Once you start listing the properties of 3I/ATLAS, it becomes clear pretty quickly that this thing is distinctly different from any other comet we've ever seen. Here's just a small taste.

Supermassive black hole binaries can be difficult to detect in many galaxies, but a new approach could find them by looking for the regular flashes of starlight caused by the gravitational lensing of these black holes.

Traditional chemical rockets, though they are the most commonly used propulsion method for space exploration today, are beholden to the tyranny of the rocket equation. Every ounce of thrust they use must also start out as fuel, which means the rocket itself will have to weigh more, and weight is one of the limiting factors in how fast a propulsion system can go. So, scientists have been searching for, and actively testing, alternatives for decades. One of the most promising is the solar sail - a huge reflective sheet that uses sunlight, or in some cases a “pushing laser” to maneuver about the solar system without any onboard propellant necessary. A recent paper published in the Journal of Nanophotonics by Dimitar Dimitrov and Elijah Taylor Harris of Tuskegee University describes a new type of light sail that solves some of the major problems of existing designs.

China has just laid out one of its most ambitious spaceflight schedules yet and the details reveal a programme that is accelerating. Two crewed missions, a cargo resupply flight, a year long solo endurance experiment, and the first ever space station flight by astronauts from Hong Kong or Macao are all on the cards for 2026. Beyond Earth orbit, the countdown to a Chinese crewed Moon landing is ticking louder than ever. Here's what's coming up and why it matters.

A NASA spacecraft that spent seven years mapping Earth's invisible radiation shields has made its final journey home and it came back years ahead of schedule. Van Allen Probe A, launched in 2012 to study the powerful belts of charged particles that wrap around our planet, re-entered Earth's atmosphere in March 2026, most of it burning up in a blaze of friction and heat. What brought it down early wasn't a malfunction or a mission decision. It was the Sun and that twist in the story tells us something important.

When a powerful solar storm erupts, the warning system we currently rely on gives us just hours to respond, barely enough time to protect the satellites, power grids, and communication networks that modern life depends on. But a new tool developed by scientists at the Southwest Research Institute and the National Science Foundation could change that entirely, pushing advance warnings of dangerous space weather from hours to weeks. The secret lies not at the Sun's surface, but deep in its hidden interior and unlocking it has required a remarkable fusion of physics and artificial intelligence.

A new movie called "Project Hail Mary" tells the story of an unlikely astronaut who teams up with an alien to deal with a common cosmic threat. In the latest Fiction Science podcast, SETI astronomer Seth Shostak provides a status report on the real-world quest for alien contact.

For forty years, a network of telescopes has been listening to the Sun hum and scientists have finally decoded what those sounds reveal about our star's hidden interior. A new study from the University of Birmingham and Yale University has found that the Sun's internal structure quietly shifts between solar cycles, leaving measurable fingerprints deep beneath its surface. It's a discovery that could transform how we forecast space weather and its impact here on Earth.

Multiple mobile phones, dashcams, and dedicated meteor cameras capture a fireball over part of Europe on Sunday night. Thousands of people witnessed it, and the ESA's Planetary Defence Team is analyzing it. So far, it looks like it was a few meters in diameter. It lit up the sky, and some debris even struck some buildings in Koblenz, Germany.

One of the Vera Rubin Observatory's objectives is to detect incoming objects. It's decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time will detect one-meter class objects about to impact Earth and allow more detailed observations of them. That will help determine their impact sites with greater accuracy, allowing for more recovery.

Just a few days in simulated microgravity can subtly change the way women’s blood clots, sparking bigger questions about health monitoring protocols for astronauts who can spend six months or more in orbit, say Simon Fraser University researchers.

Imagine you live in a small town. Maybe it’s easy for you to imagine because you actually do. You’ve spent your whole life there. You know all the people, and all the people know you. Years go by. Decades. The same faces at the same corner store, the same routes to the same places, the same sky overhead. It’s comfortable. Predictable. You could walk the whole thing blindfolded and never trip.

Astronomers have turned to some of the oldest stars in our Galaxy to tackle one of cosmology's most stubborn puzzles and their answer might surprise you. By analysing precise age data for more than 200,000 Milky Way stars, researchers have placed the age of the universe at around 13.6 billion years. It's a deceptively simple idea that the universe cannot be younger than the stars it contains. What they found doesn't just give us a number, it adds a compelling new dimension to a decades long argument that has divided the scientific world.

Back in the early 2000s, my computer screen, like that of many other space enthusiasts, was typically covered in a series of rainbow-colored spectral signals. As my computer crunched through thousands of data points of radio signals collected by the SETI@Home initiative, I was hoping I was in some small way contributing to one of humanity’s greatest scientific endeavours - the search for extraterrestrial life. But, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal by Vishal Gajjar and Grayce Brown of the SETI Institute, it seems unlikely that the signals SETI@Home was tailored to look for actually exist. That doesn’t mean there weren’t aliens yelling into the void at the top of their electronic lungs, but simply that the space weather from their local star might have changed the signal to make it unrecognizable by the time it reached us.

Scientists occasionally have a hard time figuring out whether data they are seeing is an actual physical phenomenon or just a trick of their instrumentation. A new paper in The Planetary Science Journal from Jessica Sunshine and their colleagues at the University of Maryland describes one such confusing scenario. In this case, the researchers noted some fan-like patterns across the surface of Dimorphos, the asteroid hit by NASA’s DART mission, and thought it might be a trick of their camera. But after some image correction, computation, and physical experimentation, they determined the patterns were caused by the first-ever documented cases of material transfer between two asteroids.

Lunar dust can be a pain - but it’s also literally the ground we will have to traverse if we are ever to have a permanent human settlement on the Moon. In that specific use case, it’s clingy, jagged, staticky properties can actually be an advantage, according to a new paper, recently published in Research from researchers at Beihang University, who analyzed the mechanical properties of samples returned by Chang’e 6 mission to the far side of the Moon.

Jupiter's powerful, continuous aurorae dwarf those of Earth. Scientists know that Jupiter's Galilean moons created bright spots on Jupiter's northern aurora. The JWST observed these bright spots and generated infrared spectra of them for the first time. Those observations showed that Io's bright spot is extremely variable in both temperature and density, and researchers want to know why.

Even when the idea of terraforming Mars was originally put forward, the idea was daunting. Changing the environment of an entire planet is not something to do easily. Over the following decades, plenty of scientists and engineers have looked at the problem, and most have come to the same conclusion - we’re not going to be able to make Mars anything like Earth anytime soon. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is a good explainer as to why.

Finding Earth-like exoplanets with the composition and ingredients for life as we know it is the Holy Grail of exoplanet hunting. Since the first exoplanets were identified in the 1990s, scientists have pushed the boundaries of finding exoplanets through new and exciting methods. One of these methods is the direct imaging method, which involves carefully blocking out the host star within the observing telescope, thus revealing the orbiting exoplanets that were initially hiding within the star’s immense glare.

Astronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way in a striking new image, unveiling a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprecedented detail. Obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), this rich dataset—the largest ALMA image to date—will allow astronomers to probe the lives of stars in the most extreme region of our galaxy, next to the supermassive black hole at its center.