It’s always worth being vigilant when skywatching in mid- to late November. Every year, a few Leonid meteors punctuate the November sky morning sky around the 17th. These silent harbingers are only a hint at the shower’s true storm potential, which culminates once every three decades. The Leonid meteor shower can put on a true spectacle, and while 2026 isn’t expected to be a ‘storm year,’ we could be due for some enhanced activity in the late 2020s going into the early 2030s.

The ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has released its first huge batch of data. It's all part of the telescope's mission to study dark energy and dark matter. The telescope is busy creating the largest ever 3D map of the Universe with its huge 600 megapixel camera, and new images give us some highlights.

Carl Sagan and Frank Drake were pivotal to the development of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), as exemplified by the Pioneer Plaques and Voyager Golden Records.

Researchers compared the samples from asteroid Bennu with the Murchison meteorite and measured the amino acid β-alanine in both. Using new techniques, they were able to measure not only their isotopic compositions, but isotopic differences between individual atoms in the same molecule. The results show that some of the same pre-cursors to life formed in different conditions and positions in the protoplanetary disk.

If people ever think about cleaning up space debris, they typically think of something equivalent to a giant garbage truck in the sky, collecting lost astronaut tools and dead satellites then hauling them back down to Earth to be deposited in a landfill. But dealing with space debris doesn’t work that way, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who we typically cover for his work on the Solar Gravitational Lens idea, makes a good argument as to why.

Astrophysical jets are enormously powerful and energetic phenomena. Black holes launch them from their poles and they can extend enormous distances into space, disrupting star formation in adjacent regions. Astrophysicists want to be able to forecast when they're launched so they can understand theire extreme physics better. New research is making progress in understanding when they are triggered.

Uranus and Neptune, the Solar System's ice giants, have interiors unlike the other planets. As a result, they also have magnetic fields unlike the others. They're messy and tilted, and Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to even flyby them, showed us how messy they are. New research uses models to try to understand what's going on with the pair of planets and their weird fields, and found that it's likely they change on very short timescales. They could already be much different than when Voyager 2 visited in the late 1980s.

Science fiction authors have been dreaming of robotic spacecraft harvesting fortunes from asteroids for decades. Humanity is slowly getting closer to that reality. But if you ask asteroid mining skeptics, they will usually ask one specific question - what happens to the prices of all those rare materials once someone actually brings them back? A pair of system dynamicists from MIT directly tackled that question with a new paper titled Will AstroForge Collapse the PGM Market?

Some stars, called Luminous Blue Variables, can be confused with supernovae explosions. They exhibit similar outbursts, but unlike supernovae, which explode once and then are gone forever, these stars have periodic outbursts. New research found that one of these 'supernova impostors' is in a binary relationship with a black hole or a neutron star, and that explains its periodic outbursts.

TESS watched an exoplanet about 1,000 light years away as it repeatedly transited in front of its star for seven years. But astronomers were surprised to find that the hot Jupiter disappeared. Of course, planets don't just disappear. Something interrupted its transits from our point of view, and astronomers think they've figured out what happened. An unseen, nearby giant planet companion tugged on it until TESS couldn't see it anymore.

The ability to build large structures in space is maturing. The ISS, Mir, and Tiangong were built in space from pre-constructed modules, but a new program called NOM4D is taking space construction to the next level. It recently showed that a simple robot can create truss-like structures in space from premade components. Is the sky the limit for NOM4D?

There's a strange gamma-ray emitter in the Large Magellanic Cloud that has astronomers stumped about its source. It lies within the ashes left behind by a supernova that created a compact object that's part of the system. The supernova remnant provides some evidence for the emissions, but not the whole story.

The MeerKLASS international collaboration achieves the first direct measurement of the large-scale clustering of cosmic hydrogen in the Universe.

When low-mass stars like our Sun age, they leave the main sequence and follow the Red Giant Branch. As they ascend this branch, their luminosity steadily increases. But there's a sort of hiccup in the path called the RGB luminosity bump, where their luminosity suddenly dips. Astrophysicists have struggle to explain this, but one astrophysicist might have the answer.

For the second time in a few weeks, we’re writing about research into the temperature gap between the Sun’s surface and its corona. More and more data from various missions continue to feed this wave of discovery. A new paper by Katariina Nykyri of Embry-Riddle, recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, adds to this growing body of work. She argues that millions of tiny whirlpools scattered across the Sun’s surface could be the energetic engine driving that temperature difference.

Mechanical engineering assistant professor Erik Komendera developed a method that combines vibrations and AI to determine how deeply a rock is buried, helping robots clear terrain more efficiently.

Mars may be more volcanically active than we thought, according to new research. The Trace Gas Orbiter detected HCl, a chemical associated with magma, at a time of year that's difficult except by volcanic origins. The new research also identified new surface fissures on Mars that could be the source of the chemical.

Researchers at Washington University examined how dust interacts with the spacesuit swatches on the Perseverance Rover. Future missions to Mars require that planners account for the effects of dust exposure on humans and materials.

Thousands of so-called zombie satellites orbit Earth in the critical Low-Earth Orbit regime. They're either inactive or have stopped alerting other satellites to their presence. Researchers are building a system called CORTEX that can guide a repair satellite to autonomously dock with these zombies.

In propulsion system design, engineers have long faced a trade-off between solid and liquid rocket fuels. Each has advantages and disadvantages, and in an effort to try to min/max the efficacy of different types of fuel, researchers have long placed an emphasis on a hybrid between solids and liquids - in other words they’ve been working with gels. Unfortunately, gels have their own sets of problems to deal with. But a new paper published by Pranay Mudaliar and Jerin John of Concordia in the journal Langmuir uses an uncommon ingredient to elegantly solve some of those problems, but which is typically used in a completely different area of human activity - lecithin.