According to a recent study by the non-profit Explore Titan, a nuclear-fission propulsion spacecraft could enable the first crewed mission to Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

In our neighborhood of the Milky Way, we see a region surrounding the solar system that is far less dense than average. But that space, that cavity, is a very irregular, elongated shape. What little material is left inside of this cavity is insanely hot, as it has a temperature of around a million Kelvin.

Astrobiologists are dying to send another mission to study Enceladus, the icy moon that orbits Saturn and has active plumes emanating from its surface, A team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) proposes an Enceladus Orbitlander that would conduct in-situ measurements of Enceladus' plumes, which could confirm the presence of organics and maybe even life in its interior.

What can Helium-3 (3He) being discharged from the Sun teach us about 3He creation and the Sun’s activity? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated 3He-rich solar energetic particles (SEPs) emitted by the Sun in late 2023. This study has the potential to help astronomers better understand how solar activity could contribute to the production of 3He, the latter of which remains one of the most desired substances due to its potential for nuclear fusion technology on Earth.

Two new studies have sparked fresh debate about a faraway planet with a weird atmosphere. One of the studies claims additional evidence for the presence of life on the planet K2-18 b, based on chemical clues. The other study argues that such clues can be produced on a lifeless world.

Sometimes an old telescope can still impress. That is certainly the case for Hubble, which is rapidly approaching the 35th anniversary of its launch. To celebrate, the telescope's operators are collaborating with ESA to release a series of stunning new photographs of some of the most iconic astronomical objects the telescope has observed. As of the time of writing, the latest one to be released is a spectacular new image of a favorite of millions of amateur astronomers - the Sombrero Galaxy.

Who knew that magnetic fields could be so useful?

Everything in the Universe spins. Galaxies, planets, stars, and black holes all rotate, even if just a bit. It comes from the fact that the clouds of scattered gas and dust of the cosmos are never perfectly symmetrical. But the Universe as a whole does not rotate. Some objects spin one way, some another, but add them all up, and the total rotation is zero. At least that's what we've thought. But a new study suggests that the Universe does rotate, and this rotation solves the big mystery of cosmology known as the Hubble tension.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful events in the Universe, briefly outshining the combined light of their entire galaxies. A team of astronomers has figured out a clever technique to use the light from gamma-ray bursts to map out the large-scale structure of the Universe at different ages after the Big Bang. They found that the Universe might be less uniform at large scales than previously thought.

The dream of finding life on an alien Earth-like world is hampered by a number of technical challenges. Not the least of which is that Earth is dwarfed by the size and brightness of the Sun. We might be able to discover evidence of life by studying the molecular spectra of a planet's atmosphere as it passes in front of the star, but those results might be inconclusive. The way to be certain is to observe the planet directly, but that would take a space telescope with a mirror 3–4 times that of Webb.