In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with such a high amount of energy that it should have been impossible. In fact, there are no known sources anywhere in the universe capable of producing such energy—100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. However, a team of physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently hypothesized that something like this could happen when a special kind of black hole, called a "quasi-extremal primordial black hole," explodes.

Telescopes are getting smaller. It’s strange to think: smartscopes have been with us for over half a decade now. Since 2020, we’ve tested units from Vaonis, Unistellar and more. In a short time, these smartscopes have revolutionized amateur astronomy, putting deep-sky imaging within reach of causal users. Recently, we had a chance to put Dwarf Lab’s latest unit the Dwarf Mini through its paces.

Astronomers have been collecting data for generations, and the sad fact is that not all of it has yet been fully analyzed. There are still discoveries hiding in the dark recesses of data archives strewn throughout the astronomical world. Some of them are harder to access than others, such as actual physical plates containing star positions from more than a hundred years ago. But as more and more of this data is archived, astronomers also keep coming up with ever more impressive tools to analyze it. A recent paper from Cyril Tasse of the Paris Observatory and his co-authors, published recently in Nature Astronomy describes an algorithm that analyzes hundreds of thousands of previously unknown data points in radio telescope archives - and they found some interesting features in it.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which will carry the Artemis II crew around the Moon, sits at the launch pad on Jan. 17, 2026, after rollout. It rests atop the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. Orion can provide living space on missions for four astronauts for up to 21 days without docking to another spacecraft. Advances in technology […]

This is all based on the assumption that galaxies are receding away from us. And I actually cheated a little.

The JWST found a system of at least five interacting galaxies only 800 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery adds weight to the growing understanding that galaxies were interacting and shaping their surroundings far earlier than scientists thought. There's also evidence that the collision was redistributing heavy elements beyond the galaxies themselves.

New tools unlock new discoveries in science. So when a new type of non-destructive technology becomes widely available, it's inevitable that planetary scientists will get their hands on it to test it on some meteorites. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Estrid Naver of the Technical University of Denmark and her co-authors, describes the use of two of those (relatively) new tools to one of the most famous meteorites in the world - NWA 7034 - also known as Black Beauty.

Researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), in collaboration with the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), have led the most extensive observational study to date of runaway massive stars, which includes an analysis of the rotation and binarity of these stars in our galaxy.

When I say that the universe is 13.77 billion years old, it sounds rather authoritative.

Astronomers haven't found many gas giants orbiting white dwarfs. But is that because they're so difficult to spot? Or is it because their survival rate is so low? New research probes the issue.

Magnetism on the Moon has always been a bit confusing. Remote sensing probes have noted there is some magnetic signature, but far from the strong cocoon that surrounds Earth itself. Previous attempts to detect it in returned regolith samples blended together all of the rocks in those samples, leading to confusion about the source - whether they were caused by a strong inner dynamo in ages past, or by powerful asteroid impacts that magnetized the rocks they hit. A new study from Yibo Yang of Zhejiang University and Lin Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published recently in the journal Fundamental Research, shows that the right answer seems to be - a little of both.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’s making space-based artificial intelligence the “immediate focus” of a newly expanded company that not only builds rockets and satellites, but also controls xAI’s generative-AI software and the X social-media platform. That’s the upshot of Musk's announcement that SpaceX has acquired xAI.

Arp 220 is a well-known pair of galaxies that are merging. New ALMA observations of polarized light reveal the complex and powerful magnetic fields that shape the process.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy about 187 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. This “lens-shaped” galaxy sits in between more familiar spiral alaxies and elliptical galaxies in the galaxy classification scheme. The dark, dramatic dust lanes are the fingerprints of an ancient galaxy merger.

For the first time, a complex, ring-shaped molecule containing 13 atoms—including sulfur—has been detected in interstellar space, based on laboratory measurements. The discovery closes a critical gap by linking simple chemistry in space with the complex organic building blocks found in comets and meteorites. This represents a major step toward explaining the cosmic origins of the chemistry of life.

The search for life-supporting worlds in the Solar System includes the Jovian moon Europa. Yes, it's an iceberg of a world, but underneath its frozen exterior lies a deep, salty ocean and a nickel-iron core. It's heated by tidal flexing, and that puts pressure on the interior ocean, sending water and salts to the surface. As things turn out, there's also evidence of ammonia-bearing compounds on the surface. All these things combine to provide a fascinating look at Europa's geology and potential as a haven for life.

Red Geysers are an unusual class of galaxy that contain only old stars. Despite having plenty of star-forming gas, Red Geysers are quenched. Astronomers have mapped the flow of gas in these galaxies and figure out why they're dormant.

Jupiter's icy moon Europa is a tantalizing target in the search for habitability in our Solar System. Its thick, global ice sheet overlies a warm, salty, chemically-rich ocean. But for life to exist in that ocean, nutrients need to find their way from the surface to the ocean. New research says that may be very difficult.

The light, rare element boron, better known as the primary component of borax, a longtime household cleaner, was almost mined to exhaustion in parts of the old American West. But boron could arguably be an unsung hero in cosmic astrobiology, although it's still not listed as one of the key elements needed for the onset of life.

When the rover now named Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in early 2021, scientists already knew they had picked an interesting place to scope out. From space, they could see what looked like a bathtub ring around the crater, indicating there could once have been water there. But there was some debate about what exactly that meant, and it’s taken almost five years to settle it. A new paper from PhD student Alex Jones at Imperial College London and his co-authors has definitively settled the debate on the source of that feature - part of it was once a beach.

Researchers at KAIST have developed a breakthrough technology that could dramatically improve our ability to image black holes and other distant objects. The team created an ultra precise reference signal system using optical frequency comb lasers to synchronise multiple radio telescopes with unprecedented accuracy. This laser based approach solves long standing problems with phase calibration that have plagued traditional electronic methods, particularly at higher observation frequencies.

It’s 2050 and you’re living on Venus. This might come as a surprise due to the planet’s crushing surface pressures (~92 times of Earth) and searing surface temperatures (~465 degrees Celsius/870 degrees Fahrenheit), which is equivalent to ~900 meters (3,000 feet) underwater and hot enough to melt lead, respectively. But you’re not living on the surface. Instead, you’re safe and sound inside a lava tube habitat scanning data from the latest orbiter images while sipping on some habitat-made espresso.

Solar flares are one of the most closely watched processes in solar physics. Partly that’s because they can prove hazardous both to life and equipment around Earth, and in extreme cases even on it. But also, it’s because of how interestingly complex they are. A new paper from Pradeep Chitta of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and his co-authors, available in the latest edition of Astronomy & Astrophysics, uses data collected by ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft to watch the formation process of a massive solar flare. They discovered the traditional model used to describe how solar flares form isn’t accurate, and they are better thought of as being caused by miniaturized “magnetic avalanches.”

A new study led by researchers from Aarhus University showed that amino acids spontaneously bond in space, producing peptides that are essential to life as we know it. Their findings suggest that the building blocks of life are far more common throughout space than previously thought, with implications for astrobiology and SETI.

Astronomers have solved a bit of a mystery that had them questioning whether one of the most extreme stars ever observed was about to explode. WOH G64, a massive red supergiant in the Large Magellanic Cloud, began behaving so strangely that researchers suspected it had evolved into a rare yellow hypergiant on the brink of supernova. But new observations from the Southern African Large Telescope reveal the star is still very much a red supergiant, yet still exhibiting strange behaviour.

NASA has completed its first major testing of nuclear reactor hardware for spacecraft propulsion in over 50 years, marking a crucial step toward faster, more capable deep space missions. Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center conducted more than 100 ‘cold flow’ tests on a full scale reactor engineering development unit throughout 2025, gathering vital data on how propellant flows through the system under various conditions.

Finding Earth-like planets is the primary driver of exoplanet searches because as far as we know, they're the ones most likely to be habitable. Astronomers sifting through data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope have found a remarkably Earth-like planet, but with one critical difference: it's as cold as Mars.

The Milky Way's Galactic Center and Bulge are shrouded in thick dust and tightly-packed with stars. It's a tough region to observe, but the Nancy Gracy Roman Space Telescope is built for the task. Its Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will find more than 100,000 exoplanets, along with stars, black holes, neutron stars, and even rogue planets.

Jupiter’s atmosphere and clouds have mesmerized stargazers for centuries, as their multi-colored, swirling layers can easily be viewed from powerful telescopes on Earth. However, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has upped the ante regarding our understanding of Jupiter’s atmospheric features, having revealed them in breathtaking detail. This includes images of massive lightning storms, clouds swallowing clouds, polar vortices, and powerful jet streams. Yet, despite its beauty and wonder, scientists are still puzzled about the processes occurring deep inside Jupiter’s atmosphere that result in these incredible features.

The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration collected information on hundreds of millions of galaxies across the Universe using the U.S. Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera, mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at CTIO, a Program of NSF NOIRLab. Their completed analysis combines all six years of data for the first time and yields constraints on the Universe's expansion history that are twice as tight as past analyses.

After months of protests led by Nobel laureate Reinhard Genzel, the American energy company AES Andes has abandoned plans to build a massive solar and wind facility just kilometres from one of the world's premier telescope sites. The decision preserves the pristine night skies above Chile's Paranal Observatory, where the European Southern Observatory operates some of humanity's most powerful eyes on the universe.

Nearly a century after Edwin Hubble discovered the universe's expansion, astronomers have finally explained the nagging mystery of why most nearby galaxies rush away from us as if the Milky Way's gravity doesn't exist? The answer lies in a vast, flat sheet of dark matter stretching tens of millions of light years around us, with empty voids above and below that make the expansion appear smoother than it should.

Researchers using machine learning have discovered hundreds of mysterious bright streaks on Mercury's surface that appear to be caused by gases escaping from the planet's interior. The finding suggests the Solar System's smallest planet isn't the static, geologically dead world we thought it was, Mercury might still be active today, continuously releasing material into space even billions of years after its formation.

Our current understanding of the Cosmos shows that structures emerge hierarchically. First there are dark matter densities, then dwarf galaxies. Those dwarfs then merge to form more massive galaxies, which merge together into even larger galaxies. Evidence of dwarf galaxy mergers is difficult to obtain, but new research found some in the Milky Way's halo.

BepiColombo is slowly uncovering more and more fun facts about Mercury as it continues its preliminary mission. One of the more interesting things found so far is a magnetic “chorus” that appears similar to a phenomenon found in Earth’s much larger magnetic field. A new paper in Nature Communications from the researchers responsible for the probe’s Mio instrument that is studying Mercury’s magnetic field describes what could be thought of as a form of magnetic birdsong.

It's 2041 and an astronaut on Mars Station 1 orbiting the Red Planet is inspecting life support systems in the bowels of the habitat. They open a compartment and are aghast to discover a mysterious goop clinging to the walls in microgravity that definitely shouldn't be there. In their shock, they immediately have flashbacks from every alien-based science fiction movie they've ever seen, and are convinced they not only just discovered the first signs of alien life, but they won't live to tell about it. After telling the rest of the crew in a heated panic, they calmly explain it's not an alien menace, but a substance called biofilm, which has been present on Earth for billions of years.

An international team of astronomers has uncovered the first definitive evidence that at least some fast radio bursts (FRBs) originate in binary stellar systems.

Supermassive black holes grow larger by accreting matter. When they're actively accreting matter they're called active galactic nuclei (AGN). AGN are the most luminous sources of persistent radiation in the Universe, yet they turn on and off as the SMBH passes through quiet and active phases. Astronomers have found one that is just turning on its powerful jets after a long period of dormancy.

Using the South Pole Telescope, astronomers have detected powerful stellar flares erupting from stars near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. Operating at millimetre wavelengths that can penetrate the dust obscuring our view of the core of the Galaxy, the telescope caught these dramatic magnetic energy releases in one of the most extreme environments in our Galaxy. The discovery opens a new observational window for studying stellar behaviour in regions previously hidden from view and provides insights into how stars survive and behave in the intense gravitational and radiation environment surrounding the Milky Way's central black hole.

The comet bearing Edmond Halley's name may have been misnamed! New research from Leiden University reveals that an 11th Century English monk recognised the famous comet's periodicity centuries before the British astronomer. Eilmer of Malmesbury witnessed the comet's appearances in both 989 and 1066, linking the two observations and understanding they represented the same celestial visitor returning after decades, a realisation documented by the medieval chronicler William of Malmesbury but overlooked by scholars until now. The discovery challenges whether history's most famous comet should continue bearing Halley's name when a Benedictine monk beat him to the discovery by more than 600 years.

Dark matter remains invisible to our telescopes, yet its gravitational fingerprints pervade the universe. Using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have produced one of the most detailed dark maps ever created, revealing with unprecedented clarity how dark matter and ordinary matter have grown up together. The map shows that wherever galaxies cluster in their thousands, equally massive concentrations of dark matter occupy the same space, a close alignment that confirms dark matter's gravity has been shepherding regular matter into stars, galaxies, and ultimately the complex planets capable of supporting life.

AI faces strong skepticism due to its potential for misuse, its drain on resources, and even its potential dumbing down of students. But new results illustrate its uses. A team of astronomers have used a new AI-assisted method to search for rare astronomical objects in the Hubble Legacy Archive. The team sifted through nearly 100 million image cutouts in just two and a half days, uncovering nearly 1400 anomalous objects, more than 800 of which had never been documented before.

Why are SMBH in the early Universe so massive? According to astrophysical models, these extraordinarily large SMBH haven't had time to become so massive. Super-Eddington accretion might explain it, but can it explain a very unusual early SMBH recently discovered?

It's been about one millennia since humans directly observed a core-collapse supernova in the Milky Way. That's strange, since there should be 1 or 2 every century. By working with neutrino detectors, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory should be able to detect far more supernovae.

Lately we’ve been reporting about a series of studies on the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), NASA’s flagship telescope mission for the 2040s. These studies have looked at the type of data they need to collect, and what the types of worlds they would expect to find would look like. Another one has been released in pre-print form on arXiv from the newly formed HWO Technology Maturation Project Office, which details the technology maturation needed for this powerful observatory and the “trade space” it will need to explore to be able to complete its stated mission.

There’s a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4%), but non-negligible. And scientists are starting to prepare both for the bad (massive risks to satellites and huge meteors raining down on a large portion of the planet) and the good (a once in a lifetime chance to study the geology, seismology, and chemical makeup of our nearest neighbor). A new paper from Yifan He of Tsinghua University and co-authors, released in pre-print form on arXiv, looks at the bright side of all of the potential interesting science we can do if a collision does, indeed, happen.

How long did it take to establish the water content within Jupiter’s Galilean moons, Io and Europa? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of scientists from the United States and France investigated the intricate processes responsible for the formation and evolution of Io and Europa. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of two of the most unique moons in the solar system, as Io and Europa are known as the most volcanically active body in the solar system and an ocean world estimated to contain twice the volume of Earth’s oceans, respectively.

Icy comets contain common crystals that can only be formed in extreme heat. But comets reside in the frigid outer reaches of the Solar System. How did these materials form, and how did they find their way into the Solar System's cold fringes?

Water exists across Mars in underground ice, soil moisture, and atmospheric vapour, yet most of it remains frustratingly beyond practical reach for future explorers. A new comparative study from the University of Strathclyde evaluates the technologies that could extract this vital resource from various Martian sources, assessing each method's energy demands, scalability, and suitability for the Red Planet's harsh conditions.

Stars change in brightness for all kinds of reasons, but all of them are interesting to astronomers at some level. So imagine their excitement when a star known as J0705+0612 (or, perhaps more politically incorrectly, ASASSN-24fw) dropped to around 2.5% of its original brightness for 8.5 months. Two new papers - one from Nadia Zakamska and her team at the Gemini Telescope South and one from Raquel Forés-Toribio at Ohio State and her co-authors - examine this star and have come to the same conclusion - it’s likely being caused by a circumsecondary disk.