New circumbinary planets from TESS & Starship V3 Flight 12 slips - Space News (May 19, 2026)

Astronomers have identified twenty-seven new candidate circumbinary planets—worlds that orbit two stars—using a new semi-automated search pipeline applied to NASA’s TESS data. The method, designed specifically for eclipsing binary systems, first models and subtracts the deep binary eclipses, then searches for transit-like dips without requiring strict periodicity, which is crucial because circumbinary transits can shift in timing and depth as orbits precess. If follow-up observations confirm most of these candidates, the known sample of circumbinary planets would more than double, turning a rare category into a statistically meaningful population and forcing planet-formation models to better account for the complex disks and gravitational dynamics around binary stars.

On the launch side, SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12—set to be the first test of the upgraded Starship V3 configuration—has slipped again, now targeting no earlier than May 21. The plan remains a suborbital-style mission: the Ship aims for a partial lap of Earth with splashdown in the Indian Ocean, while the Super Heavy booster attempts a controlled descent into the Gulf of Mexico, and the flight is also tied to validating a newly prepared Pad 2 at Starbase. These short, repeated delays are typical of new-hardware campaigns, but the stakes are especially high here, because Starship’s promised combination of super-heavy lift and rapid reusability underpins everything from future lunar landers to large next-generation commercial space station modules.

Space weather is comparatively calm right now. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center reports low solar activity with a quiet-looking solar disk and only minor R1-level radio-blackout risk—effects that are usually weak and brief on the sunlit side of Earth. For satellite operators and power-grid managers, that’s welcome breathing room, but it’s also a reminder that the operational dependence on space-based infrastructure keeps rising, so forecasting and monitoring have to be robust even when the Sun is behaving. Investments in space communications and monitoring capacity, including ongoing upgrades to ground infrastructure, matter most when conditions swing back toward stronger storms later in the solar cycle.

Looking ahead, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could help solve a long-standing census problem: finding isolated neutron stars that emit little or no detectable light. New work suggests Roman’s microlensing survey—watching background stars brighten and subtly shift position as a foreground object passes—could detect and even measure the masses of dozens of these hidden remnants. Roman’s advantage is that it’s designed to capture both the photometric brightening and the tiny astrometric displacement with high precision, letting researchers infer lens masses and distances. If it works as projected, Roman would deliver a new, gravity-selected sample of compact objects and sharpen constraints on dense-matter physics that are otherwise hard to test.

In another “invisible physics” storyline, researchers are exploring whether gravitational waves can carry signatures of dark matter environments. By comparing waveform predictions for black hole mergers in vacuum versus mergers embedded in dense dark matter, one analysis of events from LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA’s first observing runs found that most signals match vacuum expectations—but one event, GW190728, showed a statistical preference for a dark-matter-influenced model. It’s not a detection, and the authors stress uncertainties, but it sketches a practical framework: as catalogs grow and models improve, gravitational waves could become a probe of where dense dark matter structures might exist around compact-object systems.

Across the broader astronomy beat, JWST and ALMA observations continue to reshape galaxy evolution stories, including evidence for faint, dusty star-forming galaxies very early in cosmic time—potential ‘missing links’ between extreme starbursts and later quiescent galaxies. JWST is also helping characterize unusually extreme black hole systems, including reports of an ultramassive black hole pair whose combined mass estimate reaches tens of billions of Suns, consistent with dramatic ‘core scouring’ in a post-merger galaxy center. Together, these results push on a central question: how quickly massive structures—dusty galaxies and enormous black holes—can assemble in the universe’s first chapters.

Planetary science delivered a striking mineralogical twist on Mars: Perseverance has detected tiny corundum grains—minerals that form rubies and sapphires on Earth—within rocks near Jezero Crater, using SuperCam’s spectroscopy and luminescence measurements. The leading idea is that meteorite impacts may have created the high-pressure, high-temperature conditions needed to form corundum on a planet without Earth-like plate tectonics, adding a shock-process layer to Jezero’s history alongside water-driven geology. Meanwhile, in the Saturn system, simulations continue to build a dramatic hypothesis that Titan may have been reshaped by a relatively recent giant impact involving a now-lost moon, potentially linked to the youthfulness inferred for Saturn’s rings—an idea still under scrutiny but emblematic of how dynamic moon systems can be.

Finally, low-Earth orbit operations and strategy keep evolving. The ISS remains busy: a recent SpaceX cargo delivery brought thousands of pounds of supplies and experiments, including studies of microgravity simulation fidelity, biomedical investigations, and instruments to better understand charged particles in near-Earth space. Beyond the station, NASA’s Artemis planning is shifting too, with Artemis III described as an Earth-orbit-focused rendezvous and docking demonstration with commercial lander elements rather than a first landing attempt—an effort to de-risk key integration steps before pushing back to the lunar surface. And looming over it all is the post-ISS transition: proposals for commercial stations, and even ideas involving a NASA-owned core module strategy, are being debated as policymakers and companies try to ensure research continuity and a viable market once the ISS era ends.