The galaxy cluster Abell 2029 is sometimes described as “the most relaxed cluster in the Universe.” This moniker does not arise from some sort of mellow vibe, but rather because of how calm and undisturbed the superheated gas that pervades the cluster appears to be. But new Chandra X-ray observations of the massive cluster highlight a major merger 4 billion years ago that still shape it today.

Earth has a group of cosmic stalkers. Known as “co-orbitals”, these small bits of rock have a 1:1 mean motion resonance with Earth. Basically, they take the exact same amount of time to orbit the Sun as we do. Astronomers have long believed these objects wandered in from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but recent spectral analysis suggests they better match the space-weathered lunar silicates that make up the Moon’s surface. As such, there has been an ongoing debate about whether these cosmic stalkers are actually visitors from the belt or blasted pieces of the Moon. A new study, published in Icarus, from researchers Elisa Alessi and Robert Jedicke provides strong hints that the belt is the more likely source - but pretty soon we’ll get a definitive answer from a spacecraft.

The Moon has a busy week ahead of it. If skies are clear, be sure to get outside on the evenings of May 18th/19th and surrounding nights to check out the evolving view to the west, in one of the best sky shows for 2026.

Dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. We have never directly detected a single particle of it. But a new method developed by physicists at MIT and across Europe may have just opened a door we didn't know existed. When two black holes collide and merge, they send ripples through the fabric of spacetime, these are known as gravitational waves and if those black holes happened to spiral through a dense cloud of dark matter on their way in, those waves carry an imprint of it. For the first time, scientists have a technique to read that imprint and one signal in the existing data is already raising eyebrows.

Artemis II has barely left the headlines. On April 1st 2026, four astronauts climbed aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, rode the most powerful rocket ever to carry humans beyond low Earth orbit, and swung around the far side of the Moon. The world watched. Now, before the dust has settled, NASA has outlined its plans for what comes next. Artemis III won't be landing on the Moon. But what it will do is arguably just as important and if history is any guide, it's exactly the kind of mission that makes the difference between a Moon landing and a disaster.

Right now, as you read this, Earth is drifting through a cloud of debris from an ancient stellar explosion. Stardust, real stardust, is raining down on us so thinly scattered that we have only just found the proof. Locked inside Antarctic ice cores up to 80,000 years old, an international team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has discovered traces of iron-60, a radioactive isotope that can only be created in the heart of an exploding star.

For ten years, astronomers at UCLA have been pointing one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes at the stars and listening. Not for pulsars or gas clouds, or the hiss of the cosmic microwave background, but for something far more extraordinary. A signal from another civilisation. The result of a decade's work, 70,000 stars, and 100 million candidate signals is now in and every single one of them was us! But far from being a disappointment, the findings are among the most rigorous and revealing in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Shalbatana Vallis is a 1300 km water channel on Mars. It was carved out in one cataclysmic flooding event, possibly triggered by a massive impact. It's more evidence that liquid water once flowed on Mars.

University of Cincinnati astrophysicist Paul Smith is part of an international team studying TOI-2031Ab, a gas giant orbiting a star 901 light years from Earth. Smith and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope to study its atmosphere.

One of the core community surveys of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, is expected to locate over a thousand exoplanets that orbit far away from their stars, beyond the orbital distance of Earth from the Sun. Although Roman hasn’t launched yet, astronomers already are gathering useful supporting data by utilizing NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which could assist astronomers in analyzing Roman data.

Perseverance has travelled almost 26 miles, or 42 km. That's just shy of a marathon, which is 26.2 miles or 42.195 kilometers. Along the way, it's abraded and studied 62 rocks and collected 27 rock cores. And it's not done yet.

When a massive star dies, it can leave behind a black hole. That much has been understood for decades. But the most monstrous black holes in the universe, the heavyweights detected by the faint ripples they send through the fabric of space and time aren't born that way at all. According to a new Cardiff University study, they're built through repeated, catastrophic collisions in the most densely packed star clusters in the cosmos.

Hot Jupiters are the bullies of the planetary world. These colossal gas giants orbit impossibly close to their stars and their gravity is so overwhelming that anything nearby gets scattered, swallowed, or flung into oblivion. Finding a smaller planet surviving inside a hot Jupiter's orbit should be virtually impossible. Yet 190 light years away, that's exactly what astronomers have found.

Every time an astronomer points a telescope at a distant supernova, they're trying to measure how far away it is. But the light from these stellar explosions arrives tangled up with interference from dust, the age of the host galaxy and the chemical make up of the original star . Unpicking it all has always been a painstaking business. Now a team of researchers has used artificial intelligence to cut through the noise in a single step, potentially making cosmological measurements four times more precise. In a universe full of unanswered questions, that's a very significant leap forward.

During the 1970s, pioneering experiments were conducted that are known today as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). At the same time, NASA launched four spacecraft bound for interstellar space, each carrying "messages in a bottle" intended for extraterrestrial beings.

The search for life elsewhere focuses on biosignatures. These are chemicals in atmospheres that can only be attributed to life. But despite the prowess of the JWST, finding slam-dunk proof of life on other worlds is a confounding exercise. New research suggests that rather than focus on individual chemicals, we should look for statistical patterns.

Extremely powerful quasars in the early Universe drove star-forming gas out of their galaxies. These Super-quasars are behind the JWST's puzzling early Universe observations.

Brown dwarfs are notoriously difficult to find. These “failed stars” aren’t big enough to sustain nuclear fusion, and therefore aren’t as bright as more traditional main sequence stars. In fact, they’re nearly invisible in optical light, and faintly visible in infrared. But thanks to dozens of citizen scientists combing through archival infrared datasets from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and a paper published in the Astronomical Journal detailing their work, we now have an additional set of over 3,000 candidate new brown dwarfs in our stellar neighborhood, more than doubling the total number found so far.

A close flyby past the Red Planet this week will send NASA’s Psyche mission on its way towards its final destination. The mission’s closest approach to Mars occurs on Friday, May 15th, when the spacecraft passes only 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) from the surface of the Red Planet. That’s just 1.3 Mars radii distant, inside the orbits of Phobos and Deimos.

Step outside on a clear night almost anywhere in Britain and look up. Chances are you won't see much. An orange coloured washed out glow hangs over every town and city, drowning the stars in a tide of misdirected light. Now the Royal Astronomical Society is demanding that tide be turned back, not just for the sake of astronomy, but because the evidence of what artificial light at night is doing to our health, our wildlife, and our ecosystems has become impossible to ignore. The night, it turns out, isn't just a backdrop. It's a habitat that’s more entwined with our very wellbeing and health than you can possibly imagine. And we're destroying it.

Turn on your kitchen tap and watch the water hit the sink. That split second where fast, shallow water suddenly slows and spreads is known as a hydraulic jump. Now imagine the same thing happening in the atmosphere of Venus, but stretched across 6,000 kilometres of sulphuric acid cloud. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have just revealed that this extraordinary phenomenon, the largest hydraulic jump ever identified in the Solar System, is responsible for a mysterious wave that has been sweeping around our neighbouring planet for years.

When NASA's Artemis II spacecraft carried four astronauts around the Moon earlier this year, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope was quietly watching from a quiet valley in West Virginia. The Green Bank Telescope tracked the Orion capsule across 213,000 miles of empty space with a precision that would embarrass most speedometers and what it produced isn't just an engineering triumph. It's a glimpse of how the world's most sensitive ears are becoming indispensable to the future of human spaceflight.

You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. You’re chilling for several hours and eventually notice the water hasn’t touched you. You remember over-hearing some otherworldly fellows who briefly landed and discussed the landscape didn’t look well formed, so they left.

In 2025, a retreating glacier in Alaska caused a landslide into a fjord named Tracy Arm. The landslide triggered a tsunami that swept down the fjord into the ocean. The tsunami reached a height of more than 480 meters, the second highest tsunami ever recorded.

Jupiter, the gravitational behemoth that makes up a lion’s share of our solar system’s planetary content, is much more complicated than ever previously thought. Or so say leaders from NASA’s highly successful Juno mission.

The cosmological constant has been a problem in physics since Einstein, but new research may show why it takes the value that it does despite quantum fluctuations that should make its value practically infinite.

If you’ve ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you’ve probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has been a “cheat sheet” for stellar astrophysics for over a century. But the universe is full of more than just stars, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Gabriel Steward and Matthew Hedman of the University of Idaho, attempts to do for the density and mass of all objects what the HR diagram did for the lifecycle of stars - provide a coherent, visual map to represent them.

Life didn't just happen on Earth, a new study suggests that the slow, grinding rise of our planet's continents more than 3.7 billion years ago may have done something extraordinary. Instead it carefully calibrated the chemistry of the ancient oceans to create precisely the conditions life needed to get started. The unlikely hero of the story is a semi precious gemstone.

Since the James Webb Space Telescope switched on, astronomers have been puzzled by hundreds of tiny, ancient, red objects lurking at the edge of the observable universe. Nobody could agree on what they were but now, a single extraordinary discovery of a lone object that behaves differently from all the others may have just solved one of the biggest mysteries of the modern telescope era. In doing so it has revealed a previously unknown chapter in the life story of the universe's most extreme objects.

In February 2013, a 20 metre asteroid exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk without warning, injuring more than 1,600 people and releasing energy equivalent to 33 Hiroshima bombs. Nobody saw it coming but that sobering wake up call directly motivated ESA's Meerkat Asteroid Guard, an automated system watching the skies around the clock for rocks on a collision course with Earth.

A new study by planetary scientists at Harvard offers an explanation for one of Earth’s great climate puzzles: how the Sturtian glaciation, an ancient ice age when the planet was nearly entirely frozen, could have lasted 56 million years. A large igneous province in Canada helped them figure it out.

A new international scientific study by the Hellenic Space Center (HSC) has identified some of the most promising candidate cryovolcanic regions on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. These regions represent important targets for future observations by the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE).

Life on Earth depends on a critical dance of elements throughout the biosphere. One of these elements is Molybdenum, a transition metal that speeds up important biochemical reactions in cells. New research shows that despite its ancient scarcity, and despite the greater availability of other, similar metals, life "chose" Molybdenum earlier than thought.

By the 1960s, two major contributions were made to the field of SETI, both of which considered how more advanced civilizations could be found based on the types of structures they might build and the levels of energy they could harness.

The search for Earth 2.0 has begun in earnest. But there’s a huge variety of exoplanets out there, so narrowing down the search to focus valuable telescope time on only the best candidates is critical. One variable of a planet that will have a huge impact on its habitability is its size. A new paper, now available in pre-print on arXiv, by researchers at the University of California Riverside, looks into the impact of a planet’s size on one of its more critical features for habitability - whether it holds onto an atmosphere - and determines that slightly smaller than Earth is likely the smallest a planet can be and still be viable for life to develop.

Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange "little red dots" (LRDs) in its infrared images. There are hundreds of these compact blobs at very high redshifts at distances of about 12 billion light-years. Astronomers think they began forming some 600 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them players in the infancy of the cosmos. They appear red in optical light and blue in the ultraviolet. So, what are these strange objects?

A spiral galaxy seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disc fills the view from corner to corner. Its disc is yellow near to the centre and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars, respectively. Thin brown clouds of dust, glowing pink spots of star formation, and sparkling blue patches filled with star clusters swirl through the galaxy. Behind it, small orange dots are very distant galaxies.

There’s a specific sequence in the anime Dragonball Z that for some reason has stuck in my head for over two decades. Goku, the main character of the show, travels to King Kai’s planet and can barely stand up when he arrives because the planet’s gravity is 10 times stronger than Earth’s. Over time, he trains in this gravity, and his body begins to adapt to it. Eventually, after leaving the planet, he’s stronger, faster, and more agile than he ever was before. But would that really happen if you were exposed to 10G over a long period of time? Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) decided to test that idea and report their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But instead of using anime characters, they used fruit flies as their test subjects.

Fifteen years after Western astronomers first discovered ‘buckyballs’ in space, they’re back with stunning images and rich data generated by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The results of their study have revealed the cosmic origin of these strange molecules.

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.