The WHAT? Yeah, the vortons. It’s not an anime monster-hunting show. It’s not some AI startup company. It’s a…it’s a thing. I think.

Oxygen has been the most important gas in our search for life among the cosmos thus far. On Earth, we have it in abundance because it is produced by biological synthesis. But that might not be the case on other planets, so even if we do find a very clear high oxygen signal in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it might not be a clear indication that life exists there. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Margaret Turcotte Seavey and a team of researchers from institutions like the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University, adds some additional context to what else might be going on in those atmospheres. In particular, they note that if there’s even a little bit of water vapor, it can make a big difference in whether a lifeless rock looks like a living, thriving world.

With the ISS set to retire in 2030, several plans are in place to replace it. These include existing space stations, proposals by rising national space agencies, and commercial space stations. With multiple outposts in orbit, the potential for research, development, and even conflict is considerable!

There may be as many rogue planets or free-floating planets in the Milky Way as there are stars. If there are billions of these worlds, some of them have likely held onto their moons. New research reveals a pathway to habitability for these rogue exomoons.

Every ounce counts when launching a rocket, which is why considerations for the Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) of every component matters so much. For decades, one of the heaviest and most power-hungry components on a spacecraft has been its optical and communications hardware - specifically the bulky mechanical mirror used for LiDAR and free-space laser communications. But a new paper, published in Nature by researchers at MIT, MITRE, and Sandia National Laboratories, might have just fundamentally changed the SWaP considerations of LiDAR systems. Their technology, which they’re called a “photonic ski-jump” could one day revolutionize how spacecraft communicate.

And yeah, we have a problem.

One particularly well known fact about the Moon is that it doesn’t have much of a magnetosphere to speak of. There’s no blanket to protect it from the solar wind ravaging its surface, blowing away its atmosphere and charging the notoriously dangerous dust particles that make up its regolith. However, scientists have also known for around 60 years that some parts of the moon do experience sudden spikes in a magnetic field - some of which are up to 10 times stronger than the background magnetization. Since their discovery, these “lunar external magnetic enhancements” (LEMEs) have puzzled researchers - what was causing them, and why did they reach so high above the lunar surface that spacecraft could see them? A new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by Shu-Hua Lai and her colleagues at the National Central University in Taiwan explains for the first time what is likely causing these LEMEs - a novel type of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability.

Beneath Europa's cracked and frozen shell lies a vast ocean of liquid water and what's seeping up through that ice may be one of the most compelling clues we have ever found about the moon's potential for life. A new analysis of James Webb Space Telescope observations has revealed that carbon dioxide on Europa's surface is far more widespread than previously thought, spreading across multiple regions of geological terrain in a distinctive lens like pattern. The findings are rewriting what we thought we knew about how material moves between Europa's hidden ocean and its surface.

For sixty years, the search for life beyond Earth has been built on the single assumption that alien life will look enough like us to recognise. A radical new idea called Assembly Theory is challenging that assumption. A team from the Arizona State University has proposed applying it to the atmospheres of distant exoplanets, not to look for specific gases, but to measure how much complexity a planetary atmosphere contains, and whether blind chemistry alone could plausibly have produced it. If it works, it could transform the way humanity searches for life among the stars, and redefine what we are even searching for.

Our Sun didn't always call this quiet corner of the Milky Way home. New research using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite has uncovered evidence that the Sun fled the chaotic heart of our Galaxy four to six billion years ago and it didn't go alone. A vast migration of stars almost identical to our own swept outward together, a great exodus that may have made life on Earth possible. The story of how astronomers pieced this together is as remarkable as the discovery itself.

But here’s the thing about these defects. They can’t just go away. They’re stuck.

On 2 July 2025, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a gamma-ray burst lasting over seven hours, nearly twice the duration of anything previously recorded. Not only was it the longest ever seen, it repeated, firing off multiple distinct bursts across an entire day. GRB 250702B, as it became known, doesn't fit any known category of astronomical explosion. But a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society offers the explanation that a star torn apart by an intermediate mass black hole may well be the culprit! On 2 July 2025, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a gamma-ray burst lasting over seven hours, nearly twice the duration of anything previously recorded. Not only was it the longest ever seen, it repeated, firing off multiple distinct bursts across an entire day. GRB 250702B, as it became known, doesn't fit any known category of astronomical explosion. But a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society offers the explanation that a star torn apart by an intermediate mass black hole may well be the culprit!

The spacecraft changed the binary system’s orbit, confirming that a kinetic impactor can be an effective planetary defense technique for deflecting a near-Earth object.

Every time you flip a light switch, or check the time, or feel the sodium ions wiggling in your brain — don’t think about that one too much—you’re assuming something fundamental. You’re assuming the universe is a finished product. A completed work. You think the Big Bang happened, the forces of nature settled into their seats, and we’ve been cruising on a smooth, predictable ride ever since.

Every planet with a magnetic field has a radiation belt, a region of space where charged particles get trapped and flung around at extraordinary speeds. Earth has two of them, and they've been puzzling scientists for decades. Now, a physicist at the University of Helsinki has built a model that defines a universal upper limit to just how energetic those belts can ever get. The answer applies not just to Earth, but to every planet in the Solar System, every gas giant, and even the strange objects sitting halfway between planets and stars.

Stars peek through the dusty, winding arms of NGC 5134, a spiral galaxy located 65 million light-years away, in this Feb. 20, 2026, image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument collects the mid-infrared light emitted by the warm dust speckled through the galaxy’s clouds, tracing the clumps and strands of dusty gas. The telescope’s Near Infrared Camera records shorter-wavelength near-infrared light, mostly from the stars and star clusters that dot the galaxy’s spiral arms. The image helps researchers understand star formation in spiral galaxies. Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy

So that's all nice. But why now? That's the question everyone asks. We went decades — centuries, millennia really — without seeing a single rock that didn't have a "Made in the Solar System" sticker on it. Then, in the span of less than ten years, we get the Big Three: 'Oumuamua, Borisov, and now 3I/ATLAS.

What happens when a solar superstorm hits Mars? Thanks to the European Space Agency’s Mars orbiters, we now know: glitching spacecraft and a supercharged upper atmosphere.

Rocky planets are found in abundance around M-type stars (red dwarfs), so finding another one doesn't always generate headlines. But an international team of astronomers say that one recent M-dwarf rocky planet found by TESS is especially noteworthy. This one can serve as a benchmark for comparative studies of this type of exoplanet and their at-risk atmospheres.

A neutron star merger is an extraordinary event. It features extremely powerful, chaotic magnetic fields that generate extremely energetic photons. Supercomputer simulations show that the extreme gamma-ray photons created in the mayhem can't even escape the chaos.