Dark matter is the invisible stuff that accounts for roughly 85% of the mass in the universe, and for decades, physicists have been trying to figure out what it's made of. Now an experimental facility located nearly a mile below ground in South Dakota has recorded a single interaction between subatomic particles that doesn't match what's expected from normal matter. Has a dark-matter particle been detected at last? It's too early to say, but the anomaly is definitely attracting attention from dark-matter detectives.

Extreme quasars near the dawn of time are giving astrophysicists clues to the formation of supermassive black holes.

If you visit the New Horizons mission website frequently, you'll notice that the spacecraft continues to generate excellent science as it plows its way through the Kuiper Belt. It recently woke up from its latest hibernation period in good health and is transmitting data it gathered back to Earth. The spacecraft, in addition to studying the Jupiter system in 2007, the Pluto system in 2015, and the Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth in early 2019, has been doing some other fascinating solar system science since then thanks to two mission extensions in 2016 and 2023. Now, as a result of budget cuts at NASA, an important part of the NH science mission could end as early as October of this year.

Prior to its launch, astronomers were uncertain what the powerful JWST would find in the ancient, early Universe. One of its surprising findings was Little Red Dots, unexplained ancient objects. They're widely considered to be connected to the growth of SMBHs in the Universe. New research suggests that we may be seeing some LRDs before they merge, on their way to becoming SMBH.

The ASTRID cosmological simulation has run from the Universe's early days up to the present day, z=0. ASTRID is larger than some other simulations, and smaller than others. But with a higher number of particles, it has higher-resolution than its fellows. Among other things, this can tell astronomers where to look for gravitational waves from black hole mergers with future GW observatories.

As any amateur astronomer can tell you, Venus is famous for its yellow coloration in visible light. But, ask a professional planetary scientist and they will tell you the strangest thing about Venus is how it appears in ultraviolet. In this spectrum, stark, high-contrast streaks are splattered across the planet’s cloud cover, and rotate on its four-day atmospheric rotation period. For over 100 years, scientists have wondered what could be causing those patterns, referring to an unknown “UV absorber”. A new paper, published in Astrobiology from Jan Spacek and an international team of researchers, hopes to answer that long-standing question by answering a simpler one - if you scooped Venus’ clouds into a test tube, how dark would they be?

The planet Mars is a cold and dry world completely devoid of life, but billions of years ago things were much different. This is when Mars had a much warmer interior than it does today, resulting in active volcanism that replenished its atmosphere, a magnetic field that protected the planet from harmful solar and cosmic radiation, and a surface of flowing liquid water. But due to Mars’s small size, the interior cooled far faster than Earth’s has cooled, leading to a loss of volcanism, near-absolute depletion of its magnetic field, and complete evaporation of all surface liquid water. But what is the interior heat of Mars like today?

Black holes are some of the most awe-inspiring and mysterious celestial objects in the universe. This is primarily because astronomers still don’t understand the underlying mechanisms that drive black holes, including its formation, evolution, and end. As their name implies, black holes can’t be viewed directly since they blend into the background of the vastness of space. Therefore, astronomers are limited to “seeing” black holes when they consume other celestial objects, most notably stars. When this happens, the astronomers see the light from the star being violently consumed by a nearby black hole in a spectacular display. However, astronomers are still puzzled regarding what happens after the consumption.

Scientists and philosophers have argued over the nature of time since … well, since time immemorial. Is time real, or is it a convenient illusion? Why does time seem to flow in just one direction? In a new book called “On Time,” British physicist Jim Al-Khalili lays out what he thinks is the answer to such questions.

Sure. It’s just another image of Phobos crossing the disk of the Sun, as seen from the surface of Mars. Like so much of the modern space era, these images, once amazing, are now almost routine. But there’s some real science behind tasking the Mars rovers to conduct a little ‘Martian astronomy.’

Astrophysicists at Syracuse University in New York think they've found a hitherto-hidden explanation for strange activity during so-called repeating partial Tidal Disruption Events (rpTDEs). These are interactions between a supermassive black hole and a star that wanders too close for comfort, but not close enough to get swallowed up.

While astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets over the last few decades, the true prize continues to elude them - they have yet to find an Earth-mass, rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star. That’s partially just due to cosmic geography - around half of all sun-like stars near us aren’t alone. They have one or more companion stars that complicate their orbital dynamics, as well as those of any planets they might host. But a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, suggests a new NASA Small Explorer mission called Searching for Habitable Exoplanets with Relative Astrometry (SHERA), which aims to use those complex dynamics to help find Earth-sized worlds in these multi-star systems.

Cislunar space is already getting crowded. And with that crowding comes infrastructure complications. One is navigation - there is no Global Positioning System available when you're not on the globe. Finding a spacecraft’s exact orbital path relies on networking with the Deep Space Network (DSN), a set of telescopes originally developed in the 1950s to communicate with spacecraft far afield. DSN itself is already getting overwhelmed with managing all of the missions requesting its time, so getting a precise orbital location currently can take hours. But researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory think they might have a solution for this - launching a fleet of three satellites to collectively create a deep-space navigational system known as the LIght High-Orbit Utility Signal Emitter - LightHOUSE.

The planet Jupiter hosts more than 100 moons with the majority of attention going to the four Galilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. This is primarily due to their active geology, including Io being the most volcanically active planetary body in the solar system and Europa having a vast subsurface liquid water ocean beneath its icy crust. However, Jupiter’s smaller and lesser-known moons could provide astronomers key insights into the history of the solar system since they’ve remained largely unchanged, unlike the Galilean moons.

At least once in our lives, we’ve all seen a bright streak of light briefly blaze across the sky and have quickly referred to it as an asteroid, meteor, shooting star, comet, or some other whimsical name we’ve heard others use to describe it. For those calling it a meteor, you would be correct, but we’ll touch upon this later. The time it takes for a space rock, bolide being its scientific name, to travel through Earth's atmosphere and crash into the ground literally takes only a few seconds. But what happens to a space rock during this very brief travel time, and how can scientists use this to learn about a specific space rock’s origin and the potential damage it could cause if it explodes in mid-air?

When a meteoroid hits the Moon's surface, it does more than just dig up a little dirt. It actually excavates a little bit of cosmic history that recorded a long-ago supernova explosion. Scientists at the University of Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology have come up with a way to decode that history and learn something about such energetic events in the Universe.

NASA's newest eye on the sky, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, has begun its journey to unravel the secrets of dark matter, dark energy and Earthlike planets — months ahead of schedule.

How do scientists know the mass of the Universe? Measuring it has traditionally relied on knowing how many stars there are in galaxies, as well as clouds of gas and dust, and associated dark matter. Astronomers generally use the mass of the brightest stars to estimate the mass of an entire galaxy. That means the rest of a galaxy's stars and its dark matter are essentially invisible. For decades, astronomers estimated the number of small, unseen stars in clusters and galaxies using a mathematical rule that assumed stars formed in roughly the same mass proportions everywhere in the Universe. That tool is called the initial mass function (IMF). It describes how many stars of each size there are in a given cluster or galaxy. However, there are challenges with the way it's currently applied because of assumptions it contains.

Those little dust grains that fall to Earth during meteor showers or end up as part of larger meteorites found on Earth may hold surprising clues to the formation of the Sun. That's because they record the state of the magnetic field in the protostellar nebula from which Earth (and ultimately the planets) formed.

Due to an ongoing commercial spacecraft attitude control issue, NASA and Katalyst Space announced Wednesday the LINK spacecraft will attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration.