black hole. The disk feeds the black hole. The black hole fires its jets. And the cycle begins again.
To test whether this explanation holds up, the team also ran state-of-the-art computer simulations of the system. The simulated gas behaved in a way that closely matched what JWST observed, lending strong independent support to the proposed picture.
“It’s been really exciting to participate in this project,” MSU Physics and Astronomy Professor Mark Voit said. “Calculations done by our Michigan State group predict that magnetic fields should help feed the universe’s biggest black holes by channeling cool gas toward them, and it’s amazing to see that happening in these JWST images.”
Journal
The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Article Title
JWST reveals how black holes are fed: kiloparsec-scale multiphase filaments feed sub-kiloparsec circumnuclear disks
Article Publication Date
14-Jul-2026
A close-up of the center of galaxy NGC4696 around its supermassive black hole. The background greyscale imaging comes from the Hubble Space Telescope. The overlaid coloured map shows the distribution of gas falling into the black hole as traced by the Paschen α line using the James Webb Space Telescope NIRSpec instrument. An S-shaped swirl can be seen in the gas.
Credit
NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/J. Hlavacek-Larrondo, et al. 2026
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July 13, 2026
By Eurasia Review
Sugars are key biomolecules in living organisms, as they form the backbone of DNA and RNA and play a fundamental role in metabolic processes. In theories of the origin of life, sugars are also essential for the synthesis of the first nucleic acids. Despite their importance, one of the major questions in origin-of-life research is how the first sugars formed on Earth, since laboratory experiments show that they do not form in enough quantities under prebiotic conditions. Sugars such as ribose and glucose have previously been detected in meteorite and asteroid samples, suggesting that some of these molecules may have originated in the primordial molecular cloud from which our Solar System formed. However, until now, no sugar had ever been directly detected in the interstellar medium.
An international team led by CAB researcher Izaskun Jiménez-Serra has now identified the first sugar in interstellar space: erythrulose. This molecule is the only possible four-carbon ketose, and on Earth it is commonly found in raspberries and sunless tanning products. Erythrulose was detected toward the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, located near the centre of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The discovery was made possible by ultra-sensitive, broadband spectroscopic surveys carried out with the 40-m Yebes radio telescope and the 30-m telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range (IRAM).
The team identified 12 spectral lines matching the laboratory spectrum of erythrulose measured at the University of the Basque Country. The study also shows that this sugar is at least eight times more abundant than similar three-carbon sugars, none of which were detected in the same region. “This finding was unexpected, as the prevailing view in astrochemistry is that interstellar molecules grow in size through the sequential addition of carbon atoms”, says Izaskun Jimenez Serra (CAB), leading author of this work.
Working in collaboration with chemists from the University of Extremadura and Radboud University (the Netherlands), the CAB team discovered that erythrulose can form within interstellar ices from simpler two-carbon alcohols and aldehydes.
Based on the abundance of erythrulose measured in the G+0.693−0.027 molecular cloud, the researchers estimate that between 0.5 and 50 million tonnes of this sugar could have reached Earth’s surface during the Late Heavy Bombardment, which occurred approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. The presence of erythrulose in interstellar space therefore provides an alternative source of sugars that may have contributed to the emergence of the first metabolic and replication processes on the early Earth.
“The detection of erythrulose is very exciting because it opens up the possibility of discovering in space other sugars such as ribose, which is part of RNA, and other important molecules for the origin of life,” says Carlos Briones, co-author of the study.
Sugar in interstellar space
A recent study led by the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) reports the first detection of a sugar in the interstellar medium
image:
Figure. Composite image from the Galactic Center. Green and yellow: 8 µm and 24 µm emission observed with Spitzer (Churchwell et al. 2009; Carey et al. 2009). Red: 20 cm emission imaged with MeerKAT (Heywood et al. 2019, 2022) and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT; Law et al. 2008). Image adapted from Henshaw et al. (2023; doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2203.11223) and Longmore et al. (2026; 10.48550/arXiv.2602.20340).
view moreCredit: Credits: Ashley Barnes/Izaskun Jiménez-Serra/Juan García de la Concepción
Sugars are key biomolecules in living organisms, as they form the backbone of DNA and RNA and play a fundamental role in metabolic processes. In theories of the origin of life, sugars are also essential for the synthesis of the first nucleic acids. Despite their importance, one of the major questions in origin-of-life research is how the first sugars formed on Earth, since laboratory experiments show that they do not form in enough quantities under prebiotic conditions. Sugars such as ribose and glucose have previously been detected in meteorite and asteroid samples, suggesting that some of these molecules may have originated in the primordial molecular cloud from which our Solar System formed. However, until now, no sugar had ever been directly detected in the interstellar medium.
An international team led by CAB researcher Izaskun Jiménez-Serra has now identified the first sugar in interstellar space: erythrulose. This molecule is the only possible four-carbon ketose, and on Earth it is commonly found in raspberries and sunless tanning products. Erythrulose was detected toward the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027, located near the centre of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The discovery was made possible by ultra-sensitive, broadband spectroscopic surveys carried out with the 40-m Yebes radio telescope and the 30-m telescope of the Institute for Radio Astronomy in the Millimeter Range (IRAM).
The team identified 12 spectral lines matching the laboratory spectrum of erythrulose measured at the University of the Basque Country. The study also shows that this sugar is at least eight times more abundant than similar three-carbon sugars, none of which were detected in the same region. “This finding was unexpected, as the prevailing view in astrochemistry is that interstellar molecules grow in size through the sequential addition of carbon atoms”, says Izaskun Jimenez Serra (CAB), leading author of this work.
Working in collaboration with chemists from the University of Extremadura and Radboud University (the Netherlands), the CAB team discovered that erythrulose can form within interstellar ices from simpler two-carbon alcohols and aldehydes.
Based on the abundance of erythrulose measured in the G+0.693−0.027 molecular cloud, the researchers estimate that between 0.5 and 50 million tonnes of this sugar could have reached Earth's surface during the Late Heavy Bombardment, which occurred approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. The presence of erythrulose in interstellar space therefore provides an alternative source of sugars that may have contributed to the emergence of the first metabolic and replication processes on the early Earth.
"The detection of erythrulose is very exciting because it opens up the possibility of discovering in space other sugars such as ribose, which is part of RNA, and other important molecules for the origin of life," says Carlos Briones, co-author of the study.
CSIC Comunicación
comunicacion@csic.es
Journal
Nature Astronomy
Method of Research
News article
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
Detection of a chiral four-carbon sugar in interstellar space
Article Publication Date
13-Jul-2026
First diagnostic X-rays in space mark new era for astronaut health
Radiological Society of North America
image:
Representative preflight, in-flight, and postflight hand radiographs. Radiographs of the hand were acquired (A) preflight by a crewmember, (B) in-flight on day 1 after launch (L+1) by a crewmember, and (C) postflight by a non-crew operator using the same imaging protocol.
view moreCredit: Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)
OAK BROOK, Ill. – A team of crew members aboard a commercial spaceflight acquired the first diagnostic X-rays during an orbital flight. Results of the mission were published today in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).
“It’s been a dream for aerospace medicine to have more than one imaging modality for diagnosing illnesses and injuries in space,” said Sheyna Gifford, M.D., lead researcher and an assistant professor of aerospace medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “X-rays are fast, easy and diagnostically valuable.”
For more than four decades, ultrasound has been the only reliable medical imaging modality used in spaceflight. As spaceflight missions increase in duration and distance, increasing the risk of adverse medical events, the limitations of ultrasound have become less acceptable. Ultrasound imaging requires substantial operator training and relies on a sound wave transmitting medium.
“Traditional X-ray machines are very large, produce a lot of radiation, and have a tendency to produce a blurred image if there’s movement,” Dr. Gifford said. “Because everything in space is constantly moving, the conceit has been that obtaining a diagnostic image in orbit was too technically challenging.”
The availability of small, portable X-ray machines offered Dr. Gifford’s team the opportunity to test in-orbit X-ray capabilities. In 2022, the flight crew, with minimal medical training, took a portable X-ray machine on a parabolic flight and successfully obtained a digital X-ray of a hand in microgravity.
Dr. Gifford’s team partnered with the commercial company SpaceX to investigate the feasibility of using a commercial off-the-shelf portable radiography system on Fram2, a 3.5-day polar orbital flight.
“Portable X-ray machines are in use everywhere — at the Kentucky Derby, on the sidelines of the Super Bowl and around the globe in low-resource areas — because they can run on solar power and can be operated by individuals with no medical expertise,” she said. “We believed an off-the-shelf portable system would stand a very good chance of surviving prelaunch testing and be operational in space by crew members with minimal training.”
In the prospective study, anatomic and equipment X-rays were obtained both preflight and inflight by crew members using an X-ray system featuring an ultraportable wireless digital X-ray generator. All images were evaluated by independent radiologists.
“A spaceflight-ready radiography system would have profound implications not only for crew health but also for mission-critical nonmedical tasks,” Dr. Gifford said. “For sustained human presence in space, X-rays are critical not just for crew members but also for other mission components like electronics and spacesuits. The only way to look inside these objects without taking them apart is to X-ray them.”
Prior to the Fram2 spaceflight, three crew members received four hours of training on the portable radiography system. SpaceX personnel also conducted impact and compatibility testing on the system for the spacecraft. The crew acquired preflight images, including X-rays of a hand, forearm, abdomen, pelvis and chest.
The Fram2 mission launched on March 31, 2025, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, entering into a 90-degree orbit at 425 to 450 kilometers above sea level. The mission duration was 3 days and 14 hours, and the spacecraft returned to Earth on April 4, 2025. The X-ray generator sustained superficial structural damage during landing and recovery. However, internal hardware components and X-ray output were unaffected.
Inflight images acquired without ground support included X-rays of a phantom object used to calibrate the system, and a smartwatch, hand, forearm, abdomen, pelvis and chest. These inflight images were immediately transmitted to an onboard computer and reviewed by the crew. Upon returning to Earth, postflight X-rays replicating the preflight and inflight images were also acquired.
All X-rays were evaluated by three independent radiologists for overall image quality, spatial resolution, contrast resolution and positioning. The researchers found no differences in the overall image quality, contrast resolution or spatial resolution between the preflight and inflight X-rays. The inflight image quality achieved a diagnostic level for all X-rays, despite the decreased scores for the positioning of the central body X-rays, including the images of the chest, pelvis and abdomen.
“By acquiring the first human and equipment X-rays in space, our study demonstrates the feasibility of in-orbit radiography and expanded diagnostic capabilities for crew health and hardware evaluation,” Dr. Gifford said. “Acquiring a diagnostically useful X-rays in space is something that anyone can do. Three very talented nonmedical people with four hours of training in one of the harshest environments did it right and did it well.”
Crew members strongly agreed that the X-ray system was easy to use and the imaging protocols were easy to follow. They suggested improvements for the radiography system, including mechanisms to securely mount and clamp the X-ray detector and generator. The estimated radiation exposure for crew members was no greater than that associated with standard clinical imaging on Earth.
Dr. Gifford said more prospective studies are needed to establish guidelines for examination indications, image interpretation and imaging baselines.
“It's my hope that we can further reduce the size of portable imaging systems and improve its ruggedness and usability so they can be included in future missions,” she said.
Other space-related applications for portable X-ray systems include imaging malfunctioning satellites in orbit and equipping lunar rovers to analyze the moon’s surface.
“Disseminating autonomous miniature X-ray systems around the globe could also change the game in public health,” she added. “The sky is not the limit when it comes to X-rays in space and here on Earth.”
Representative preflight, in-flight, and postflight chest radiographs. Radiographs of the chest were acquired (A) preflight by a crewmember, (B, C) in-flight on day 3 after launch (L+3) by a crewmember, and (D) postflight by a non-crew operator using the same imaging protocol.
Credit
Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)
###
“SpaceXray: Feasibility and Diagnostic Capabilities of On-Orbit Medical Radiography.” Collaborating with Dr. Gifford were Michael Pohlen, M.D., Adam S. Wang, Ph.D., David J. Lerner, M.D., Anna Wadhwa, M.S., Michael Cairnie, B.S., Jeanne Walter, B.S., Karim S. Karim, Ph.D., Steven Tilley II, Ph.D., Amol Karnick, M.Eng., Marissa A. Rosenberg, Ph.D., and Lonnie G. Petersen, M.D., Ph.D.
Radiology is edited by Suhny Abbara, M.D., FACR, MSCCT, Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, Florida, and owned and published by the Radiological Society of North America, Inc. (https://pubs.rsna.org/journal/radiology)
RSNA is an association of radiologists, radiation oncologists, medical physicists and related scientists promoting excellence in patient care and healthcare delivery through education, research and technologic innovation. The Society is based in Oak Brook, Illinois. (RSNA.org)
For patient-friendly information on X-rays, visit RadiologyInfo.org.
Journal
Radiology
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
SpaceXray: Feasibility and Diagnostic Capabilities of On-Orbit Medical Radiography
Article Publication Date
14-Jul-2026
Space launch costs could fall more than 90% by 2040, transforming the marketplace of space
image:
A graphic illustrating one of the key findings from the new study, the changing costs per kilogram of payload to low Earth orbit.
view moreCredit: Dr Alessio Terzi
The expense of launching goods into space will plummet over the next few years, with the cost of reaching orbit forecast to more than halve between now and the end of the decade, and fall around 93% by 2040, according to new Cambridge-led research.
The cost of sending a kilogram of payload into low Earth orbit, an average of $3,868 last year, is set to fall more than 58% to just $1,569 by 2030, and could reach as little as 273 US dollars per kilo by 2040, the study suggests.*
Researchers analysed the economics of the space industry using the largest global dataset of rocket launches yet assembled, covering more than 4,400 launches between 1960 and 2025, to project future trends.**
They show that the cost of reaching space is falling faster than the expense of steamship freight did during the 19th-century transport revolution, and even faster than solar photovoltaics: a benchmark for rapidly affordable “transformative technologies”.
Economists behind the report say that tumbling launch costs could see new industries emerge to create a space marketplace, from zero‑gravity research and orbital tourism to factories exporting fibre-optic cables and 3D-bioprinted organs back to Earth.
“Space is no longer a science-fiction fantasy or a purely scientific pursuit, it is becoming a marketplace,” said Dr Alessio Terzi from Cambridge’s Bennett School of Public Policy, who led the study published in the journal PNAS Nexus.
“As launch costs fall and commercial activity expands, we are entering an era where spacefaring is like any other economy, driven by incentives, trade and investment, and economists should be paying more attention.”
However, researchers caution that profit-maximising corporate monopolies combined with geopolitical tensions could drive up prices and delay the next stage of the space age, as nations focus on developing and using their own launch technologies.
They note that the space launch market is already dominated by one firm, SpaceX, which accounts for roughly 80% of total annual payload sent into orbit globally. A recent working paper co-authored by Terzi shows this dominance of a frontier economy by SpaceX is equivalent to the East India Company’s hold on maritime trade in the 1820s.
The space sector has surged since 2020, thanks to the boom in satellite technologies, with the amount of payload launched into orbit growing by 31% a year, compared with average annual growth of 4% between 2000 and 2019.
About 4,900 tonnes were launched into orbit in 2025, and the space economy was worth over $600 billion in 2024, equivalent to Sweden’s GDP.
Terzi and his colleague Dr Francesco Nicoli from the Politecnico Institute of Turin forecast this will almost double by 2030, when humanity will have the joint capacity to send 9,100 tonnes a year to low Earth orbit.
“SpaceX alone could achieve this with eighty flights of its new superheavy rocket Starship, which will be fully reusable,” said Terzi. He thinks the figure could hit 32,000 tonnes a year by 2040.
Their research found that every doubling of cumulative payload cut the average cost of sending a kilo into orbit by 21.2%. The economists compare the trend to steamship freight during the globalised Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, when costs fell by about 15.5% for each doubling of cargo volumes such as wheat and cotton.
“The cost of space launch technology is now falling faster than during one of history’s greatest transport revolutions,” said Terzi.
“Steamships cut costs through explosive growth in global trade. Space technology, by contrast, has achieved even steeper declines at a far smaller scale. This suggests there is plenty of scope for further cost reductions and the industry may now be on the cusp of a comparable economic boom.”
According to estimates in the latest study, the cost of reaching orbit fell 96% between 1960 and 2025. The Space Race drove costs down from over $87,000 per kilo into orbit in 1960 to around $20,000 per kilo by the early 1970s, where it stalled following the end of the Apollo project and phase-out of its Saturn V rocket.
Launch costs remained stable right up until the early 1990s, when the end of the Cold War saw big commercial interests injected into space, and costs once again began to slide.
In fact, Terzi and Nicoli compared space launch costs before and after 1989, and found that they fell over two-and-a-half times faster once the Berlin Wall came down, compared to the Cold War era of government investment in space.***
“State-led competition during the Cold War did not foster cost efficiency on the same scale as the ensuing era of international space cooperation and private sector involvement,” said Nicoli.
Researchers point out that the relationship between distance and cost works differently in space. Escaping our planet requires large amounts of energy, but once spacecraft reach orbit the gravitational pull is a fiftieth of that at sea level, and there isn’t that much difference in energy needs between, say, the Moon, or Mars.
“Rapidly falling launch costs could open the way to space colonisation and commercial activity far beyond low Earth orbit,” said Terzi. “Ever cheaper launch costs could open up possibilities around solar power production in orbit, asteroid mining, and a self-sustaining economy producing fuel, food and infrastructure in orbit or on the Moon.”
“Major polluting industries currently devastating the biosphere could even be offshored to sit outside the Earth’s atmosphere.”
Notes:
* The cost would fall by about 92.9% (roughly 93%) from last year's average of US$3,868/kg to US$273/kg in 2040. Low Earth orbit is between 160 km and 2,000 km of altitude.
**The standardised dataset of rocket launches from 1960 to 2025 covers sixteen geographical entities including all the major spacefaring nations: US, Russia, China, India, Europe, and Japan. It includes over 330 different rocket configurations and 4,405 launches.
*** In 2022, some 78% of satellites orbiting the Earth were primarily commercial, with just 8% government operated, and 7% military.
****Costs of space launch decreased by roughly 44% with each doubling of payload between 1989 and 2025, compared to a 17% decrease in costs with each doubling of payload between 1960 and 1989.
Journal
PNAS Nexus
Method of Research
Data/statistical analysis
Article Title
From Sputnik to Starship: Estimating the experience curve of space launch technology
Article Publication Date
14-Jul-2026
A graphic that illustrates one of the key findings of the new study, the increase in tonnes of mass launched into space each year, and in the future.
Credit
Dr Alessio Terzi
Space launch costs have fallen 96% in 65 years; could plummet in the future
PNAS Nexus
image:
The experience curve of space launch.
view moreCredit: Alessio Terzi
In 1960, sending a single kilogram into orbit cost $87,000. Today the average cost is on average under $4,000. By 2040, it could cost as little as $300 per kilogram, according to a study.
Alessio Terzi and Francesco Nicoli present a comprehensive dataset of rocket launch costs: more than 4,400 launches spanning all major spacefaring nations. By standardizing costs across six decades of launches and calculating the cost per kilogram to orbit for each mission, the authors trace a pattern of technological learning that rivals the fastest cost declines ever recorded in any industry. For every doubling of cumulative payload sent to orbit, the average cost of a kilogram has fallen by 21.2%—a learning rate comparable to solar panels in their early adoption phase. If that relationship holds, average launch costs will reach $1,600 per kilogram by 2030 and $300 by 2040.
In the near term, SpaceX's Starship could push costs below $1,000 per kilogram, but whether the vehicle can deliver those cost reductions will depend on how quickly launch cadence can be scaled up.
According to the authors, three forces could slow or reverse the space launch cost trajectory: the worsening problem of space debris, which raises costs and risks for all operators; geopolitical fragmentation of launch markets, as nations pursue independent access to orbit; and the growing concentration of Western commercial launch capacity in a single provider.
Journal
PNAS Nexus
Article Title
From Sputnik to Starship: Estimating the experience curve of space launch technology
Article Publication Date
14-Jul-2026
A data-driven tool for finding mineral biosignatures on other worlds
A technique for judging whether a common mineral was formed through biological activity could aid the search for ancient life on Earth and Mars. Apatite is a ubiquitous phosphate mineral found in terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments. It is a major component of teeth and bones, but it also occurs in igneous rocks and sedimentary phosphorites. Robert M. Hazen and colleagues developed a method to distinguish biologically formed apatite from abiotic apatite using Raman spectroscopy, an analytical technique incorporated into several recent Mars missions. Determining the origin of a sample involves assessing multiple independently varying features of a Raman spectrum, including band positions, widths, and relative intensities, the type of multivariate analysis well suited to machine learning. The authors compiled 331 Raman spectra of apatite from biotic and abiotic sources and trained a random forest classifier to identify the most diagnostic features. The intensity of the carbonate band and the width of the dominant phosphate band, reflecting chemical composition and crystal structure, respectively, emerged as the strongest indicators of origin. The resulting model distinguished biotic from abiotic apatite with classification accuracy exceeding 96%. According to the authors, minerals such as apatite can preserve evidence of biological activity over long geological timescales and the approach could thus help future planetary missions identify minerals that retain records of ancient life on rocky worlds.
Journal
PNAS Nexus
Article Title
Mineral biosignature identification from Raman spectroscopy using machine learning
Article Publication Date
14-Jul-2026
