As we make our way through the latest solar maximum period, scholars and scientists are looking to similar events in the past to learn more about ancient bouts of solar activity. In particular, they want to know more about solar proton events (SPEs). These outbursts of high-energy particles get triggered by flares and coronal mass ejections.

New research examines 10 different types of global technological civilizations, how they govern themselves, how they use resources, and other factors, to determine which types may endure and which may be doomed to collapse. Simulations show that resource use plays the key role. The simulations also show which types of detectable technosignatures each may generate.

So far, America has remained ahead in the new space race. But its biggest rival is making continual steps to catch up. China announced another step in that direction with the unveiling of its first ever reusable five-meter-wide composite propulsion module, announced in a press release on April 11th.

Using the eROSITA space telescope, MPE researchers have successfully isolated the X-ray glow from our Solar System, revealing its impact on the soft X-ray sky. The findings, published in Science, underscore the importance of considering Solar System processes when analyzing X-ray data and highlight eROSITA’s role in advancing not only astrophysics but also heliophysics.

Water is critical to life because cells need liquid to function. That's why scientists focus on finding and studying exoplanets in habitable zones. But even if they're in habitable zones, exoplanets need lots of water to support their carbon cycles. So without water, exoplanets become inhospitable greenhouse planets, regardless if they're in habitable zones or not.

New missions mean new capabilities - and one particularly interesting new mission is finally up and running. Data is starting to come in from SPHEREx, the medium-class surveyor that is mapping the entire sky every six months. A paper based on some of that early data was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, mapping ice and compounds called Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) throughout some interesting regions of our Milky Way.

Rubin’s largest asteroid haul yet, gathered before the Legacy Survey of Space and Time even begins, is just the “tip of the iceberg”

Cherenkov radiation isn't just a beautiful phenomenon. It turns up in nuclear reactors, in the upper atmosphere, in gamma ray telescopes on three continents, in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and in hospital imaging suites. Here's what a light boom is actually good for.

Using lunar regolith simulant, a team of researchers demonstrated that "immature" regolith similar to what is expected around the Moon's southern polar region is suitable for rovers to drive on.

We have the crowd. We have the star. Now it's time to put them together. Here's exactly what happens — and why — when a charged particle outruns the local speed of light in a material. Also: why it's always blue.

In 2014, a strange cloudy object called G2 made a close approach to Sagittarius A*, (Sag A*) the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers were pretty excited, partly because they thought it might get torn apart by Sag A*'s intense gravitational pull. That didn't happen, and the event was a cosmic fizzle. Instead, G2 skipped around the black hole. Various observations showed that it wasn't just a gas cloud. It was likely a dusty protostellar object encased in a dusty cloud. Or perhaps several merged stars. But, it survived the flyby and continued on a shortened orbit.

Understanding the beginning of the solar system requires us to look at some very strange places. One such place is at the so-called “Trojan” asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit in front of and behind it. But for a long time, these cosmic time capsules have held a mystery for astronomers: why are they color-coded? The populations of larger asteroids are very clear split into two distinct groups - the “reds” and the “less reds”, because apparently they’re all red to some extent. A new paper from researchers in Japan tried to solve this mystery by taking a close look at even smaller asteroids, and their findings, published in a recent edition of The Astronomical Journal, actually brings up a completely different question - why don’t smaller Trojan asteroids have the same color-coding?

Researchers from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) and National Institute for Basic Biology have developed a new method to detect extraterrestrial life without relying on traditional biosignatures. By modelling how life might spread between planets, they demonstrate that life could be detected through statistical patterns across planetary populations rather than on individual planets. This "agnostic biosignature" approach could assist in guiding future searches for life beyond Earth.

We’re one comet down, and one to go for spring season 2026. We recently wrote about prospects for sungrazer C/2026 A1 MAPS and comet C/2025 R3 Pan-STARRS in April 2026. While the bad news is, Comet A1 MAPS disintegrated like so many sungrazers before it during its blistering close perihelion passage on April 4th, comet R3 Pan-STARRS put on an amazing dawn showing for early rising astrophotographers.

Living long-term on the Moon means surviving the devastating toll that deep space takes on a human body. Astronauts in low gravity environments suffer muscle and bone loss, vision-altering fluid shifts, and heavy radiation exposure - all of which are incredibly hazardous to our biology. So, to help future lunar explorers survive, a new crew just arrived at the International Space Station (ISS). That might not sound surprising, except this crew is composed of worms.

Mars is well known as a static, frozen desert. We tend to think of the only thing changing on the surface of the Red Planet is due to the occasional dust storm. But if you look closely - and are willing to wait decades - you’ll see the planet is very much alive - at least in the environmental sense. The European Space Agency just released some spectacular new images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on its Mars Express Orbiter, one of which shows a surprisingly “fast” geological change happening in Utopia Planitia. A dark, ominous-looking blanket of volcanic ash is actively creeping across the bright red sands - and it's moving (relatively) fast.

Before Brad Bradington can sprint down the red carpet, we need to understand the crowd. Specifically, we need to understand why a crowd of atoms and molecules slows down light — and why that creates a loophole that changes everything.

Astronomers using data from the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) have discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago.

Engineers love a good practical challenge, especially when it comes to spaceflight. But there’s one particular challenge facing the crewed missions of the near future that scares mission planners above almost all others - fire. For decades, we’ve relied on a NASA test known as NASA-STD-6001B to screen material flammability for flight. But space is much more complicated than an Earth-bound test provides for. A new paper from researchers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center and Johnson Space Center and Case Western Reserve University details a planned mission to test the flammability of materials on the Moon’s surface - where they expect flame to act much differently than it does here on Earth.

To say NASA has been undergoing some massive administrative changes lately is a huge understatement. One of the more concerning ones, according to a new paper at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference by Ari Koeppel and Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society, is the trend towards the Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and break things” - which they argue doesn’t work very well when it comes to producing valuable science.