Armed with a drone and a device which is a cross between a scoop and a spatula, a graduate student is cracking the code of Mars by studying California's desert dunes. By comparing wind carved patterns in the Algodones Desert with satellite images of the Red Planet, researchers are creating humanity's first comprehensive database of Martian sand formations, work that could determine where future astronauts can safely establish bases without getting buried alive. Her pioneering research proves that sometimes the keys to exploring alien worlds aren't found in billion dollar space missions, but in the shifting sands right here on Earth.

It's assumed that our region of the Universe isn't special, and the Hubble Tension, or mismatch of expansion rates of the Universe at different times, is happening everywhere. But what if our place is unusual, for example, if the Milky Way is inside a lower-density region of the Universe, with stronger gravity pulling material away from us in all directions? A new paper suggests we might be in a void that's emptying out towards higher-density regions all around us.

Hidden in the darkness between Uranus and Neptune, a team of astronomers have discovered a small world locked in a million year gravitational waltz with Uranus. The asteroid enjoying this celestial dance with Uranus completes exactly three orbits for every four of the ice giant, representing the first known stable partnership of its kind in this remote region of the Solar System. The discovery proves that even in the apparent chaos of space, there are elegant mathematical relationships that have persisted, revealing new secrets about how gravitational forces sculpt the architecture of our planetary system.

December 24th, 2024, NASA's Parker Solar Probe made its closest approach to the Sun so far, coming within just 6.1 million km from the surface of the Sun. During this flyby, it captured data and images, including this incredible picture using the Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR. In this WISPR image, you can see the corona and solar wind, charged particles coming from the Sun, hurled across the Solar System. The next pass will happen in September.

Close encounters with massive objects can alter the orbits of planets around their stars. Stellar flybys can change planetary orbits, and may be responsible for some of the rogue or free-floating planets astronomers have discovered. But stars aren't the only massive objects out there, and new research suggests that primordial black holes may alter the orbits of exoplanets.

Astrobiology can be split into two very distinct fields. There’s the field that astronomers are likely more familiar with, involving large telescopes, exoplanets, and spectroscopic signals that are pored over to debate whether they show signs of life. But there is another camp, collective known as the Origins researchers that focus on developing a scientific understanding of how life originally developed on Earth. A new paper from Cole Mathis at Arizona State and Harrison B. Smith at the Institute of Science in Tokyo suggests a new path forward to tackling those challenges - set them up as competitions and let a hefty prize motivate scientific teams and individuals to pursue them.

In the last couple of decades, evidence has accumulated showing that ancient Mars was a warm planet with abundant water flowing across its surface. The more scientists study the planet, the more evidence they find. New research examining Mars' Noachis Terra region adds to this evidence, showing that flowing water was once widespread across this less-often studied region.

It’s the question of the hour. On the first day of the month July 1st, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) station at Río Hurtado, Chile spotted an interstellar interloper, which would receive the official designation C/2025 N1 ATLAS or 3I/ATLAS. The ‘I’ is a rare ‘interstellar’ designation, only the third such object known of after 1I/ʻOumuamua and 2/I Borisov. But can we see it? Such a spectacle as actually seeing an interstellar comet would be a true rarity to cross off your skywatching life list.

Stars don’t form out of nothing, but tracking the gas and dust that do eventually form stars is hard. They float around the galaxy at almost absolute zero, emitting essentially no light, and generally making life difficult for astronomers. But, part of how they make life difficult is actually the key to studying them - they have “absorption lines” that detail what kind of material the light is passing through on its way to Earth. A new paper from Harvey Liszt of America’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Maryvonne Gerin of the Sorbonne details how tracking those absorption lines via radio astronomy can trace the “dark neutral medium” of interstellar gas throughout the galaxy.

A 2.35 billion year old rock that fell from the sky in Africa is rewriting our understanding of the Moon's past. This ancient meteorite, blasted off the lunar surface has revealed that our closest neighbor remained volcanically active for nearly a billion years longer than scientists previously knew. With its unique chemical fingerprint pointing to deep lunar origins, this rare space rock proves that sometimes the most extraordinary discoveries don't require billion dollar missions, they literally drop into our laps, carrying secrets from space.

Why wait for rare solar eclipses? ESA's Proba mission can now create an artificial solar eclipse once a day. Now, a UK-led mission could do the same trick, but using the Moon's shadow to provide a 48-minute total eclipse once every lunar orbit (29.6 days). Named the Moon-Enabled Sun Occultation Mission (MESOM), the small spacecraft would align its orbit with the Moon, blocking the Sun perfectly, allowing observations of the solar atmosphere.

On June 14 and 16, technicians installed solar panels onto NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, one of the final steps in assembling the observatory. Collectively called the Solar Array Sun Shield, these panels will power and shade the observatory, enabling all the mission’s observations and helping keep the instruments cool. “At this point, the […]

It's crazy to think that the JWST has already been working for three years. It's repeatedly impressed us not only with its powerful science observations, but also with stunning images that capture our interest even if we didn't know what we were seeing. Now, the telescope is celebrating its third anniversary with a glorious image of the Cat's Paw Nebula.

Shortly after the Big Bang, after the CMB was released, there was a time that's tricky to observe called Cosmic Dark Ages. Clouds of hydrogen could be detected at that time using a specific frequency of radio waves, but Earth's radiation introduces too much noise. Researchers are proposing a CubeSat called Cosmo Cube that could orbit the Moon, observing when it's in the quiet radio shadow cast by the Moon. It could help detect the first structures coming together, leading to the formation of the first galaxies.

A team of international researchers led by Tomas Stolker in the Netherlands has imaged a young gas giant exoplanet near a 12-million-year-old star. The planet is orbiting a star whose planet formation has finished, while a same-aged companion star in this double star system still has a planet-forming disk.

In a recent study, a team of astronomers examined 27 confirmed and candidate exoplanets identified by TESS for signs of radio transmissions during star-planet occultations. The purpose was to see if radio signals from these targets of interest (TOIs) were interrupted as they passed behind their stars, thereby indicating that they were artificial in origin.

Cosmic dust does far more than float through space. It's the raw material from which stars, planets and possibly even life emerge. Yet astronomers have long puzzled over where this vast amount of dust comes from and what it's made of.

Names are a strange thing in astronomy. Sometimes scientists come up with grandiose, simple name, like the Extremely Large Telescope. Other times, they come up with unique sounding names, like quasars. And sometimes they come up with names that, while descriptive in some sense, are completely misleading in others. That is the case for Little Red Dots (LRD) - active galactic nuclei in the early universe that show up as a little red dot in the images captured by whatever telescope found them. However, they actually represent supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of times the size of our Sun. A new paper from Federica Loiacono and her colleagues at Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy describes one of these behemoths they found with the James Webb Space Telescope at a period of the early universe, about 11 billion years ago, known as the “cosmic noon”.

Is there life on Venus? The controversial detection of phosphine and ammonia hints that bacterial life could be surviving in the planet's milder upper atmosphere. But to confirm its existence, we'll need to measure the atmosphere directly. A new mission concept was recently unveiled called the Venus Explorer for Reduced Vapours in the Environment (VERVE). It's a CubeSat that could fly with ESA's EnVision mission in 2031, studying the atmosphere for more evidence of active biology.

If we can learn to grow our own food in space, it'll make surviving off Earth less challenging. While plants do grow in space, some genetic improvements are in order. Researchers have unveiled "Moon rice," a genetically manipulated strain of rice that grows much shorter than even dwarf varieties of rice and could be grown reliably in space. They're also simulating microgravity, constantly rotating the rice in all directions to see how it responds.

Sometimes a mission can be too successful. When NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos in 2022 as part of an asteroid redirection test, it altered the asteroids orbit, proving that kinetic impactors can be used to defend Earth from hazardous objects. Unfortunately, the impact also created a shower of boulders that also gave Dimorphos an unpredicted kinetic kick.

China's Tianwen-3 is poised to be the first sample-return mission to Mars. The science team now includes a group of astrobiologists from Hong Kong University (HKU), led by Professor Yiliang Li. In a recent paper, the team advised the China National Space Agency (CNSA) on landing site selection and how the first samples from Mars should be analyzed and curated once they are brought back to Earth.

Alarmingly, a team of scientists propose that every flight you take could be alerting alien civilizations to our existence. I must apologise now as I pack for a flight out to Mexico in a few days! The new research reveals that airport radar systems from Heathrow to JFK are unintentionally broadcasting powerful signals up to 200 light years into space, that’s far enough to reach over 120,000 star systems that might harbor intelligent life! These "accidental technosignatures" would appear obviously artificial to any aliens with technology similar to ours, potentially making every takeoff and landing an announcement that we're here!

A team of researchers has cracked the code for building space telescopes with mirrors the size of a soccer field, not from perfectly figured glass, but from liquid floating in zero gravity! The new research reveals how a 50-metre liquid mirror telescope could maintain its optical quality for decades despite the constant slewing motions needed to observe different stars, with deformations taking years to propagate from the edges toward the centre. The idea could enable the next generation of space telescopes capable of directly imaging Earth-like planets around other stars, potentially answering the ultimate question: are we alone in the universe?

A team of scientists are preparing to use NASA's upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory to answer one of the most profound questions of all time: How does life begin? Rather than searching for individual signs of life, the team plan to study patterns across dozens of exoplanets to test competing theories about the origins of life; from scenarios where life is so rare we might be alone within 33 light-years, to theories predicting that life emerges wherever basic conditions exist. This approach could transform perhaps our oldest question into testable science, potentially revealing whether our biosphere is an accident or part of a universe teeming with life.

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of exoplanets on extremely short orbits of less than 10 days. Our Solar System has nothing like this, and these planets are so close to their stars that they can disrupt the stars' magnetic fields. Scientists think this can induce stellar flaring, and researchers have detected the first example of exoplanet-induced stellar flaring.

The search for habitable exoplanets boils down to the search for water. Exoplanet scientists lack the technological capability to detect surface water on exoplanets from great distances, so instead they can only search for planets in habitable zones where surface water is likely. But what if we could directly detect the surface water itself?

With the recent first light milestone for the Vera Rubin observatory, it's only a matter of time before one of astronomy’s most long-awaited surveys begins. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is set to start on November 5th, and will scan the sky of billions of stars for at least ten years. One of the most important things it hopes to find is evidence (or lack thereof) of primordial black holes (PBHs), one of the primary candidates for dark matter. A new paper from researchers at Durham University and the University of New Mexico looks at the difficulties the LSST will have in finding those enigmatic objects, especially the statistical challenges, and how they might be overcome.

It's cold in space, but overheating is a bigger problem than low temperatures. That's because the only way to regulate a spacecraft's heat is through radiation, or slowing down its computing. Engineers have tested a new type of heat sink in space that contains a wax-based phase change material that melts within the normal operating temperature range of the electronics, absorbing heat and then helping to radiate it away. The heat sink was part of a CubeSat launched in August 2024.

When the JWST was being built, some labelled it as the Hubble's successor. In some ways it is, even though the Hubble is still performing important science observations. When the two telescopes team up, we get the best of both.

An international team of scientists led by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) proposed a new method for living beyond Earth. Their experiment demonstrated how bioplastic structures can be grown using algae, which would be rugged enough to survive the hostile Martian environment.

Although dark matter doesn't seem to interact with regular matter or itself, if it has particle-like properties, it could self-annihilate if packed into a tight space. In a new paper, researchers have proposed that dark matter could make its way into brown dwarfs near the Galactic Center, where everything is packed more closely together. The dark matter could annihilate inside the brown dwarfs, creating Dark Dwarfs that could be detected.

Gravitational waves come in all shapes and sizes - and frequencies. But, so far, we haven’t been able to capture any of the higher frequency ones. That’s unfortunate, as they might hold the key to unlocking our understanding of some really interesting physical phenomena, such as Boson clouds and tiny block hole mergers. A new paper from researchers at Notre Dame and Caltech, led by PhD student Christopher Jungkind, explores how we might use one of the world’s most prolific gravitational wave observatories, GEO600, to capture signals from those phenomena for the first time.

We all know what it's like when Earth is on the receiving end of a solar flare. Things get spicy in the upper atmosphere, and the outbursts have the potential to disrupt technology here at home. Catastrophic flares of radiation devastate planets around other stars, too. Now it looks like scientists have found that planets orbiting close to their stars can trigger the flares that threaten to harm them.

NASA's Curiosity Rover has been exploring Gale Crater and found that carbonate materials make up to 11% of rocks in the region. These are important because carbonates formed by pulling CO2 out of Mars's atmosphere. A new paper suggests that Mars once had a self-regulating climate system that created oases of liquid water on its surface over billions of years, keeping the planet barely habitable with alternating wet and dry periods. The atmosphere is thin because its CO2 was locked away in rocks.

Here's a thought experiment. What would happen if you were on the International Space Station, folded up a paper airplane, and threw it from the station? According to a new paper, it would fall from orbit in just 3.5 days, but still keep aerodynamic stability until about 120 km. Then it would heat up and combust at about 90-110 km altitude. It's a fun idea, but there are actual practical uses to probe the density of the atmosphere or test thin-film space technologies.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can tell us a lot about the subjects of its observations if it spends enough time with them. That includes lonely rocks on the edges of our solar system, such as the Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO) Quaoar. Recent observations using the NIRCam on JWST and pre-published on arXiv by researchers at the University of Central Florida, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and Kyoto University add a plethora of new data to our understanding of this enigmatic object, including insights into what might be causing its ring system and its hydrocarbon atmosphere.

The long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory has delivered some preliminary observations of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae field. 47 Tuc is the Milky Way's second-brightest globular cluster, second to Omega Centauri. The Rubin Observatory's data demonstrates the telescope's promising scientific potential.

The Milky Way and other similar galaxies have two distinct disk sections. One is the thin disk section, and it contains mostly younger stars with higher metallicity. The second is the thick disk, and it contains older stars with lower metallicity. The effort to study these disks in more galaxies and in greater detail has been stymied. But now we have the JWST, and researchers used it to examine more than 100 distant, edge-on galaxies.

Earth life is carbon-based, and without carbon, there would be no life. New research shows how Earth got its carbon from impactors, including a boost from Theia, the impactor that created the Moon. Jupiter also pitched in to help.

The search for dark matter requires all of the best models, theories, and ideas we can throw at it. A new paper from Julia Monika Koulen, Stefano Profumo, and Nolan Smyth from the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) tackles the implications of the sizes and abundance of one of the more interesting dark matter candidates - primordial black holes (PBHs).

Proxima Centauri b is the closest known exoplanet that could be in the habitable zone of its star. Therefore, it has garnered a lot of attention, including several missions designed to visit it and send back information. Unfortunately, due to technological constraints and the gigantic distances involved, most of those missions only weigh a few grams and require massive solar scales or pushing lasers to get anywhere near their target. But why let modern technological levels limit your imagination when there are so many other options, if still theoretical, options to send a larger mission to our nearest potentially habitable neighbor? That was the thought behind the Master’s Thesis of Amelie Lutz at Virginia Tech - she looked at the possibility of using fusion propulsion systems to send a few hundred kilogram probe to the system, and potentially even orbit it.

What new methods can be developed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? This is what a recent white paper submitted to the 2025 NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) Request for Information (RFI) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the Breakthrough Listen project and Michigan State University discussed how high-energy astronomy could be used for identifying radio signals from an extraterrestrial technological civilization, also called technosignatures. This study has the potential to help SETI and other organizations develop novel techniques for finding intelligent life beyond Earth.

One of the most iconic cosmic scenes in the Universe lies nearly 3.8 billion light-years away from us in the direction of the constellation Carina. This is where two massive clusters of galaxies have collided. The resulting combined galaxies and other material is now called the Bullet Cluster, after one of the two members that interacted over several billion years. It's one of the hottest-known galaxy clusters, thanks to clouds of gas that were heated by shockwaves during the event. Astronomers have observed this scene with several different telescopes in multiple wavelengths of light, including X-ray and infrared. Those observations and others show that the dark matter makes up the majority of the cluster's mass. Its gravitational effect distorts light from more distant objects and makes it an ideal gravitational lens.

Earlier this year, asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered and found to have a trajectory through the Earth/Moon system in 2032. The world's telescopes focused on the potential threat and downgraded the chance to negligible for the Earth...but it still has a non-zero chance of hitting the Moon. As the asteroid became too dim to continue observing, its Moon impact chance stood at 4%. When will we update this number? Not until it does another close flyby in 2028.

Astronomers have made a breakthrough by using 25 year old Hubble images to investigate a potential "rogue planet" drifting through space without a host star. When a brief gravitational microlensing event occurred in 2023, researchers discovered Hubble had photographed the same location in 1997, creating an unprecedented quarter century baseline. Finding no stellar companion in the archival data strengthened evidence for a rogue planet with mass between Earth and Saturn, demonstrating the scientific value of space telescope archives for studying these elusive worlds wandering the Galaxy alone.

Some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world are designed to simulate complex astrophysical processes, like what's happening inside a giant star as it's going supernova. But researchers have developed a new machine learning algorithm that was able to accurately simulate galaxy evolution with fewer computer resources and dramatically more quickly than a supercomputer, which could take years to fully process.

Astronomers once wondered if the Universe might one day collapse in on itself in a Big Crunch, but the discovery of dark energy suggested that the expansion of the Universe would accelerate, removing that possibility. New data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument suggests that dark energy might be changing in strength over time, maybe even going negative. If that result holds, are we due for a Big Crunch? And how long would it take?

How do galaxies like ours continue producing stars long after they should have used up their star-forming gas. Somehow, an external gas source must find its way into the galaxy. New research has found evidence of gas clouds that found their way into a spiral galaxy, likely fueling continued star formation.