Uranus and Neptune, the Solar System's ice giants, have interiors unlike the other planets. As a result, they also have magnetic fields unlike the others. They're messy and tilted, and Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to even flyby them, showed us how messy they are. New research uses models to try to understand what's going on with the pair of planets and their weird fields, and found that it's likely they change on very short timescales. They could already be much different than when Voyager 2 visited in the late 1980s.

Science fiction authors have been dreaming of robotic spacecraft harvesting fortunes from asteroids for decades. Humanity is slowly getting closer to that reality. But if you ask asteroid mining skeptics, they will usually ask one specific question - what happens to the prices of all those rare materials once someone actually brings them back? A pair of system dynamicists from MIT directly tackled that question with a new paper titled Will AstroForge Collapse the PGM Market?

Some stars, called Luminous Blue Variables, can be confused with supernovae explosions. They exhibit similar outbursts, but unlike supernovae, which explode once and then are gone forever, these stars have periodic outbursts. New research found that one of these 'supernova impostors' is in a binary relationship with a black hole or a neutron star, and that explains its periodic outbursts.

TESS watched an exoplanet about 1,000 light years away as it repeatedly transited in front of its star for seven years. But astronomers were surprised to find that the hot Jupiter disappeared. Of course, planets don't just disappear. Something interrupted its transits from our point of view, and astronomers think they've figured out what happened. An unseen, nearby giant planet companion tugged on it until TESS couldn't see it anymore.

The ability to build large structures in space is maturing. The ISS, Mir, and Tiangong were built in space from pre-constructed modules, but a new program called NOM4D is taking space construction to the next level. It recently showed that a simple robot can create truss-like structures in space from premade components. Is the sky the limit for NOM4D?

There's a strange gamma-ray emitter in the Large Magellanic Cloud that has astronomers stumped about its source. It lies within the ashes left behind by a supernova that created a compact object that's part of the system. The supernova remnant provides some evidence for the emissions, but not the whole story.

The MeerKLASS international collaboration achieves the first direct measurement of the large-scale clustering of cosmic hydrogen in the Universe.

When low-mass stars like our Sun age, they leave the main sequence and follow the Red Giant Branch. As they ascend this branch, their luminosity steadily increases. But there's a sort of hiccup in the path called the RGB luminosity bump, where their luminosity suddenly dips. Astrophysicists have struggle to explain this, but one astrophysicist might have the answer.

For the second time in a few weeks, we’re writing about research into the temperature gap between the Sun’s surface and its corona. More and more data from various missions continue to feed this wave of discovery. A new paper by Katariina Nykyri of Embry-Riddle, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, adds to this growing body of work. She argues that millions of tiny whirlpools scattered across the Sun’s surface could be the energetic engine driving that temperature difference.

Mechanical engineering assistant professor Erik Komendera developed a method that combines vibrations and AI to determine how deeply a rock is buried, helping robots clear terrain more efficiently.

Mars may be more volcanically active than we thought, according to new research. The Trace Gas Orbiter detected HCl, a chemical associated with magma, at a time of year that's difficult except by volcanic origins. The new research also identified new surface fissures on Mars that could be the source of the chemical.

Researchers at Washington University examined how dust interacts with the spacesuit swatches on the Perseverance Rover. Future missions to Mars require that planners account for the effects of dust exposure on humans and materials.

Thousands of so-called zombie satellites orbit Earth in the critical Low-Earth Orbit regime. They're either inactive or have stopped alerting other satellites to their presence. Researchers are building a system called CORTEX that can guide a repair satellite to autonomously dock with these zombies.

In propulsion system design, engineers have long faced a trade-off between solid and liquid rocket fuels. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and in an effort to try to min/max the efficacy of different types of fuel, researchers have long placed an emphasis on a hybrid between solids and liquids - in other words they’ve been working with gels. Unfortunately, gels have their own sets of problems to deal with. But a new paper published by Pranay Mudaliar and Jerin John of Concordia in the journal Langmuir uses an uncommon ingredient to elegantly solve some of those problems, but which is typically used in a completely different area of human activity - lecithin.

Millisecond pulsars are fascinating objects that serve as natural clocks in the Universe. They form by drawing material and angular momentum from a companion. This mass transfer can rapidly accelerate the companion's evolution to a white dwarf. Astronomers have detected a millisecond pulsar's white dwarf companion that appears to be observed just as the mass transfer completed. They can still see some of the debris.

A new study of more than three dozen dwarf galaxies has surprised researchers with just how little oxygen they have been able to retain over cosmic time. The results reveal that we still have major gaps in our understanding of galaxy evolution.

The decades old idea that our solar system’s Oort Cloud is continually perturbed by a heretofore undetected low mass Red Dwarf star remains the best explanation for periodicities found in Earth’s impact record. Or so says a well known physicist who has long championed this idea.

Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies are strange because they're as large as the Milky Way, but have far fewer stars. It's as if they're puffed up for some reason. Determining what's going on with them could help confirm the Lambda-CDM model. A new proposed instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope could give astronomers their best look yet at these strange galaxies.

NASA's ESCAPADE mission features a pair of identical spacecraft on their way to Mars. They launched outside of the normal launch window, so they'll perform powered slingshot maneuvers to boost their speed. Once there, they'll "fly" in formation and study how the solar wind interacts with what remains of Mars ancient magnetosphere.

We typically think of the Moon as a static, floating object that has remained the same for basically its entire lifetime, with an occasional asteroid impact serving as an exception. That understanding is grounded in physics - the Moon should have cooled rapidly after forming when a huge protoplanet hit the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. But, some lunar material returned from the Chang’e-5 mission was notably formed only around two billion years ago, yet appeared to be volcanic in origin. So how did a world that was supposed to have settled down without volcanism remain hot enough to create these materials more than two billion years after its violent birth? A new paper from Miao Chen of the Chengdu University of Technology and his colleagues, and recently published in the journal Planet, offers an explanation - tidal heating.