ScientistPankaj: Space & Physics: 10,000 Starlink satellites and counting

Thursday, March 19, 2026

Space & Physics: 10,000 Starlink satellites and counting

March 19—This week's top stories include the historic milestone of SpaceX's 10,000+ satellites in orbit, physicists discovering a new subatomic particle, weird galaxies devoid of dark matter and much more. Enjoy!

Thoughts? Questions? Let me know via e-mail (lbillings@sciam.com), X or Bluesky.

—Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Physical Sciences

Top Stories

Cropped image of a graphic shows a multicolored series of semicircles of varying sizes labeled with the names of satellite constellations or companies. The semicircle representing SpaceX Starlink is much larger than the rest.

SpaceX now has more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit

Once unfathomable, the milestone of a single company having 10,000 satellites operating overhead signals that the era of mega constellations is here to stay

Jonathan O'Callaghan

Conceptual illustration: split view of a spiral galaxy and a dark matter-less galaxy.

Galaxies without dark matter mystify astronomers

Bizarre objects that seem to lack all dark matter present a cosmic mystery

Maria Luísa Buzzo

Immerse yourself in the universe of science with a subscription to Scientific American.

An illustration of a composite particle containing two charm quarks and a down quark.

A 'charmed' new particle is discovered at world's largest atom smasher

The Large Hadron Collider just produced a never-before-seen particle made of charm and down quarks

Clara Moskowitz

A head with swirling planets and particles around it

A 100-year-old theory might explain what's wrong with quantum mechanics

One physicist is on a mission to get scientists to look into Louis de Broglie's pilot wave theory

Tim Folger

A black hole surrounded by a thin accretion disk and trailing a stream of stars soars through deep space

Have astronomers found a runaway monster black hole or just a very weird galaxy?

Despite years of debate and follow-up studies, an odd streak of cosmic light still defies a final explanation. Is it a giant black hole screaming through intergalactic space?

Phil Plait

A library shelf packed with books, with a rectangular hole cut out of the center, revealing infinitely more shelfs behind.

As AI keeps improving, mathematicians struggle to foretell their own future

First Proof is an effort to see whether LLMs can contribute meaningfully to pure mathematics research. The dust has settled on round one, and the results are surprising

Joseph Howlett

This is earthrise over the lunar south pole as recorded by a wide angle camera.

There might be less water on the moon than we'd hoped

New satellite data come up dry as the search for lunar ice continues

K. R. Callaway

Two panels showing before and during a collision between two galaxies.

Something extremely weird is happening to our galactic neighbor. Scientists think they know why

The stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud aren't behaving the way they should. A cataclysmic collision with another nearby galaxy may be the culprit

Joseph Howlett

An aerial view of a crater on Mars, with artistic addition of color on the right half

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover discovers even older lost rivers at Jezero Crater

By plying its ground-penetrating radar in the depths of Mars's Jezero Crater, this rover has found even older deltas buried beneath those seen on the surface from space

Joseph Howlett

Two black holes with misaligned accretion disks on the cusp of merging

A boom in gravitational waves leaves scientists with more questions than answers

A new data release more than doubles the number of gravitational-wave candidate events—and reveals unexpected complexities of merging black holes

K. R. Callaway

A bright fireball meteor entering Earth's atmosphere

An asteroid just exploded above Ohio with the force of 250 tons of TNT

Eyewitness accounts and videos taken from across the Midwest reveal the streak of a large fireball across the daytime sky

Jackie Flynn Mogensen

A man sitting with hands folded on a bench outside a wooden shed.

Gerd Faltings, mathematician who proved the Mordell conjecture, wins the Abel Prize at age 71

The Mordell conjecture—now known as Faltings's theorem—concerns the number of special points on a curve

Joseph Howlett

A blackboard shows the digits of pi drawn out in chalk.

Mathematicians find one pi formula to rule them all

A mixture of AI and algorithms uncovered a hidden structure spanning 2,000 years of equations for pi

Lyndie Chiou

A view of the International Space Station against the blackness of space.

24 mice launched to orbit in 2023. What happened to their bodies could help humans better survive in space

The human body is not built for life in space, and a new study helps reveal how

Jackie Flynn Mogensen

What We're Reading

NASA considering sharp increase in robotic lunar landings | Space News
The Race to Replace Starlink on the Battlefield | Supercluster
A private space company has a radical new plan to bag an asteroid | Ars Technica