China's Chang'e-4 mission grew the first plants on the Moon, and the results of the experiment could lead to lunar greenhouses someday!

On July 15th, 2023, astronomers discovered an asteroid 43 meters across, two days before it passed within a quarter of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. If it had struck the Earth, it would have impacted with 1.5 megatonnes of energy and caused significant local damage. Is there anything we could do to stop asteroids this size from causing damage, even if we have just hours or days of notice? Surprisingly, yes, with the "pulverize it" method.

In a recent bootlegged video, China provided a detailed look at their plans for the future of lunar exploration.

Astronomers are discovering that free-floating, rogue planets are common in the Milky Way. Hundreds were recently found in the Orion Nebula. Discovering the mechanism for these rogue planets is still a challenge. A new paper suggests that misaligned binary star systems are unstable shortly after formation, with more massive planets kicking out the smaller worlds. They predict that there should be many more low-mass planets out there to find as instruments improve.

Is the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way (SagA*) spinning? And how fast? It's tricky to know how fast a black hole is spinning without an accretion disk, but astronomers can estimate using polar outflows of material streaming from the black hole. Researchers observed the region around SagA* with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and estimated that it is spinning. In fact, it's spinning as quickly as the laws of physics will permit.