New Curtin University-led research has used a radio telescope that spans the Earth to snap images that measure the immense power of jets from black holes, confirming scientists’ theories of how black holes help shape the structure of the Universe.

In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is our best bet for “living off the land” for a future Martian base, but tracking down those resources is no easy task. As of now, we have two options - send a rover to a specific location to scout it, or monitor it from orbit. Since rovers are expensive, and there are an absolute ton of sites that we would eventually want to scout, doing so from orbit would seem a better option. But monitoring for temperature, one of the most important orbital scans we can do, is notoriously blurry - based in part on the fact that most of the main instruments used to collect data on it are a few decades old. Now, a paper from researchers at Curtin University in Australia presented at the International Astronautical Congress meeting last September uses a fancy AI-like algorithm to improve that thermal resolution, and, as a result, provided a much better map to some of the most important resources we’ll be looking for.

Kepler and TESS showed us that there's a radius gap in the exoplanet population. There are very few planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii, according to the data. But new research shows that the gap may not be as significant as thought.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a city on Mars is likely going to take even longer to build than Rome itself. At the time of the first Martian colonists, it is likely that the entirety of humanity’s industrial capacity, including the infrastructure to make critical materials like metals, will be based in the Earth-Moon system. While Mars has some iron, it also lacks many of the materials needed to make advanced materials, like boron and molybdenum. To alleviate that resource bottleneck, a new study, available in pre-print on arXiv and led by Serena Suriano and a team of researchers, offers a workaround that seems obvious in theory but difficult in practice - mine the necessary material from Main Belt asteroids.

A new mission promises to 'open the box' on exoplanet science. Scientists and engineers recently released the first engineering images from the Pandora exoplanet survey mission. The pictures represent the first ever images from a NASA Astrophysics Pioneers Program mission. Established in 2020, the program looks to test the feasibility of small low cost missions designed to address key questions in astronomy and astrophysics.

The Subaru Telescope observed the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) on January 7, 2026 (UT), after it made its closest approach to the Sun. By observing colors in the coma around the comet, astronomers could estimate the ratio of carbon dioxide to water. This ratio is much lower than that inferred from earlier observations by space telescopes. These findings suggest that the chemistry of the coma is evolving over time and offers clues to the structure of comet 3I/ATLAS.

Mars has lots of glaciers located along its mid-latitudes. We’ve known this for years thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO’s) SHARAD sounder. But, despite all of the excellent data it’s managed to gather, SHARAD doesn’t have high enough resolution to accurately measure the boundary between the glacier itself and the rocky material that has been deposited on top of it over the course of billions of years. A new study, published in the journal JGR Planets, details a potential method of finding that boundary—by using a drone.

Our Moon is still guarding its secrets decades after the last of the Apollo missions lifted off the lunar surface. Lunar scientists still puzzle over just when and how a giant Earth impactor formed our Moon, completely altering our early Earth in the process.

Io is a world of extremes. It is by far the most volcanically active world in our solar system. Being continually squeezed in the never-ending tug-of-war between Jupiter and its larger satellites will do that to a moon. As a result, Io has over 400 “paterae” - volcanic depressions that spew lava up onto its surface. And, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and utilizing data from Juno’s Jupiter InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) tool, we have been massively underestimating the power output of those paterae for decades.

The Paranal solar ESPRESSO Telescope (PoET), installed at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Paranal site in Chile, has made its first observations. The telescope will work with ESO's ESPRESSO instrument to study the sun in detail. Described as a solar telescope for planet hunters, PoET aims to understand how the variation in the light from stars like the sun can mask the presence of planets orbiting them, helping us in our search for worlds outside the solar system.

The Orion Nebula provides a master class in the study of newly born stars as the closest starbirth region to us. Yet, many of its youngest ones are still swaddled in their birth creches, hidden by clouds of gas and dust. The Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescopes have managed to punch through the dusty obscuring veil to study a pair of young binary systems called Brun 656 and HD 294300 born in the Nebula.

Our most massive satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), has been the center of a heated debate in the astrophysics community over the last few years. That debate centers on whether this is the LMC’s first or second “pass” by the Milky Way itself - and it has huge implications for the evolution of our galaxy given the disruption such a large grouping of stars has. A new paper from Scott Lucchini, Jiwon Jesse Han, Sapna Mishra, and Andrew J. Fox and his co-authors, currently available in pre-print on arXiv, provides what they claim to be definitive evidence that this is, in fact, the first time LMC has encountered the Milky Way.

Rogue planets sound like rare travelers amongst the stars, freed from the gravitational constraints of a host system, left to forever wander the interstellar void. But modern models suggest these Free Floating Planets (FFPs) as they are technically known, are actually very common - nineteen times more common than planets beyond the “snow line”, which is the distance from the central star where it becomes cold enough that hydrogen compounds like water, ammonia, and methane can condense into ice. But why are FFPs so common? What forces them out of the stellar systems where they form? A new paper from Xiaochen Zheng of the Beijing Planetarium and his co-authors, available in pre-print in arXiv, offers a plausible explanation - planetary “bouncers”.

You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’re told the Odyssey spacecraft designed to take you there will be the smoothest ride you’ll ever take. It features a newly christened electric propulsion engine which was in the late stages of testing during the first three missions. The mission starts and the spacecraft travels at a crawl, and you wonder if it’s broken. A week goes by and you’re now traveling at more than 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) per hour, and your mind is blown as to how fast you’re going, how quickly that happened, and that this mission might be more awesome than you thought.

Astronomers now believe there is at least one planet for every star in the Milky Way but new research has revealed a deeply unsettling twist in that picture. The most common planets in our Galaxy, it turns out, are almost entirely absent around the most common stars. Using data from NASA's TESS satellite, researchers found that the small, faint stars that make up the vast majority of the Milky Way seem to host rocky super Earths in abundance, but virtually no sub Neptunes, the planet type previously thought to be plentiful. The finding doesn't just refine existing theories of planet formation, it rewrites them.

An international team of astrophysicists has just released one of the largest cosmological datasets ever assembled. A mouthwatering 2.5 petabytes of simulated universe, freely available to researchers anywhere in the world. Built using a supercomputer and a suite of simulations called FLAMINGO, the data models how matter has evolved since the Big Bang, tracing everything from individual galaxies to the vast cosmic web that stretches across billions of light years.

When NASA's Artemis II crew swung around the Moon in April, the world watched in extraordinary detail and a breakthrough laser communications system was the reason why. Bolted to the outside of the Orion capsule, a compact optical terminal beamed 484 gigabytes of data back to Earth using invisible infrared light, outpacing traditional radio systems by a factor of tens. The result was some of the most vivid imagery ever captured in deep space, and a technology demonstration that will fundamentally change how humanity communicates beyond Earth.

Our Sun is a bit of an outlier in the general stellar population. We typically think of stars as being solitary wanderers throughout the galaxy. But roughly half of Sun-like stars are locked in with more than one companion star. If there are two, it’s known as a “binary” system, but in many cases there are even more stars all collectively tied together by gravity. Astronomers have long debated why this happens, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Ryan Sponzilli, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, makes an argument for a mechanism known as disk fragmentation.

There are tens of thousands of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that represent some of the most easily accessible resources in the solar system. If we can get to them at least. Planning trajectories to rendezvous with these miniature worlds is notoriously difficult, and requires a massive amount of computational power to calculate. But a new paper from astrodynamicist Alessandro Beolchi of Khalifa University of Science and Technology and his co-authors offers a much less computationally intensive way to find these trajectories, and has the added bonus of finding the much less energy-intensive paths to boot.

They’re a prolific, yet often elusive for northern hemisphere observers. If skies are clear, watch for a strong annual meteor shower that’s attained an almost mythical status: the May Eta Aquariids. The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is active from April 19th until May 28th, with the key night being the evening of May 5th into the morning of May 6th.