How do blue stragglers defy the aging that turns their mates red? Blue stragglers are found in ancient star clusters, where they outshine stars the same age, looking far bluer and younger than their true age. Astrophysicists have tried to understand blue stragglers for decades. New research using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is finally revealing how these ageless stars come to be and why they thrive in quieter cosmic neighbourhoods.

The Helix Nebula is one of the closest and brightest planetary nebula. It's what's left of a dying star and has nothing to do with planets. Our Sun will end up as one of these sumptuous displays, and a new JWST image reveals even more detail in the stunning nebula.

Some really unique science can be done during a total solar eclipse. Totality is the one time we can see the elusive corona of the Sun, the pearly white segment of our host star’s lower atmosphere where space weather activity originates. The trouble is, totality is fleeting. What researchers really need are eclipses on demand. ESA’s innovative Proba-3 mission does just that, by making use of a free-flying occulting disk. Launched in late 2024, we’re now seeing some unique science and images from the space observatory.

If humans are ever going to expand into space itself, it will have to be for a reason. Optimists think that reason is simply due to our love of exploration itself. But in history, it is more often a profit motive that has led humans to seek out new lands. So, it stands to reason that, in order for us to truly begin space colonization, we will have to have a business-related reason to do so. A new paper from the lab of Srivatsan Raman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and recently published in PLOS Biology, describes one potential such business case - genetically modifying bacteriophages to attack antibiotic resistant bacteria.

High-precision oxygen isotopes in Apollo lunar soils reveal a persistent impactor fingerprint, showing that impacts contributed only a tiny fraction of Earth’s water.

The Hubble Mission Team has released another image of the space telescope's study of star formation. This image shows the dark cloud Lupus 3, a star-forming region about 500 light-years away. Lupus 3 contains bright young T-Tauri stars, and 2 hot young stars that are creating a beautiful nebula.

The resolution of the Event Horizon Telescope is limited by the diameter of Earth, and our observations of the black hole in M87 and in our own galaxy are at the edge of that limit. To observe other, more distant black holes we will need radio telescopes on the Moon.

Back in 2014, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) captured an image of a young protoplanetary disk around a young star named HL Tauri. The image showed gaps and rings in the disk, substructures indicating that young planets forming there. This meant that planet formation began around young stars a lot sooner than thought. ALMA is continuing its investigation of protoplanetary disks in its ARKS survey (ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures).

Material science plays an absolutely critical role in space exploration. So when a new type of self-healing composite is announced, it’s worth a look–especially when the press release specifically calls out its ability to repair microtears associated with micrometeoroid impacts on satellites. It sounds like just such a composite material was recently invented at North Carolina State University - and it’s even already been spun out into a start-up company.

How can scientists estimate the pH level of Enceladus’ subsurface ocean without landing on its surface? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a team of scientists from Japan investigated new methods for sampling the plumes of Enceladus and provide more accurate measurements of its pH levels. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the subsurface ocean conditions on Enceladus and whether it’s suitable for life as we know it.

Newly developing stars shrouded in thick dust get their first baby pictures in these images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble took these infant star snapshots in an effort to learn how massive stars form. Protostars are shrouded in thick dust that blocks light, but Hubble can detect the near-infrared emission that shines through holes carved in the gas by the young stars themselves.

The Ring Nebula is a well-studied planetary nebula about 2,570 light-years away. Nnew observations of the nebula with a new instrument have revealed a previously unseen component. The William Herschel Telescope used its WEAVE instrument to detect a massive 'iron bar' inside the nebula's inner layer.

The US’s federally funded space program has been struggling of late. With the recent cancellation of the Mars Sample Return mission, and mass layoffs / resignations taking place at NASA, the general sense of a lack of morale at the agency is palpable, even from a distance. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire software entrepreneur and rocket enthusiast who was recently confirmed as NASA administrator during his second confirmation hearing, hopes to change that, and one of his priorities is pushing the Artemis missions for a permanent human presence on the Moon. However, at least one big technical hurdle remains before being able to do so - how to power a base during the two week long lunar night. A recent press release describes how NASA, and another branch of the federal government (the Department of Energy - DoE) hope to solve that problem - with a lunar-ready nuclear fission reactor

We recently discussed the different types of worlds that the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is expected to find that might have noticeable biosignatures. However, no matter how good the instrumentation on board the observatory is, the data it collects will be useless if scientists don’t know how to interpret it. A paper explaining what data they need to collect before analyzing HWO data was authored by Niki Parenteau, a research biologist at NASA, and her co-authors, which is now available in pre-print on arXiv.

Astronomers at the University of Warwick have discovered that black holes don’t just consume matter—they manage it, choosing whether to blast it into space as high-speed jets or sweep it away in vast winds.

Hydrogen Cyanide, which is toxic, may have played an important role in the emergence of life. Its unique properties, especially in frigid environments in space, may have helped generate the complex molecules necessary for life to appear.

Humans have always been fascinated with space. We frequently question whether we are alone in the universe. If not, what does intelligent life look like? And how would aliens communicate?

Deep beneath the surface of distant exoplanets known as super-Earths, oceans of molten rock may be doing something extraordinary: powering magnetic fields strong enough to shield entire planets from dangerous cosmic radiation and other harmful high-energy particles.

The early stage of giant telescope development involves a lot of horse-trading to try to appease all the different stakeholders that are hoping to get what they want out of the project, but also to try to appease the financial managers that want to minimize its cost. Typically this horse-trading takes the form of a series of white papers that describe what would be needed to meet the stated objectives of the mission and suggest the type of instrumentation and systems that would be needed to achieve them. One such white paper was recently released by the Living Worlds Working Group, which is tasked with speccing out the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), one of the world’s premiere exoplanet hunting telescopes that is currently in the early development stage. Their argument in the paper, which is available in pre-print on arXiv, shows that, in order to meet the objectives laid out in the recent Decadal survey that called for the telescope, it must have extremely high signal-to-noise ratio, but also be able to capture a very wide spectrum of light.

Inside the cores of ice giant planets, the pressure and temperature are so extreme that the water residing there transitions into a phase completely unfamiliar under the normal conditions of Earth. Known as “superionic water”, this form of water is a type of ice. However, unlike regular ice it’s actually hot, and also black. For decades, scientists thought that the superionic water in the core of Neptune and Uranus is responsible for the wild, unaligned magnetic fields that the Voyager 2 spacecraft saw when passing them. A series of experiments described in a paper published in Nature Communications by Leon Andriambariarijaona and his co-authors at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Sorbonne provides experimental evidence of why exactly the ice causes these weird magnetic fields - because it is far messier than anyone expected.