A new study reveals that Jezero Crater’s enigmatic ‘Margin Unit’ was shaped by a complex sequence of ancient lakes, groundwater systems, and hydrothermal fluids.

Rocket launches are some of the most violent travel methods man has ever created. They generate millions of pounds of thrust and convert that into intense g-forces. Humans must undergo serious training to withstand those experiences, but machines have to do so as well, but by design rather than training. If a delicate mirror or solder joint cracks before a multi-billion dollar satellite even begins its mission, the years of effort that went into its design and assembly could be lost. Now, researchers in Switzerland have come up with an ingenious way to make sure that is much less likely to happen.

Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so is a showcase in how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s equivalent to traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr and parallel parking into an open garage on a multi-billion dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward you actually drift up, and there’s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone onboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resultant debris field could both wipe out dozens of satellites and even people on the ground. No pressure, obviously. For decades, aerospace engineers have been docking successfully using hard coded physics equations and human pilots to correct them. But now, a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at Stanford, is taking a shot at building an AI to perform a series of “mental simulations” that could fundamentally change how future spacecraft interact with each other.

Galaxies and their stars in the early Universe look a lot weirder than those we see today, and astronomers want to know why. A team of researchers at the University of Utah decided to survey certain stars in nearby galaxies as analogs of those that existed when the Universe was still in its infancy. The survey, called the "Treasury of Extremely Metal-Poor O Stars (TEMPOS), used the ultraviolet (UV) light streaming from those relatively close-by stars as detected by the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

Asteroids which strike the Moon and create new craters offer lunar scientists a window onto the workings of our natural satellite’s shallow subsurface.

The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will return to Earth on 28 September, with flight controllers guiding the spacecraft close to our home planet to alter its speed and direction en route to Jupiter.

Never seen Neptune for yourself? Late September 2026 presents an ideal opportunity to cross the outermost ice giant off of your ‘life list,’ as the planet reaches opposition for 2026, rising opposite to the setting Sun and riding high to the south towards local midnight.

Most exoplanets we find have been around a long time. They’ve cleared out their orbital path (one of the requirements of planethood, as fans of Pluto well know), have their own gravitational pull, and in many cases shine with their own infrared light. But it takes a long time to get to that point - finding “young” planets is much harder. But a new paper available in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by a research team led by Andrea Bernardi of Diego Portales University in Chile describes a new paper that definitely takes the prize as the youngest exoplanet we’ve yet found.

Asteroids don’t come with a warning label that they might one day hit Earth. While we don’t know of any currently on course to do so, we are finding thousands of new ones each year, and there’s always a potential that one could. We proved a viable technique for dealing with that eventuality - the DART mission successfully moved a small asteroid using a “kinetic impactor” - basically a big rod designed to push the asteroid off its trajectory. But DART had one big flaw - it was traveling in the same direction as the asteroid, and approached it from behind, eventually hitting it with an impactor launched while in orbit around it. That technique might work if we have enough warning, but would require years of orbital mechanical maneuvering to pull off. An alternative, proposed by researchers at Beihang University, is to use a new type of solar sail to deflect a potentially hazardous asteroid by hitting it head on.

Studying exoplanets has provided astronomers with a plethora of insights regarding what characteristics need to be searched to find life beyond Earth. For the longest time, astronomers merely thought an exoplanet in a star’s habitable zone was a sufficient criterion for an Earth-like world. However, astronomers have learned that certain stars are more active than our Sun, resulting in exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zone being blasted with far more radiation than Earth could handle. In recent years, astronomers have recognized that a planet’s magnetic field, which shields the Earth from harmful radiation, could be a prime characteristic for identifying Earth-like worlds.

A team of researchers acquired the first diagnostic X-ray images during a commercial spaceflight, demonstrating that X-ray medicine can be performed in space.

More and more details about 3I/ATLAS are filtering through the scientific process as time goes on. Our third known interstellar visitor attracted the attention of some of the most powerful observatories in the world when it was discovered in July 2025, and some of those telescopes found something peculiar - the isotopes it contained appeared different. A new paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters (and available in pre-print on arXiv) by Kenji Furuya of the RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute in Japan and his co-authors, shows how that isotopic discrepancy is likely due to the “low-metallicity” of the stellar nursery 3I/ATLAS was born in.

Scientists have known for a while that meteorites contain the “building blocks” of life - complex organic molecules such as amino acids, simple sugars, or even the chemical rungs of DNA. But anyone who has taken an organic chemistry class knows there are plenty of other carbon-based molecules out there, and a new study from Joseph W. Frye-Jones of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Florida State, which was published in The Planetary Science Journal, found tens of thousands of types of previously unseen organic compounds in two of the world’s most famous meteorites.

The discovery of a very early and rare proto-supercluster of infant galaxies may help give clues to the formation of such clusters and their connection to the Cosmic Web.

There are more than 450 confirmed moons orbiting the eight major planets, but only a handful of them provide unique scientific value to pique the interests of the scientific community, specifically their potential for hosting life as we know it. This is due to the subsurface oceans that exist beneath icy crusts, including Jupiter’s Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn’s Enceladus. But what processes are responsible for producing these subsurface oceans, or potentially preventing them from forming in the first place?

It's easy to think of the Moon as the static constant companion in the night sky. Its face hasn’t visibly changed in millennia, and always faces us with the same side. But looks can be deceiving, as our closest companion is constantly bombarded by asteroids and comets that make small craters across the lunar landscape. While they might not be large enough for us to see with our naked eye, professional Moon watchers can pick up on them. And a recent paper published in Science Advances, describes the largest ever found in modern times.

Earth's center of mass isn't stationary. It drifts seasonally and over the course of years. A new study measures this down to the scale of millimeters and finds the seasonal drift is smaller than we thought.

The Sun’s magnetic fields are a twisty, curvy, ever changing mess. In particular, our star’s polar regions host regions called polar coronal holes that host invisible magnetic highways that stretch out into interplanetary space. But there’s a lot we don’t know about how those highways actually work, and in particular how they give the particles that form the fast solar wind an extra “kick” that sends them zooming at hundreds of kilometers per second. A new paper from a team led by Dr. Yuhang Gao and Prof. Hui Tian at Peking University, and published recently in the journal National Science Review, thinks they might have found an answer by using high-speed shots from Solar Orbiter to detect never-before seen rapid, high-frequency magnetic waves in those areas.

X-rays showcase some of the most unique astronomical objects in the universe. Neutron stars and black holes siphoning gas from companion stars stick out like sore thumbs at this level of radiation. However, according to a new paper by Mustafa Muhibullah and Jimmy Irwin from the University of Alabama and Rosanne Di Stefano from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & the Smithsonian, there appears to be another group of ultra-bright X-ray emitters that we’ve completely missed until now. They call them Hypersoft X-ray Sources (HSSs) and, according to a press release accompanying the paper, might answer two long-standing astronomical questions.

We have long known that the Sun is active. It “flares” quite often, sending huge amounts of energy off in a certain direction - sometimes directly at Earth. But we also know that, compared to other Sun-like stars, it seems relatively quiet, and not capable of producing the “superflares” we sometimes see in its stellar equivalents. That sounds like great news for humanity, and some scientists have even argued that lack of superflares was a critical impetus for the development of complex life on Earth. But a new paper from Natalie Krivova of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and her co-authors in the journal Philosophical Transactions A calls the assumption that our Sun is incapable of such dramatic outbursts into question. That also means that, eventually, our highly technological society could bear the brunt of one of them.