Readers of a certain age will remember a golden area of asteroid films, capstoned by two with very different endings. Deep Impact engrained the devastating consequences of letting a large piece of rock hit our planet, whereas Armageddon, though arguably the more kitschy of the two films, was an uplifting story about technical ingenuity and sacrifice. And now, the central crux of that movie’s storyline - essentially blasting an asteroid with a nuclear detonation - is taking center stage as our last line of defense against a potential Deep Impact scenario. A new paper from researchers at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, and published in Space: Science & Technology, describes two potential scenarios examining how we might actually be able to nuke a space rock - and whether it would actually save us.

If an alien civilization could see Earth only as a single pale blue dot, what could they learn? We start with transit spectroscopy, the biosignature cocktail of oxygen, methane, ozone, and water, and why even the James Webb will struggle to find life.

A new study warns that astronomers measuring the rotation of distant exoplanets may often be measuring atmospheric winds instead, since the clouds of Venus circle the planet roughly 60 times faster than Venus itself actually spins. Kane proposes using multi-wavelength observations to correct for this, work that will matter enormously once the European Space Agency's PLATO mission launches in 2027 and, researchers predict, discovers several hundred Venus like exoplanets.

New research shows that extreme space weather can significantly raise radiation exposure on commercial flights and increase electronic faults in aircraft systems. A severe 1956 scale solar storm could expose passengers to a year's worth of radiation in a single flight, and the researchers point to last year's Airbus A320 grounding, triggered by a solar radiation linked flight computer fault, as proof this isn't theoretical. To address the gap, the team has proposed a new aviation specific radiation scale designed to give airlines clearer, more reliable guidance on when to monitor, reroute, or ground flights during severe events.

A new study modelling Reflect Orbital's proposed constellation of giant orbital mirrors finds their light pollution would be severe. A single 54 metre satellite would appear four magnitudes brighter than the full moon to anyone in its beam, and its scattered glow would outshine moonlight across the sky from 14 kilometres away, remaining visible from over 30 kilometres out. With the pilot satellite already approved by the FCC despite astronomer objections, and up to 50,000 mirrors planned by the mid-2030s, the research puts hard numbers on a fight over who controls the night sky, and who answers for what's lost when it disappears.

A team of scientists led by the University of Washington has studied how star formation is declining in the Andromeda galaxy using highly detailed Hubble surveys.

A new composite image combining data from Chandra, Hubble, Webb and the retired Spitzer telescope has helped astronomers solve a long standing puzzle in the Tarantula Nebula, a star forming region 160,000 light years away. Young, massive stars there should be heating enough gas to emit X-rays, but observations showed far less X-ray emission than predicted.

Largest Italian radio telescope located on an out of the way mountain plateau in southern Sardinia sheds light on the cosmos’ still misunderstood Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

Astronomers working with the JWST have found a galaxy only 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang that contains three black holes. Two are close to the galaxy's center and will merge soon. The third is more distant, and is expected to merge much later. The discovery shows that black hole mergers were an important contributor to the masses of the SMBH we find in galaxies today.

Science seems like a straightforward endeavour. You come up with a hypothesis, collect data to prove or disprove it, and analyze that data to see if the hypothesis is right. But anyone who actually does science will tell you many times it’s not that straightforward. And one of the most common complexities is in data analysis. A new paper suggests that one such complexity, known as regression to the mean, might be causing us to massively underestimate how severe solar storms can truly be.

Scientists have discovered a rare star formation hidden in a distant galaxy, unlike anything seen before beyond the Milky Way. What’s more, the discovery offers a brand new way to measure the distribution of dark matter in distant galaxies.

What does a home actually need to do for us, beyond keeping the weather out? Engineers at MIT have started mapping the answer for astronauts heading to the Moon and Mars, tracing exactly how the walls, layouts and lighting around a person shape their stress, their loneliness and their sense of belonging. It turns out the science of surviving a place and the science of living in one are not the same thing at all, and I have spent enough of the last year thinking about that difference to know how much it matters.

Planet building was supposed to be one of the universe's slow projects, something that only got going billions of years after the Big Bang. New research suggests otherwise. The raw materials for rocky worlds, and perhaps even the water needed for life, may have been ready to go just 100 million years after the Big Bang, long before the first galaxies had even taken shape.

Astronomers found evidence that a giant stream of gas flowing into the GW Orionis young triple-star system may have tilted its planet-forming disk, offering a new explanation for why some planetary systems are misaligned. The next step is to search for shock fronts in the system, and to search for more of these massive streams of gas in other systems.

The atmospheric is a dynamic place, and just how well we understand that dynamism depends on what part of the atmosphere it is. Low altitudes can be reached by traditional balloons, with full suites of sensing equipment. Higher reaches are the domain of satellites, with their zippy orbits allowing them to travel through the less dense regions. But there a section scientists call the “ignorosphere”, between 30-100 kilometers up that still plays a major role in global climate dynamics, but which are only able to reach with temporary sounding rockets that only collect data for a few minutes before falling back to Earth. But a new technology from Benjamin Schafer of Rarefied Technologies that received a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant hopes to solve that problem by inserting a fleet of sensors that can float in that area for months, while providing insight to these hard-to-capture long-term patterns that influence weather everywhere on the globe.

It was an eclipse for the ages. This past week, many an eclipse chaser and the ‘eclipse curious’ made the journey to stand in the shadow of the Moon, for the only total solar eclipse of 2026. Viewers across northeastern Spain had thrilling views of a low to the horizon eclipse at sunset, while viewers to the north and across Iceland had dicier, cloudy skies to contend with. Here are amazing reader views of the eclipse, along with a few special ones from space.

The eROSITA telescope has released its second great catalogue of the X-ray sky with close to two million sources across half the sky, roughly double what it published before. Buried in it is a result from Bonn that matters more than the headline number. A team there went after the faintest part of a massive galaxy cluster, the outer region where fresh material is still arriving along threads of gas stretching between clusters. Nobody had measured that emission before. The gas turns out to be hotter, denser and poorer in heavy elements than the models say it should be.

Blazars are galaxies with a jet aimed almost directly at us, and they flicker across every part of the spectrum at once. Almost everything we think we know about them comes from short observing campaigns just a handful of days, every year or two, in one narrow band of energy. A Polish and German team has now done the opposite, following a single blazar for nearly twenty years with two orbiting observatories and in two observations from 2012 they found something in the spectrum that nobody had predicted.

Reading the atmosphere of another world means catching starlight as it filters through that planet's air during a transit. The signal is about one part in a million and a true Earth twin transits only once a year, so you cannot simply repeat the measurement until the noise averages away. Each attempt has to work on its own. A team led from Shanghai has proposed the alternative to building an impossibly large mirror in space - nine hundred, one metre telescopes, flying together, watching the same transit and analysing the light together.

Scientists using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) in Hawai'i have found a mechanism occurring on the Sun's surface that they think is heating our star's outer atmosphere. The process, called a Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability (KHI), could well be the root cause of a phenomenon called flux braiding that builds up and moves around on the Sun and heats the coronasphere. This discovery may well also explain the fundamental physics of similar activity at other stars.