In a recent paper, an international team proposed an ultra-long wavelength radio interferometer that could examine the Cosmic Dark Ages and Cosmic Dawn. Known as the Dark Ages Explorer (DEX), this telescope could provide fresh insights into how and when the first stars and galaxies formed.

When the JWST came to life and began observations, one of its first jobs was to gaze back in time at the early Universe. The Assembly of Galaxies is one of the space telescope's four main science themes, and when it observed the Universe's first galaxies, it uncovered a mystery. According to our understanding of how galaxies evolve, some were far more massive than they should be.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover didn't just look up—it captured a sprint across the Martian sky! On March 1st, its navigation camera locked onto Deimos as the moon raced overhead in the pre-dawn darkness. Sixteen rapid-fire, 3-second exposures stacked together reveal the moon's movement across the Martian sky. The pictures were taken in very low light, so it's pretty grainy and noisy, but there are two additional stars in the sky, Regulus and Algieba, in the constellation Leo.

Scientists have discovered that black holes don't just devour everything—they also fire back. While nothing can escape the event horizon, black holes generate ferocious winds that blast outward at significant fractions of the speed of light. New research challenges the long-held belief that they flow smoothly and continuously. Instead, these winds are violent, fragmented bursts resembling rapid-fire streams of gas bullets. Astronomers have now witnessed this phenomenon firsthand, detecting five distinct gas components travelling 20-30% the speed of light and erupting like geysers from the black hole's vicinity.

Astronomers have discovered a protoplanetary disks where planets are born thrive in the most violent region of our Galaxy. For years the galactic center was thought to be too chaotic and hostile for planet formation. This is wrong. New ALMA observations have seen planet nurseries flourishing in the turbulent Central Molecular Zone near our Galaxy's heart, challenging everything we thought we knew about how worlds are born. Planets find a way.

Sometimes it's fun to look back at old missions that never were. There are more of those than the missions that receive funding and are launched, but many of those were influenced by the ones that were funded that came before. A great fountain of mission ideas is the Alpbach Summer School, held annually in Austria. Every year, at least two teams publish papers defining a complete mission concept as part of their capstone experience at the school. One published in 2014 describes a mission designed to look at Venus' tectonic activity, and even though the concept is over 11 years old, the scientific questions it sought to answer are still outstanding today.

The Small Magellanic Cloud is one of our closest galactic neighbours. It's a dwarf irregular galaxy about 200,000 light-years away, containing several hundred million stars. New research based on massive stars in the SMC shows it's being stretched along two different axes.

Computational Fluid Dynamics. Those words are enough to strike fear into the heart of many an undergraduate engineer. Modeling how liquids move through a system is mathematically challenging, but in many cases, absolutely vital to understanding how those systems work. Computational Fluid Dynamics (more commonly called CFD) is our best effort at understanding those complex systems. A new paper from researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) applies those mathematical models to an area critical for the upcoming era of space exploration - propellant production from in-situ resources.

Just as ice dominates the outer Solar System, blanketing the moons of giant planets and coating objects in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud—astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have made a chilly discovery in a distant planetary system. The alien system HD 181327, 155 light-years away harbours significant deposits of both ordinary and crystalline water ice. They detected the ice in regions that are farther away from the star, with the outer area containing as much as 20% water ice.

One of the big differences between Venus and Earth is the lack of plate tectonics. While Earth's continents float on tectonic plates—constantly reshaping our world—Venus was previously thought to remain locked in a largely static crust with only occasional volcanic hotspots. But everything we thought we knew might be wrong! Researchers examining 30-year-old NASA Magellan spacecraft images have spotted what appears to be the smoking gun of tectonic activity on our hellish sister planet, potentially rewriting planetary science as we know it.