As part of the ALMA COMPASS Large program, an international research team has detected a rare form of methanol in space for the first time.

New research draws a link between a host star and the characteristics of its planetary system. Higher mass stars create one family of systems, while lower mass stars create another. These results provide a new, more detailed template for understanding exoplanet systems.

Fall meteor season has begun. Late October not only sees dusk falling ever earlier as ghouls and goblins walk the Earth on Halloween, but it also sees the peak of two fine annual meteor showers kicking off Halloween season: the Orionid and Taurid meteor showers.

Brown dwarfs are the black (or brown?) sheep of astronomy. They’re too big to be considered a traditional gas planet, but they are too small to have started nuclear fusion and made the full transition to star-hood. They also change dramatically over time, cooling, shrinking, and spinning faster as they age. Or at least we think they do - our models of the atmospheres of these celestial objects aren’t the best, according to a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by a team led by Zafar Rustamkulov at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA's Perseverance Rover has reached another milestone. It now holds the record for the longest distance travelled on another world, meaning Mars and Earth's Moon. It's all thanks the ingenuity behind AutoNav, it's hazard-detection driving system. It's a win for science, as more distance travelled means more scientific objectives are reached.

The edge of the Sun appears darker than its central region. This effect is known as limb darkening and tells us about the solar atmosphere. This same limb darkening effect has now been observed on several nearby stars and could help us improve our understanding of stellar atmospheres.

When a supernova exploded in 1181, Chinese and Japanese sky-watchers recorded it. They couldn't have known what the object was, and why it appeared for six months then disappeared. But in our modern times, we know it was a supernova, and we've even, most likely, found its remnant. New observations reveal more detail than ever in the unusual and rare supernova remnant.

The Chandrasekhar limit states that a white dwarf can be no larger than 1.4 solar masses. A new study demonstrates how highly magnetized white dwarfs could overcome that limit, and how such super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs could form.

Mars is a planetary geologist’s paradise. NASA’s Curiosity rover drove that home recently, with a captivating panorama seen from the slopes of Mount Sharp. The image shows a stunning vista, and was not white-balance adjusted during processing, to show just what a viewer might really see at sunrise standing of Mars.

When astronauts first travel to Mars, or anywhere else in deep space, they will have to contend with two problems that our planet itself protects us from on its surface - radiation and weightlessness. Scientists already know both can have a profound impact on the human body, but just how much of one, and how long that impact can last, remain a mystery. A new paper by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and published in PLoS One, tackles those questions, and unfortunately comes up with some less than ideal answers in terms of the long term implications of deep space exposure.

Using observations from NASA's Juno spacecraft, an international team led by Shandong University shows that Jupiter's magnetodisk is a rippling structure that rotates with the planet, contrary to what scientists previously thought.

Astrophysicists think that hypernovae are the most powerful stellar explosions in the Universe. They're the most explosive type of core-collapse supernova. But the evidence for them is not voluminous, and new research pokes holes in it, pointing out that hypernovae may not actually exist.

Astronomers detected an unusual triangular light curve about 300 light years away. They were searching for Black Widow Binaries, where a dense neutron star eats its companion. But they found something different: an M dwarf slowly eating its binary companion brown dwarf.

In just one more month, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will make history. Moving at 12 kilometers per second versus Earth, the mission is about to rendezvous with the binary Dimorphos-Didymos asteroid pair. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission slammed into Dimorphos in 2022, and now Hera will provide a follow up view of the mission’s resulting handiwork. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently released a thought-provoking look at the perspectives of Hera, and what an astronaut might see from the surface of the asteroids as the mission speeds by.

Looking for biosignatures across the solar system requires looking for asymmetry. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are famously either “left-handed” (L) or “right-handed” (D). We know abiotic processes (i.e. those that create amino acids but don’t involve life) create a 50/50 mixture of the two types, which is called a racemic mixture. But life as we know it almost exclusively relies on left-handed amino acids to fold proteins and right-handed ones to construct nucleic acids. So if we find an imbalance in the types of amino acids we analyze from somewhere in the solar system, it's a good indication that life is behind that imbalance. Differentiating between the two “chiralities”, as they’re called, is possible, but typically requires advanced equipment and chemical disposables that make them burdensome for spaceflight applications. But a new paper in Nature Communications from researchers led by Takahito Ohshiro and Masateru Taniguchi of Osaka University offers an alternative - a solid-state quantum tunneling sensor that can read the chirality of a single amino acid molecule using basically just some gold wire.

Diligent sleuthing by astronomers has broken open a cold case in the data archive of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In a study published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers report uncovering a surprising chemical clue that indicates the white dwarf star HS 0209+0832 may host a second-generation planet.

Most helium in the Universe is primordial helium, formed during the Big Bang. But a fraction of helium was formed by long-dead stars. Distinguishing between the two allows astronomers to further confirm our observations of the Big Bang.

Growing fresh food on the Moon is going to be crucial if astronauts there are ever going to eat anything other than freeze-dried rations. Since husbanding animals on the lunar surface is…difficult (to put it mildly), most mission planners believe that plants are the solution. But we still don’t entirely understand how one of the most fundamental materials to plant growth, water, operates under partial gravity. A team of researchers, led by Karl Hasenstein of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and including John Kiss of the Florida Institute of Technology, and Christopher McKay of NASA’s Ames Research Center, recently published a paper in Microgravity Science and Technology that lays out the physics for how water behaves at lunar gravity.

As I’m writing this I’m able to stare out into my driveway at my trusty Honda Odyssey. Most of the public’s association with Honda is through their “mobility” products - i.e. their cars. But the company has an impressive track record of other technical achievements, not the least of which has been in robotics. Now, it’s teaming up with space infrastructure firm Redwire to develop an automated laboratory support system for use on future commercial space stations.

Through photographs, spoken observations, drawings, and annotations, the Artemis II crew created a unique scientific record—one that is now available to the science community and the public for further study. Explore highlights here, and find the full suite of reports and select data resources at the bottom of the page.