You’re a long-necked Titanosaurs grazing the plains and chomping away on tree leaves about 100 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous in what would eventually become a future Starbucks location. You look up at the night sky and notice a bright dot that seems slightly larger and brighter than usual since you’ve seen it a bunch. You grunt at your cousin (official dinosaur language) asking if he notices it, too. Your cousin grunts back that it does seem bigger and brighter and wonders what’s up.

By the mid-20th century, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence would emerge as an established field of scientific research. The era witnessed the first experiments, and many of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of SETI were proposed during this time.

More than 300 million kilometres from the nearest mechanic, NASA's Curiosity rover found itself in a situation that would make any engineer break into a cold sweat. A rock got stuck to its drill and wouldn't let go. What followed was a week long, long distance rescue operation that says as much about the ingenuity of the people behind the machine as it does about the extraordinary challenges of exploring another world.

Astronomers are puzzling over another oddball on the edge of the solar system: This time, it's an icy object less than a quarter of Pluto's size with a thin atmosphere – a layer of gas that's not typically found around objects so small.

The Department of Defense has released a fresh batch of images and transcripts relating to reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs, including pictures and descriptions from NASA's Apollo missions to the moon.

Black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation, meaning their days are numbered. But a new study finds they could enter a metastable stage where they look similar to white holes.

Aerospace engineers have to consider numerous factors when designing a spacecraft, but one that comes up more and more often is the need to design against Micro-Meteoroids and Orbital Debris (MMOD). While most designers understand the threat, designing structural solutions capable of withstanding the hypervelocity impacts these undercontrolled pieces of material can cause can take a significant bite out of a mission’s mass budget. A new paper from Binkal Kumar Sharma of the University of Bremen and Harshitha Baskar, an independent researcher, provides a detailed review of cutting-edge options for defending against those deadly particles.

When researchers look up at the sky and wonder if we’re not alone, they also realize the origins of life here on Earth might hold the key to finding out. The chaotic chemical soup of our early world eventually led to the staggering complexity of modern life, but how exactly did it start? Proteins were one of the key ingredients in the early years, but we’re still only just discovering how these marvels of modern biology first managed to fold, function, and survive. A new review paper, The borderlands of foldability: lessons from simplified proteins, published recently in Trends in Chemistry, showcases how scientists are attempting to answer this question - by researching “simplified proteins”.

The history of SETI is long and varied, with countless contributions made by some of the most brilliant minds humanity has ever produced. In this series, we will look into the milestones and principles that have led the field to where it is today.

Somewhere out there, hurtling through space in the darkness, is an asteroid with our name on it. We just don't know which one yet. NASA's answer to that uncomfortable truth is NEO Surveyor, a purpose built infrared space telescope currently taking shape in laboratories across America, and scheduled for launch in 2027. The stakes, quite literally, could not be higher.

A team of researchers used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope together with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe almost 9,000 star clusters in four nearby galaxies. They studied younger clusters that were still embedded in their natal gas clouds, and older ones that had dissipated that gas. Their results show that more massive star clusters emerge more quickly from their birth, clearing away gas and filling the galaxy with ultraviolet light. The research presents a better understanding of star formation in galaxies, something lacking in scientific simulations, as well as how and where planets can form.

For years, when something happened on the far side of the Sun, we didn't know much, if anything about it. Sunspots could form there, flares could lash out and the corona could send masses of material out to space. However, we didn't know about any of this until those active regions rotated around to our view. In the late 1900s, scientists came up with a technique called helioseismology to analyze sound waves created by such activity as they echoed through the Sun.

New Curtin University-led research has used a radio telescope that spans the Earth to snap images that measure the immense power of jets from black holes, confirming scientists’ theories of how black holes help shape the structure of the Universe.

In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is our best bet for “living off the land” for a future Martian base, but tracking down those resources is no easy task. As of now, we have two options - send a rover to a specific location to scout it, or monitor it from orbit. Since rovers are expensive, and there are an absolute ton of sites that we would eventually want to scout, doing so from orbit would seem a better option. But monitoring for temperature, one of the most important orbital scans we can do, is notoriously blurry - based in part on the fact that most of the main instruments used to collect data on it are a few decades old. Now, a paper from researchers at Curtin University in Australia presented at the International Astronautical Congress meeting last September uses a fancy AI-like algorithm to improve that thermal resolution, and, as a result, provided a much better map to some of the most important resources we’ll be looking for.

Kepler and TESS showed us that there's a radius gap in the exoplanet population. There are very few planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii, according to the data. But new research shows that the gap may not be as significant as thought.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a city on Mars is likely going to take even longer to build than Rome itself. At the time of the first Martian colonists, it is likely that the entirety of humanity’s industrial capacity, including the infrastructure to make critical materials like metals, will be based in the Earth-Moon system. While Mars has some iron, it also lacks many of the materials needed to make advanced materials, like boron and molybdenum. To alleviate that resource bottleneck, a new study, available in pre-print on arXiv and led by Serena Suriano and a team of researchers, offers a workaround that seems obvious in theory but difficult in practice - mine the necessary material from Main Belt asteroids.

A new mission promises to 'open the box' on exoplanet science. Scientists and engineers recently released the first engineering images from the Pandora exoplanet survey mission. The pictures represent the first ever images from a NASA Astrophysics Pioneers Program mission. Established in 2020, the program looks to test the feasibility of small low cost missions designed to address key questions in astronomy and astrophysics.

The Subaru Telescope observed the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) on January 7, 2026 (UT), after it made its closest approach to the Sun. By observing colors in the coma around the comet, astronomers could estimate the ratio of carbon dioxide to water. This ratio is much lower than that inferred from earlier observations by space telescopes. These findings suggest that the chemistry of the coma is evolving over time and offers clues to the structure of comet 3I/ATLAS.

Mars has lots of glaciers located along its mid-latitudes. We’ve known this for years thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO’s) SHARAD sounder. But, despite all of the excellent data it’s managed to gather, SHARAD doesn’t have high enough resolution to accurately measure the boundary between the glacier itself and the rocky material that has been deposited on top of it over the course of billions of years. A new study, published in the journal JGR Planets, details a potential method of finding that boundary—by using a drone.

Our Moon is still guarding its secrets decades after the last of the Apollo missions lifted off the lunar surface. Lunar scientists still puzzle over just when and how a giant Earth impactor formed our Moon, completely altering our early Earth in the process.

Io is a world of extremes. It is by far the most volcanically active world in our solar system. Being continually squeezed in the never-ending tug-of-war between Jupiter and its larger satellites will do that to a moon. As a result, Io has over 400 “paterae” - volcanic depressions that spew lava up onto its surface. And, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and utilizing data from Juno’s Jupiter InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) tool, we have been massively underestimating the power output of those paterae for decades.

The Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope (PoET), installed at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Paranal site in Chile, has made its first observations. The telescope will work with ESO's ESPRESSO instrument to study the sun in detail. Described as a solar telescope for planet hunters, PoET aims to understand how the variation in the light from stars like the sun can mask the presence of planets orbiting them, helping us in our search for worlds outside the solar system.

The Orion Nebula provides a master class in the study of newly born stars as the closest starbirth region to us. Yet, many of its youngest ones are still swaddled in their birth creches, hidden by clouds of gas and dust. The Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescopes have managed to punch through the dusty obscuring veil to study a pair of young binary systems called Brun 656 and HD 294300 born in the Nebula.

Our most massive satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), has been the center of a heated debate in the astrophysics community over the last few years. That debate centers on whether this is the LMC’s first or second “pass” by the Milky Way itself - and it has huge implications for the evolution of our galaxy given the disruption such a large grouping of stars has. A new paper from Scott Lucchini, Jiwon Jesse Han, Sapna Mishra, and Andrew J. Fox and his co-authors, currently available in pre-print on arXiv, provides what they claim to be definitive evidence that this is, in fact, the first time LMC has encountered the Milky Way.

Rogue planets sound like rare travelers amongst the stars, freed from the gravitational constraints of a host system, left to forever wander the interstellar void. But modern models suggest these Free Floating Planets (FFPs) as they are technically known, are actually very common - nineteen times more common than planets beyond the “snow line”, which is the distance from the central star where it becomes cold enough that hydrogen compounds like water, ammonia, and methane can condense into ice. But why are FFPs so common? What forces them out of the stellar systems where they form? A new paper from Xiaochen Zheng of the Beijing Planetarium and his co-authors, available in pre-print in arXiv, offers a plausible explanation - planetary “bouncers”.

You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’re told the Odyssey spacecraft designed to take you there will be the smoothest ride you’ll ever take. It features a newly christened electric propulsion engine which was in the late stages of testing during the first three missions. The mission starts and the spacecraft travels at a crawl, and you wonder if it’s broken. A week goes by and you’re now traveling at more than 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour, and your mind is blown as to how fast you’re going, how quickly that happened, and that this mission might be more awesome than you thought.

Astronomers now believe there is at least one planet for every star in the Milky Way but new research has revealed a deeply unsettling twist in that picture. The most common planets in our Galaxy, it turns out, are almost entirely absent around the most common stars. Using data from NASA's TESS satellite, researchers found that the small, faint stars that make up the vast majority of the Milky Way seem to host rocky super Earths in abundance, but virtually no sub Neptunes, the planet type previously thought to be plentiful. The finding doesn't just refine existing theories of planet formation, it rewrites them.

An international team of astrophysicists has just released one of the largest cosmological datasets ever assembled. A mouthwatering 2.5 petabytes of simulated universe, freely available to researchers anywhere in the world. Built using a supercomputer and a suite of simulations called FLAMINGO, the data models how matter has evolved since the Big Bang, tracing everything from individual galaxies to the vast cosmic web that stretches across billions of light years.

When NASA's Artemis II crew swung around the Moon in April, the world watched in extraordinary detail and a breakthrough laser communications system was the reason why. Bolted to the outside of the Orion capsule, a compact optical terminal beamed 484 gigabytes of data back to Earth using invisible infrared light, outpacing traditional radio systems by a factor of tens. The result was some of the most vivid imagery ever captured in deep space, and a technology demonstration that will fundamentally change how humanity communicates beyond Earth.

Our Sun is a bit of an outlier in the general stellar population. We typically think of stars as being solitary wanderers throughout the galaxy. But roughly half of Sun-like stars are locked in with more than one companion star. If there are two, it’s known as a “binary” system, but in many cases there are even more stars all collectively tied together by gravity. Astronomers have long debated why this happens, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Ryan Sponzilli, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, makes an argument for a mechanism known as disk fragmentation.

There are tens of thousands of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that represent some of the most easily accessible resources in the solar system. If we can get to them at least. Planning trajectories to rendezvous with these miniature worlds is notoriously difficult, and requires a massive amount of computational power to calculate. But a new paper from astrodynamicist Alessandro Beolchi of Khalifa University of Science and Technology and his co-authors offers a much less computationally intensive way to find these trajectories, and has the added bonus of finding the much less energy-intensive paths to boot.

They’re a prolific, yet often elusive for northern hemisphere observers. If skies are clear, watch for a strong annual meteor shower that’s attained an almost mythical status: the May Eta Aquariids. The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is active from April 19th until May 28th, with the key night being the evening of May 5th into the morning of May 6th.

Despite outward appearances, the internal workings of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune are extremely chaotic. Pressures millions of times greater than Earth’s sea level combine with temperatures in the thousands of degrees to make some pretty weird materials. Now, a new paper from researchers at the Carnegie Institution, published in Nature Communications, describes a completely new state of matter that might exist in these extreme environments - a “quasi-1D superionic” phase.

You’re based at Artemis Station on the lunar south pole, and you’re monitoring your 12 autonomous rovers that are exploring the surrounding terrain for signs of water ice or other essentials minerals. They’re about 3 kilometers out when you suddenly get a NASA Alert for an incoming solar storm. You know the rovers won’t return to base before the storm hits, but you’re calm knowing the rovers all recently got retrofitted with the latest hair-thin nanotube shielding to protect them from the harsh electromagnetic waves and radiation.

Mercury is one of the four rocky worlds of the Solar System, yet its chemistry is very different from Earth, Venus, and Mars. Missions to the planet show that it has an iron-poor, but sulfur- and magnesium-rich crust. Furthermore, it's known to planetary scientists as the most reduced planet in the Solar system. It means that the chemical makeup is dominated by sulfides, carbides, and silicides -- as opposed to oxides like we see here on Earth.

Binary stars are common, but for a long time astronomers have thought that exoplanets would have trouble forming around them. In recent years, powerful telescopes have detected about 50 of these planets. Now, new simulations show that their formation isn't actually rare, it's just that they tend to be on wide orbits, with few opportunities to observe transits. Also, many of them are ejected and become rogue planets.

One of the most intriguing puzzles in cosmology is the existence of supermassive black holes that seem to appear very early in the history of the Universe. Astronomers keep finding them at times when, by all that they understand about the infant Universe, they shouldn't be there. The standard theory of black hole formation suggests that they shouldn't have had enough time to grow as massive as they appear to be. Yet, there they are, monster black holes with the mass of at least a billion suns. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a large population of them in early epochs, and they've been observed in very early quasars as well.

It has been a dream of astronomers and solar scientists for ages. A new mission gives solar researchers a powerful new tool in their arsenal: on-demand, total solar eclipses. Launched in 2024, The European Space Agency’s Proba-3 mission has proven the feasibility of a free-flying, space-based coronagraph. Now, first science results from the mission are giving us a view of the origin of space weather. The results were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The idea of sending a swarm of tiny laser-sail powered spacecraft to our nearest exoplanet won't go away. While complex and punctuated with tough problems, the idea is the only realistic way of reaching another solar system this century, according to researchers. But the scientific benefits would be huge.

Every star that has ever lived has been slowly spinning down, losing rotational energy across billions of years until, at the end, it collapses. But new research from Kyoto University has revealed that the story is far stranger than that. Some stars, in their final moments, don't slow down at all, they spin up and nobody predicted it.

Stars are not born by chance. New research shows that the mass of a star cluster dictates exactly what kinds of stars it will produce from cool, dim dwarfs to blazing stellar giants ten times the mass of our Sun. It is a discovery that rewrites our understanding of how galaxies grow and evolve, and raises questions that astronomers will be grappling with for years to come.

Astronauts take time to adjust how firmly they grip and handle objects when moving between Earth and space, because the brain continues making predictions based on whichever gravitational environment it has most recently adapted to. Research from the Université catholique de Louvain reveals that this adjustment process works in both directions and sheds new light on how the brain anticipates and manages the risk of making mistakes.

On top of Kitt Peak in the Arizona Desert, a robotic surveyor just completed a five year mission to catalogue the positions of tens of millions of galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has now created the largest, most detailed 3D map of our universe ever constructed. And it’s not done yet, its main mission has been extended through 2028.

Exoplanet science and the search for life beyond Earth continue to advance at break-neck speeds, with the number of confirmed exoplanets by NASA rapidly approaching 6,300, with 223 of those exoplanets being designated as terrestrial (rocky) exoplanets. With the promise of discovering an increasing number of Earth-sized exoplanets increasing every day, new telescopes from across the world have the opportunity to contribute to this incredible field.

You’re in the lab analyzing Martian regolith samples within your cozy Mars habitat serving on fifth human mission to Mars. The power within the habitat has been flowing flawlessly thanks to the MARS-MES (Mars Atmospheric Resource & Multimodal Energy System), including the general habitat lighting, science lab, sleeping quarters, exercise equipment, the virtual reality headsets the crew use for rest & relaxation, oxygen and fuel generation, and water. All this from converting the Martian atmosphere into workable electricity.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research have produced the most detailed simulations ever of solar prominences. These vast clouds of cooler plasma suspended in the Sun's scorching outer atmosphere have often perplexed solar astronomers. Their research reveals that two separate processes work together to keep these structures alive, and could one day help us predict the violent eruptions that drive dangerous space weather here on Earth.

Our Galaxy's halo of hot gas is measurably warmer on one side than the other and a team of scientists have found the culprit. The gravitational pull of the Large Magellanic Cloud is drawing the Milky Way slowly southward, compressing the gas in its path and heating it up, much like a piston in an engine. The discovery solves a puzzle that has intrigued astronomers since the temperature difference was first detected in 2024.

Where exactly is the edge of the Milky Way? That question is harder to answer than one might expect. Since we’re inside of the galaxy itself, it’s obviously hard to judge the “edge” to begin with. But it gets even more complicated when defining what the edge even is - the galaxy simply gets less dense the farther away from the center it goes. A new paper by researchers originally at the University of Malta thinks they have an answer though. The “edge” can be defined as the star-forming region, and in their paper, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, they very clearly show that “edge” to be between 11.28 and 12.15 kiloparsecs (or about 40,000 light years) from the center.

The 570 megapixel Dark Energy Camera captured this image of the iconic Sombrero Galaxy. The galaxy has characteristics of both elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies, and is likely the result of multiple mergers and cannibalizations of dwarf galaxies. A faint stellar stream, only fully traced a few years ago, is revealed by DECam's resolving power.

NASA and other space agencies spend a lot of time and money considering the cleanliness of their missions. Billions of dollars are spent in and on cleanrooms every year, with the express effort of ensuring both that the equipment operates without interference, but also that we don’t accidentally contaminate our exploration target with life from Earth itself. So far, we have primarily focused on bacteria in our efforts to stop this contamination, but according to a new paper by Atul M. Chander of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and his co-authors, we might be missing an entirely different threat - fungi.