SpaceX sent its Starship super-rocket on its first orbital flight — a shorter-than-planned test mission that put operational Starlink satellites into orbit for the first time.

Something deep inside Mars has scientists looking for clues to its internal evolution. A team at the University of Arizona led by Alexander Byrne, used a technique called "tidal tomography" to probe a heat anomaly in the southern hemisphere mantle. It turns out this subsurface region measures about 200 to 400 degrees Celsius warmer than the rest of the mantle. That warm spot may contain information about how Mars has changed over its lifetime.

Both stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes can produce ionized jets streaming from their poles. Stellar-mass black holes consume the material of companion stars, while supermassive black holes rip stars apart in tidal disruption events. Despite these different eating habits, the formation of jets requires similar conditions.

Way back in the earliest epochs of the Universe, the Big Bang was followed by a period called the Cosmic Dark Ages. It was a time when the cosmic soup of primordial particles was so thick that light couldn't propagate. Hence the term "dark"; also, because, even with our best telescopes, we can't see "into" that epoch. Although we don't have a definite "century by century" timeline of activity, that doesn't mean that period of history didn't lead to something interesting.

There’s a once-in-a-millennia astronomical opportunity coming up in about three years, and space agencies are rushing to make sure they’re ready for it. On Friday April 13th, 2029, the asteroid 99942 Apophis will fly within 32,000km of the Earth’s surface. The cruise liner sized piece of rock won’t hit us, but it should put on a great show, and, given the date it will pass by, is sure to cause panic amongst some parts of western civilization. One of the missions planned to watch this historic event (and hopefully alleviate some people’s fears) - ESA and JAXA’s Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses) - has just passed a successful development milestone - turning on its computer for the first time.

Scientists love taking inspiration from nature. The evolutionary processes that have created such a diverse panoply of life on Earth can be a great source of ideas in solving technical problems. One such example is the pattern of sunflower seeds - they are arranged in a mathematically optimized pattern known as a Vogel spiral, and the international team building the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in Australia decided to lay out their antennas in a similar pattern. But, as they report in a paper recently published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, when they did so they found a huge blind spot in the data which hints that maybe this particular natural pattern might need to be modified to work well for this particular application.

As humanity continues to move towards a permanent settlement on the Moon, we still have at least one big hurdle to face - the lunar night, which lasts for roughly fourteen days straight and can drop temperatures to a bone-chilling -223°C. In order to survive those conditions, we need a power source that doesn’t come and go with the Sun, or rely on non-existent stock of coal, gas or wind. In other words, we need nuclear power, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Julius Mercz of the Technical University of Munich and his co-authors, describes a new type of nuclear reactor that wouldn’t just power a habitat’s environmental systems, but also enable its materials extraction technologies as well.

Everything from the gold in your smart phone to the calcium in your bones was originally created in a star. But for a long time there has been a question about the levels of one particular element - strontium, which makes fireworks burn bright red and is used in glow-in-the-dark paint. A new paper published in Nature Communications Physics from a large group of researchers led by Caley M. Harris, a graduate student at Michigan State University, thinks they have found an answer for why that particular elemental level was skewed - and doing so required some very elaborate laboratory testing.

The early stages of the solar system remain shrouded in mystery. Not much remains from that time, but scientists have developed plenty of theories about what was going on back then. One of those theories attempts to answer a simple question - did the early system prefer “fire” or “ice”? A new paper published in Nature Astrophysics from lead author Damanveer Grewal, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Yale, and his co-authors, have a definitive answer to that question - the early solar system preferred fire.

When we think of asteroids, we often think of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that contains the majority of the known asteroids in our solar system. However, our solar system hosts several other populations of asteroids and icy rocks, including the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that orbit in Jupiter’s orbit, and the icy bodies and comets of the Kuiper Belt. But there’s one population of asteroids that often gets overlooked called Centaurs, primarily because their orbits are not in a fixed location and instead whose orbits cross the orbits of the outer planets.

A new geochemical modeling study led by researchers at JAXA and the University of Tokyo addresses Mars' "missing" stores of carbonate rocks.

In our own solar system, all eight planets orbit our Sun in a nice, orderly fashion. None are more than 7° or so out of alignment with the equator, and all of them rotate in the same direction as the Sun itself. But that’s not the case for all solar systems, and a new paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics from a team of researchers led by Yann Carteret, a PhD student at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), describes the first time we’ve ever found an exoplanet orbiting the opposite direction of its red dwarf parent star - and it has major implications for our understanding of planet formation theory.

A new study reveals that Jezero Crater’s enigmatic ‘Margin Unit’ was shaped by a complex sequence of ancient lakes, groundwater systems, and hydrothermal fluids.

Rocket launches are some of the most violent travel methods man has ever created. They generate millions of pounds of thrust and convert that into intense g-forces. Humans must undergo serious training to withstand those experiences, but machines have to do so as well, but by design rather than training. If a delicate mirror or solder joint cracks before a multi-billion dollar satellite even begins its mission, the years of effort that went into its design and assembly could be lost. Now, researchers in Switzerland have come up with an ingenious way to make sure that is much less likely to happen.

Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so is a showcase in how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s equivalent to traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr and parallel parking into an open garage on a multi-billion dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward you actually drift up, and there’s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone onboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resultant debris field could both wipe out dozens of satellites and even people on the ground. No pressure, obviously. For decades, aerospace engineers have been docking successfully using hard coded physics equations and human pilots to correct them. But now, a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at Stanford, is taking a shot at building an AI to perform a series of “mental simulations” that could fundamentally change how future spacecraft interact with each other.

Galaxies and their stars in the early Universe look a lot weirder than those we see today, and astronomers want to know why. A team of researchers at the University of Utah decided to survey certain stars in nearby galaxies as analogs of those that existed when the Universe was still in its infancy. The survey, called the "Treasury of Extremely Metal-Poor O Stars (TEMPOS), used the ultraviolet (UV) light streaming from those relatively close-by stars as detected by the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

Asteroids which strike the Moon and create new craters offer lunar scientists a window onto the workings of our natural satellite’s shallow subsurface.

The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will return to Earth on 28 September, with flight controllers guiding the spacecraft close to our home planet to alter its speed and direction en route to Jupiter.

Never seen Neptune for yourself? Late September 2026 presents an ideal opportunity to cross the outermost ice giant off of your ‘life list,’ as the planet reaches opposition for 2026, rising opposite to the setting Sun and riding high to the south towards local midnight.

Most exoplanets we find have been around a long time. They’ve cleared out their orbital path (one of the requirements of planethood, as fans of Pluto well know), have their own gravitational pull, and in many cases shine with their own infrared light. But it takes a long time to get to that point - finding “young” planets is much harder. But a new paper available in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by a research team led by Andrea Bernardi of Diego Portales University in Chile describes a new paper that definitely takes the prize as the youngest exoplanet we’ve yet found.