Black holes are already strange enough, regions of space where gravity is so extreme that not even light can escape. But physicists have long known there's another layer of weirdness, that black holes also behave like thermodynamic objects, with temperature, entropy, and phase transitions just like a gas or a liquid. Now, a new approach borrowed from pure mathematics is revealing hidden patterns in that behaviour and hinting at something fundamental about the nature of black holes themselves.

A small rock found in the African desert has just handed scientists an extraordinary window into one of the most violent and consequential periods in the history of the Solar System. Inside this lunar meteorite, a chunk of the Moon knocked to Earth by an ancient collision, researchers have found evidence of a massive impact event 3.5 billion years ago, one that matches the timing of known impacts on Earth and in the asteroid belt. Three worlds but one shared bombardment and a story that may have everything to do with the origins of life.

Saturn's moon Titan has long fascinated scientists, it’s a world with rivers, lakes, and a thick atmosphere, all made not of water but of methane. Now, a new study suggests Titan is stranger than first imagined since beneath its surface lies a 9 km thick crust of methane laced ice that acts like a giant thermal blanket, warming the interior in ways nobody expected.

Earth was bombarded by impactors in its first couple billion years. These impacts created a vast network of hydrothermal systems in the crust that could've spawned life. New research examines their extent.

To truly understand what an asteroid is made up of, we need to send a probe to it. Remote sensing from ground-based telescopes, or even orbiting observatories, and only do so much. A new white paper submitted to the UK Space Agency’s 2035 Space Frontiers programme, pitches just such a mission architecture. Called the REndezvous Mission for Orbital Reconstruction of Asteroids (REMORA), the plan calls for a swarm of autonomous CubeSats to tag, track, and characterize multiple near-Earth asteroids.

If you’re like us, you’ve been following the close conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in the June dusk sky. Next week, the Moon enters the evening scene, and actually occults (passes in front of) the planet Venus in what promises to be one of the top skywatching events for 2026.

Sulfur is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. If you peer into a diffuse interstellar cloud, you find loads of it - about the amount expected based on fusion patterns of the stars it was born in. However, if you look at a dense, cold, molecular cloud - the kind where those stars actually form - it seems like 99% of the sulfur that is expected to be there is missing. Scientists have puzzled over this “missing sulfur problem” for decades, though a leading theory is that the element hides on icy dust grains making it hard to detect. A new paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and the Centro de Astrobiologia describes a new computer simulation model that they aimed to support the interpretation of laboratory results and test our current understanding of sulfur evolution in interstellar ices.

University of Florida researchers are exploring how lasers could help astronauts build structures on the moon using materials already available there, including lunar soil transformed into glass. The work, led by Victoria M. Miller, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and researcher with the UF Astraeus Space Institute, recently completed a research phase focused on laser forming, a manufacturing process that bends materials without physical contact.

After decades of searches, cosmologists are within reach of finding cosmic dawn. A longtime observational cosmologist explains.

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2606.04044

Astronomers may have found the missing link in the SMBH feeding process. New observations with the JWST show that a galaxy's circumnuclear disk, which feeds gas into its black hole, is connected to a much larger network of filaments. Cool gas flows through these filaments into the SMBH's sphere of influence.

A debate has been raging amongst planetary scientists for over a decade - why are there so few exoplanets with a radius of about 1.8 times that of the Earth? Exoplanets are currently largely grouped into two distinct groups - “super Earth” are below that size and have rocky interiors, whereas “Sub-Neptunes” are above that size limit and appear “puffier.” But we don’t really understand what about the path of planetary evolution forces this bifurcation. A new mission proposal, called the Early eVolution Explorer (EVE) wants to find out, and a draft of its concept can be found in pre-print form on arXiv.

When we scan the skies for signs of alien civilisations, where exactly should we be looking and perhaps more importantly, where should we not? A high school student from Ankara has just published a remarkably sophisticated answer to that question, building a filtering system that sifts nearly 1.75 million stars and identifies which ones are genuinely worth our attention. The result is a publicly available catalogue that could transform how the search for extraterrestrial intelligence allocates its most precious resource - time.

We've walked on the Moon, driven rovers across its surface, and analysed every gram of rock the Apollo astronauts brought home, yet we still don't have a complete picture of what the Moon is actually made of. Now a team of researchers in Japan think they've found the answer, a compact X-ray telescope, small enough to sit on a single satellite, that could map the entire lunar surface in just two years. It's an elegant solution to one of planetary science's most stubborn problems and the implications for understanding where the Moon came from could be revolutionary.

The space between stars may seem like a barren desert, but over the past few decades scientists have been finding all sorts of interesting chemicals in it. From the precursors to proteins to the building blocks of cell membranes, there has been discovery after discovery of new molecules in the giant gas clouds between the stars. Now, a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv details the discovery of the first ever four-carbon sugar in the Interstellar Medium (ISM), and it is another brick on the path to understanding how life on Earth first developed.

The ekpyrotic universe is a beautiful idea that runs headlong into the data. From hand-waved singularities and assumed dark energy to the killer blow from Planck and WMAP measurements of the cosmic microwave background, here is why nature has so far voted against it.

How do you measure the mass of a dormant black hole in the early Universe? That's a question astronomers at University College London (UCL) and Carnegie scientists wanted to answer about a distant object that is invisible. So, they turned to James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) studies of the region around the black hole to find that answer.

New simulations show that interactions with a magnetic field can work to decrease the distance between still forming binary protostars. These results can help explain the characteristics of the binary star systems observed in the Milky Way. These results can also be extrapolated to binary black holes, giving insights into how super massive black holes evolve.

Meteorites are (usually) gifts from the heavens. They provide unique insights to parts of the solar system that we couldn’t access otherwise - either because it's too expensive, or because the solar system itself has evolved since it was formed. A new paper from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder details how one particularly famous meteorite offers a window into just such a bygone age of the solar system - and the failed planet that was a part of it.

Neptune is definitely the odd one out of the gas giants. It’s tilted at a strange angle, and its moons are completely different from any other gas giant we know of. A new paper, published in Science Advances from researchers at CalTech, posits that might be because Triton, by far Neptune’s largest moon, absolutely obliterated the regular moon system it previously had, except for one particular exception - Nereid.

Unfortunately there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.

The ekpyrotic theory tries to beat inflation with bouncing higher-dimensional branes, no singularity, and a universe that has always existed. A tour of the prettiest version of the idea and how it claims to handle flatness, dark energy, and the entropy that doomed earlier cyclic models.

We witnessed a surprise outburst late last week, from a lesser known periodic comet. Posts flashed across message boards late last week, alerting comet watchers to a dramatic change in brightness for periodic comet 220P McNaught. Though it wasn’t on our list for bright comets to watch for in 2026, Comet 220P is now in range of binoculars or a small telescope, low to the east at dawn as it heads towards perihelion this coming weekend.

If we’re to reach another star, chemical propulsion will not get us there in any reasonable time frame. We’re going to need a different propulsion technology, and one of the most promising seems to be a solar sail. These giant reflective surfaces form the basis of many interstellar missions. Combined with giant lasers pushing them, they can be accelerated to speeds unreachable by any other current technologies. However, according to a new paper available on arXiv from Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology, once those missions start reaching a significant percentage of the speed of light they’re going to run into a drag force from the light itself.

An international team led by astronomers at the University of Sydney has uncovered the clearest evidence yet for the origin of an unusual class of cosmic signals. In doing so, they have identified a rare stellar system that is providing scientists with a natural laboratory to study extreme physics.

Inflation is awkward, possibly not even a proper theory, and it has reigned over cosmology for forty years anyway. Here is what it claims, the flatness, horizon, and monopole problems it solves, the structure-formation prediction it nailed, and the deep problems it still cannot escape.

Scientists at the SETI Institute searched for technological signals from 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object observed in our Solar System. Using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California, the team scanned a wide range of radio frequencies for signs of extraterrestrial technology and found none, as expected based on other astronomical observations showing that the object exhibits natural comet-like composition and behavior. “Eventually, our own Voyager spacecraft will be extraterrestrial artifacts in other stellar systems,” said Dr. Sofia Sheikh, lead author on the paper. “Given that, it is important that we understand the natural distribution of interstellar objects so that we will be able to identify any anomalies that could one day be signs of an artificial interstellar object.” The team observed 3I/ATLAS for more than seven hours with the ATA, covering 1 to 9 gigahertz. This broad range allows scientists to search for narrowband radio signals, which are not produced by in nature and would be evidence of technology.

A look at why a cyclic, eternally repeating universe is such an appealing idea, and why the first serious attempt to build one, Richard Tolman's 1930s model of endless big bangs and big crunches, collapsed under the weight of entropy. The Big Bang keeps demanding a beginning.

Rocket scientists have always faced a trade-off in propulsion technologies. Chemical rockets can provide lots of oomph, but burn through fuel so quickly they can only do so for a few minutes. Electric propulsion, on the other hand, can run for days, but the pushing power they provide is miniscule compared to their chemical cousins. A new paper in the Journal of Propulsion and Power from researchers at MIT describes a system that might be the best of both worlds - a propulsion system that includes an electrospray thruster that uses a chemical rocket propellant, and can seamlessly switch to a chemical rocket when needed.

An international committee of experts says it has updated its rules for evaluating and revealing the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence. The revisions to the decades-old Declaration of Principles, created and maintained by the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Committee, come just days before the release of "Disclosure Day," a movie about alien visitation directed by Steven Spielberg.

The first mission devoted to observing the Martian atmosphere and its evolution, NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), has ended after more than 11 years in orbit at Mars and a decade beyond its primary, one-year mission.

Ever since the first protoplanetary disk was discovered in 1984 around the star Beta Pictoris, these objects have presented astronomers with laboratories to study the births and evolution of worlds around distant stars. A team at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Bordeaux, made a breakthrough in understanding these planetary birthplaces when they directly observed the rotation of a protoplanetary disk around the young star AB Aurigae.

Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside have produced the most detailed map of the cosmic web ever made, tracing the network of galaxies all the way back to when the universe was one billion years old.

According to theory, all active black holes should produce winds or jets. Astronomers have long searched for wind around the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole. New images reveal a vacant, cone-shaped region pointing to the black hole. According to new research, only a supermassive black hole could've created this region.

Stephen Hawking predicted that stars can capture primordial black holes (PBH). The PBH find their way to the stellar core, creating a Hawking star. There are two possible outcomes, both deadly for the star. Either it explodes rapidly, or it's slowly consumed by the parasitic PBH.

Astronomers have developed a technique that allows them to detect cloud cycles on distant exoplanets. Using data from the James Webb Sapce Telescope (JWST), the astronomers found that mornings and evenings on the gas giant WASP-94A b have extremely different weather patterns: mornings are riddled with sand clouds, while the skies are clear in the early evenings. By isolating the clouds, researchers can more accurately measure a planet’s atmosphere and provide a clearer picture of the planet’s composition. WASP-94A b, for example, has much less oxygen and carbon than astronomers perviously calculated, making its atmosphere much more like Jupiter than they had originally thought.

New research shows how unmagnetized worlds like Mars can still deflect some of the Sun's solar wind. Unlike magnetospheres that form around planet's like Earth, this effect takes place in Mars' ionosphere. It's called the Zwan-Wolf effect, and it's not clear how deep into the atmosphere it operates.

Scientists using the Euclid space telescope found a red-dwarf brightness “gap” in the population of a globular cluster—an ancient, crowded collection of stars. A similar gap was detected by the Gaia observatory in nearby stellar populations, but it has never before been seen in a globular cluster.

It’s a familiar annual question, that we’re already hearing as we enter into June. “What are those two bright objects in the west?” They’re none other than the two brightest planets in the sky, Jupiter and Venus. Keep an eye on the dusk sky over the next week, and you’ll see the two worlds getting ever closer to each other in the west. Though this happens every year or so, an evening conjunction assures that lots of the general public will see one of the best planetary pairings of 2026.

In our final installment in the series, we'll examine all the close calls, possible candidates, and instances in which extraterrestrial signals could not be ruled out

A multi-year survey of millions of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud shows that the dwarf galaxy is expanding rather than rotating. This is due to the influence of its larger neighbour, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The early Universe is full of massive galaxies that stopped forming stars very early. They're called massive quenchers (MQ) and they're challenging to explain. New research shows that another type of galaxy, dusty star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) can explain why. It's all about mergers, starbursts, and AGN feedback.

Astronomers studying wind speeds on distant exoplanets have discovered weather systems driven by magnetic fields, rather than the largely hydrodynamic weather patterns observed on Earth. This discovery is among the best evidence yet for the existence of magnetic fields on exoplanets.

The strength of gravity is different on every body in the solar system. Whether it's the crushing weight of Jupiter or the miniscule pull of a small asteroid, this fundamental force of physics still has a major impact on the material those bodies are made up of. A new paper from researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) showcases just how different it can be by letting planetary simulants freefall inside a giant drop tower and measuring how “fluffy” the space dirt got.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is assessing damage to its launch pad after a rocket exploded during a test firing, creating a giant orange fireball seen and felt for miles around.

Galactic collisions are events of breathtaking proportions. The Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) at their centers plunge into a chaotic orbital dance that eventually coalesce into a single remnant. On their way to that point, they could eventually get “kicked” out of the center of their galaxy - and finding these “recoiling” black holes has been a challenge of cosmology for decades. A new paper, available on arXiv by an international team, used a novel idea to track down these fast-moving behemoths.

The prototype ngVLA antenna tested its systems by observing and tracking the Crab Nebula, also known as Taurus A (3C144), the remnant of an exploded star.

It might not seem like it, but the Moon is constantly being both sandblasted and baked. Its lack of a thick atmosphere allows micrometeorites to impact the surface at speed, and the solar wind isn’t held back either, baking the regolith with a constant flow of high-energy particles. These processes drive what is called “space weathering”, and it can drastically alter the physical and chemical properties of the lunar dirt over the course of billions of years. And we’re finally getting a better sense of what that means in practice thanks to two new papers from researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University, which used advanced electron tomography and spectroscopic techniques to analyze samples returned from the Chang’e-5 mission to the near side of the Moon.

Though it's a toxic chemical, hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is also important for the development of life. It's a precursor to things like amino acids and nucleic acids and plays a central role in theories of the origin of life on Earth. Recently, difficult questions have been asked about how it could have formed on the early Earth. But the authors of new research in PNAS seemed to have figured it out.

The search for any sign of life on Mars continues. In the latest update, a new data release from Curiosity’s Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) - essentially the rover’s portable X-ray diffraction lab - and published in a paper in Science, analyzes 20 different rock samples from various elevations of Mount Sharp, the mountain in the center of Gale Crater that Curiosity has been slowly climbing. In the paper, the researchers describe how the size of the crystals in those samples could help scientists determine where to look for evidence that life might have evolved on the Red Planet.