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‘Interstellar Glaciers’: NASA’s SPHEREx Maps Vast Galactic Ice Regions

15 Apr 2026, 15:02 GMT By Stephen Carney
‘Interstellar Glaciers’: NASA’s SPHEREx Maps Vast Galactic Ice Regions

NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) mission has mapped interstellar ice at an unprecedented scale. Covering regions in our Milky Way galaxy more than 600 light-years across, the ice was found inside giant molecular clouds — vast regions of gas and dust where dense clumps of