Astronomers have discovered the site of a newly forming exoplanet, probably with several times the mass of Jupiter. The image was captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope, seeing the young star system 2MASS 1612 in infrared light. The disk extends about 130 astronomical units from the star, but you can see a bright ring followed by a gap at about 50 AU. It's believed there's a new planet forming in that gap, pulling in material from the disk of gas and dust around it.

As worldwide temperatures continue to rise and conventional solutions aren't working fast enough, governments may turn to geoengineering solutions. One idea is to place a giant sunshade somewhat like an umbrella between the Earth and the Sun to block some of the sunlight that reaches our planet. A new mission proposes sending an 81 m² sail to Earth-Sun L1 to measure the effect of blocking a tiny fraction of solar energy.

When the Sun rages and storms in Earth's direction, it changes our planet's atmosphere. The atmosphere puffs up, meaning satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) meet more resistance. This resistance creates orbital decay, dragging satellites to lower altitudes. One researcher says we can change the design of satellites to decrease their susceptibility.

Gas clouds in the Milky Way's Galactic Center contain copious amounts of star-forming gas. But for some reason, few massive stars form there, even though similar gas clouds elsewhere in the galaxy easily form massive stars. The clouds also form fewer stars overall. Are they a new type of molecular cloud?

About 3 billion years after the Big Bang, star formation exploded across the cosmos. During the era dubbed "cosmic noon.” It was also when galaxies and supermassive black holes were growing faster than at any other time in the history of the universe. Now astronomers have discovered a monster from this frenzied period: a supermassive black hole unleashing jets that stretch over 300,000 light-years into space, revealing the sheer violence of its feeding frenzy.

How can radio astronomers successfully identify extraterrestrial radio signals while discerning them from Earth-based radio signals? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how machine learning could be used to search for extraterrestrial technosignatures while simultaneously identifying radio contamination from human radio signals. This study has the potential to help radio astronomers develop more efficient methods in searching for and identifying radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

Most exoplanets have been detected indirectly through the transit or radial velocity method. But here's an image of the exoplanet 14 Herculis c captured by Webb. It has been described as a "chaotic" and "abnormal" planetary system and is about 7 Jupiter masses, but with a surface temperature of only -3°C. The discovery offers new insights into how planetary systems can develop in dramatically different ways from our own Solar System.

Astronomers recently used a pair of powerful telescopes to zero in on a cosmic battle going on some 11 billion light-years away from us. The combatants are a pair of galaxies charging at each other over and over again, at velocities upwards of 500 kilometers per second. According to one of the scientists studying the scene, one galaxy is cutting into the heart of the other with a blast of radiation.

NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter captured this incredible image of the giant shield volcano Arsia Mons, poking through the cloud tops at Martian dawn. Arsia and the other megavolcanoes on Mars are so tall they're often surrounded by water ice clouds in the early morning. Odyssey is normally staring straight down, so to capture this unique angle, it had to rotate 90 degrees while in orbit so that it could capture a side perspective view of the volcano.

As astronomers found more and more exoplanets in recent years, they've discovered an unusual gap in the population. It's called the Neptunian Desert, a curious scarcity of Neptune-sized exoplanets orbiting close to their stars. Researchers just discovered an exoplanet in the Neptunian Desert around a Sun-like star. Can it help explain the Desert?

Now I know this sounds like a low-budget knockoff of Five Nights at Freddy's, but it's the real deal

The Earth's atmosphere is protected by a magnetosphere, but Mars lacks this protective shield and lost its atmosphere to space long ago through interactions with the solar wind. In a new paper, scientists report that they have directly observed this process of "atmospheric sputtering," watching how incoming ions from the solar wind directly cause neutral atmospheric particles to escape. They found the process is stronger than anticipated, especially in solar storms.

The Sun's surface has unveiled a new secret: ultra fine magnetic "curtains" that create striking patterns of bright and dark stripes across the solar photosphere. Thanks to groundbreaking observations from the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, scientists have captured the sharpest ever images of these previously unseen structures, revealing magnetic field variations at scales as small as 20 kilometres.

Whilst NASA funding has been slashed by the Trump administration with no allocation for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion or and Nuclear Electric Propulsion, scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) have been studying nuclear propulsion.

The COSMOS scientific collaboration has released the largest map of the Universe ever created. It contains almost 800,000 galaxies, some from the Universe's earliest times. The map challenges some of our ideas about the early Universe.

What we have now just…isn't going to cut it. Right now if you want power in space you essentially have two options: solar panels, and a kind of nuclear power called radioisotope thermoelectric generators.

Computers have been involved in spaceflight since almost the very beginning. Just like on the Earth, computers aid in a variety of tasks, like navigation and communication. But unfortunately, space is really, really unkind to electronics.

But in space, like on the Moon or Mars, we have…none of that. Zero. No GPS satellites, no globe-spanning networks. Just radio broadcasts from command centers here on Earth to tell our robots and crews what to do.

The Large Hadron Collider has changed particle physics, and now scientists are dreaming up even bigger supercolliders. But humanity can't match the raw particle-colliding power of a supermassive black hole. In a new paper, researchers describe how supermassive black holes create a dense environment where particles are spinning at relativistic speeds and crashing into each other, releasing other particles that could be detectable on Earth.

Space is hard. There's no doubt about that. It's completely unlike any environment we have ever faced on the Earth.

The monster black hole lurking at the center of galaxy M87 is an absolute beast. It is one of the largest in our vicinity and was the ideal first target for the Event Horizon Telescope. Scientists have taken a fresh look at the supermassive black hole using those iconic Event Horizon Telescope images and have now figured out just how fast this monster is spinning and how much material it's devouring.

Japan's private space company ispace experienced another setback on Thursday 5th June when its Resilience lunar lander crashed into the surface of the Moon, marking the company's second consecutive failed landing attempt in just over two years.

It's official. NASA's Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Request (FY 2026) has been released, and the news is decidedly mixed. In a previous article, we examined the FY 2026 Budget Request (released on May 2nd) and its recommendations for the coming year. With the release of the FY 2026 Budget, what was previewed and the anxiety it caused for many have been confirmed. While the Budget bolsters funding for NASA's exploration programs for the Moon and Mars, it also contains deep cuts to many other programs and the cancellation of key elements in NASA's Moon to Mars architecture.

The discovery of a Saturn-sized gas giant orbiting a small red dwarf is urging astronomers to reconsider their theories of planet formation. Core accretion theory is the most widely accepted explanation for planetary formation. It describes how planet formation begins with tiny dust grains gathering together and forming planetary cores that grow larger through accretion. It explains much of what we see in our Solar System and others. This discovery introduces some doubt.

Titan has no liquid water whatsoever on its surface. But it does have liquids. Seas, lakes, streams, rivers…of methane and ethane.

Across the universe, dramatic events occur when a black hole meets a neutron star. A neutron star is the ultra-dense remains of a massive star that exploded — imagine all the mass of our Sun compressed into a sphere just a few tens of kilometres wide. When a black hole and neutron star spiral toward each other, the result is one of nature's most violent spectacles.

For years, scientists have been scratching their heads over the "Hubble Tension,” the mismatch between how fast the cosmos was expanding in its youth versus how fast it's expanding today. But now, armed with the most precise data ever captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found the perceived gap is starting to narrow! In fact, the expansion rate measured by Cepheid variables versus the cosmic background has overlapping error bars again. Will the tension mystery finally be resolved?

When the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto and Charon in 2015, it revealed two amazingly complex worlds and an active atmosphere on Pluto. Those snapshots redefined our understanding of the system. Now, new observations using the James Webb Space Telescope taken over the space of a week, show that Pluto's atmosphere is completely different from any other one in the Solar System.

Astronomers have found another super-Earth. It's about 10 times more massive than Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star about 2475 light-years away. These massive Earth-like planets hold key information about how planets form and evolve.

As the years go by, the chance of Europa hosting life seems to keep going down. But it's not out of contention yet.

On the surface (you're welcome for the joke), Venus is not even close to being hospitable to life. But that's not the end of the story.

Chinese rocket startup Space Epoch put on a show recently, with a demonstration test launch of their reusable Yanxinghe-1 rocket booster.

Mars is by far the most Earth-like planet in the solar system…but that's not saying much.

In a recent paper, UCSB physicist Jack Kingdon identified a trajectory for a rapid transit (90 days) to Mars using SpaceX's Starship. This proposal offers an alternative to mission architectures that rely on nuclear propulsion to reduce transit times.

The challenge in the search for habitable worlds is clear. We need to be able to identify habitable worlds and distinguish between biotic and abiotic processes. Ideally, scientists would do this on entire populations of exoplanets rather than on a case-by-case basis. Exoplanets' natural thermostats might provide a way of doing this.

The idea that the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) will collide emerged after decades of observations by a host of astronomers. The Hubble played a decisive role in the determination during the early 2000s. It was a triumph of precision astronomy and space telescopes. Now, the Hubble has played an equally important role in cancelling the collision.

How can humanity use the developing Lunar Gateway as an appropriate starting point for advancing human space exploration beyond the Moon? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a team of researchers evaluated a myriad of ways that Lunar Gateway could be used as a testbed for future technologies involving sending humans to Mars and Ceres. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, astronauts, and mission planners develop novel strategies for advancing long-term human space exploration.

The search for life on other worlds needs a way to sift through the chemistry of their atmospheres. If another species observed Earth to search for life, they'd look for "smoking gun" chemistry in the atmosphere. That includes looking for oxygen, since it is created through photosynthesis by plants and some bacteria. So, the key is to look for life-dependent chemical "signals" at exoplanets.

Solar storms have the potential to cause catastrophic damage. One that occurred around the end of October 2003 (now called the 2003 Halloween Storm) caused an estimated $27B in damages. That number will only increase as humanity has become more reliant on space-based and electrical infrastructure. However, if we could predict when storms would hit with some accuracy and adjust our use of the technologies that could be affected, we could avoid the worst damage. But, as of now, we don't have such a system that could help predict the types of events that could cause that damage accurately enough. That is where a new Sun activity monitoring system, described in a recent paper by Leonidas Askianakis of the Technical University of Munich, would help.

How can fission-powered propulsion help advance deep space exploration, specifically to the outer planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from India investigated the financial, logistical, and reliability of using fission power for future deep space missions. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and future astronauts develop next-generation technologies as humanity continues to expand its presence in space.

The grainy videos from the Apollo Moon landings are treasured historical artifacts. For many of us, that footage will be lodged in our minds until our final synaptic spark sputters out. But like all technology since the space race days, video technology has advanced enormously, and the next Moon landings will be captured in high-definition video. The ESA is so focused on getting it right that they're practicing filming lunar landings in a special studio that mimics the conditions on the lunar surface.

Not all Full Moons are created the same. Follow the familiar Moon long enough, and you'll notice something strange, as it seems to wander across the sky from north to south, from one cycle to the next. Welcome to the fantastic precession of our natural satellite the Moon. Last December, we saw the 'Long Night's Full Moon,' as the Full Moon nearest to the solstice rode the highest in the sky for the last two decades. Now, its time for the southern hemisphere to get a turn, as the Moon heads steeply southward, on its way to Full on June 11th.

In a universe of a billion galaxies, Earth is the world known to have life. If we're a common example of what happens in the Universe, then our location can tell us something about habitability. A new study is about to flip everything we thought we knew about habitability on its head, examining the potential for life in exotic environments, such as rogue planets, water worlds, and tidally locked planets, and calculate how habitable they would be compared to Earth. As we learn more about these other worlds, if they are more habitable, it can give new predictions.

Just when astronomers think they're starting to understand stellar activity, something strange grabs their attention. That's the case with a newly discovered stellar object called ASKAP J1832-0911. It lies about 15,000 light-years from Earth and belongs to a class of stellar objects called "long-period radio transients." That means it emits radio waves that vary in their intensity on a schedule of only 44 minutes per cycle. It does the same thing in X-ray intensities, which is the first time anybody's seen such a thing coupled with long-period radio transits.

You'd think that icy worlds are frozen in time and space because they're - well - icy. However, planetary scientists know that all worlds can and do change, no matter how long it takes. That's true for Europa, one of Jupiter's four largest moons. Recent observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) zero in on the Europan surface ices and show they're constantly changing.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is equipped with a powerful tool called SHARAD (Shallow Radar), designed to peer beneath the Martian surface and uncover hidden layers of ice, rock, and geological secrets. To accommodate it, engineers mounted SHARAD on the side of the spacecraft, requiring the orbiter to roll 28° during operation to boost signal quality. But computer models hinted at something else: if the orbiter rolled more than 120°, the radar performance could dramatically improve. Scientists put this daring idea to the test—and it paid off. The extreme roll manoeuvre worked, unlocking an even clearer view of Mars's buried past.

Betelgeuse is dying—but not quietly. This colossal red supergiant, already famous for its brightness fluctuations, has now revealed a strange long-term rhythm: a secondary pulse every 2,100 days. One tantalising theory suggests a hidden companion—possibly a second star orbiting Betelgeuse at roughly the distance between Saturn and the Sun, circling every six years. Astronomers recently pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at the giant in search of this elusive "Betel-Buddy" but failed to find it constraining its size and orbit.

Exoplanet science is shifting from finding any detectable exoplanets we can to searching for those in their stars' habitable zones. NASA's proposed Habitable World Observatory and other similar efforts are focused on these worlds. The problem is, habitable zones aren't static.

Frameworks are a critical, if underappreciated, component of any space exploration mission. They can range from the overall mission architecture, capturing scientific and technical goals, to the structure of messages sent between two internal components of the system. One of the most interesting frameworks that is getting much attention in the space exploration community is the interaction of multiple robots for a single purpose, known as a multiple-robot system, or MRS. On top of that, one of the most common frameworks for robots on Earth or in space is the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS), which is commonly used to run everything from vacuum cleaners to giant mining trucks. Its most recent iteration, ROS2, even uses yet another framework, known as a middleware, to handle aspects of robot communication such as networking and packetizing data. However, there are plenty of different middlewares to choose from for ROS2, so a team of researchers from the University of Luxembourg decided to try to pick one that would be best for planetary exploration applications.