For the first time, astronomers have mapped the three-dimensional atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star, revealing temperature variations and distinct atmospheric regions across an alien world 400 light years away. Using the James Webb Space Telescope to track minute changes in brightness as the scorching gas giant WASP-18b passed behind its star, scientists created a weather map of an exoplanet, transforming these distant worlds from featureless dots into environments we can actually study layer by layer. This new technique could soon map hundreds of other similar hot Jupiters, finally bringing alien atmospheres into focus as real places with their own geography and weather patterns.

Every kilogram of rocket fuel is dead weight once it’s burned, yet conventional spacecraft must carry hundreds, sometimes thousands of tons of propellant to reach even nearby planets. This fundamental limitation has confined humanity to our own Solar System for decades. But a new generation of propulsion concepts promises to break free from this constraint entirely, harnessing radiation pressure, solar wind, and planetary gravity to accelerate spacecraft without carrying a single drop of fuel. These elegant systems could finally make interstellar exploration feasible…if engineers can overcome their formidable technical challenges.

How does water form on exoplanets and what could this mean for the search for life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated the processes responsible for exoplanets producing liquid water. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life beyond Earth, and specifically which exoplanets could be viable future targets for astrobiology.

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto has forced astronomers to rewrite their textbooks — but that’s not all: In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, space scientist Les Johnson explains how New Horizons forced him to rewrite "Pluto," the final novel in Ben Bova's Grand Tour series.

Black holes are usually described as having an event horizon and a singularity, but there are alternative models that don't have these bothersome mathematical paradoxes.

So where do we go after years of empty searches for dark matter? We haven’t learned nothing.

How could the principle of “radical mundanity” proposed by the Fermi paradox help explain why humans haven’t found evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs)? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a lone researcher investigated the prospect for finding ETCs based on this principle. This study has the potential to help scientists and the public better understand why we haven’t identified intelligent life beyond Earth and how we might narrow the search for it.

The Vera Rubin Observatory saw first light in June 2025. Its images from that time are called the Virgo First Look images because they focus on the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. M61 is one of the galaxies in that cluster, and the VRO has detected a stellar stream of stars around the distant spiral galaxy in Rubin's images.

Astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia have created a stunning new radio colour image of the Milky Way. By mapping different radio frequencies to RGB colours, the image reveals large-scale astrophysical phenomena and gives researchers a new tool to understand the lifecycle of stars.

What if I told you that while you can’t see dark matter, maybe you can hear it?

We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime. According to a new paper by Leonard Schulz of the Technical University of Braunschweig and his co-authors, material from satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, especially transition metals, could have unforeseen consequences on atmospheric chemistry - and we’re now the biggest contributor of some of those elements.

Why is it important to know about exoplanets having their atmospheres stripped while orbiting F-type stars? This is what a recent study submitted to The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of scientists conducted a first-time investigation into atmospheric escape on planets orbiting F-type stars, the latter of which are larger and hotter than our Sun. Atmospheric escape occurs on planets orbiting extremely close to their stars, resulting in the extreme temperature and radiation from the host star slowly stripping away the planet’s atmosphere.

The gas giant’s early growth carved rings in the protoplanetary disk that surrounded our Sun billions of years ago. This process set the architecture for the inner Solar System and prevented Earth from spiraling into the Sun.

New research from Tel Aviv University reveals that the first stars in the Universe formed in binary systems. These stars played a vital role in the evolution of early galaxies, giving rise to black holes and seeding the Universe with the ingredients for life.

A tiny dim satellite galaxy of the Milky Way doesn't have enough stars to hold itself together. Its properties suggest that its dark matter halo is holding it together, but new research counters that. Researchers say that it's not dark matter but a massive black hole that's keeping the dwarf galaxy intact.

Current gravitational wave observatories can't see a range of frequencies known as mid-band. That could change with a new detector that uses a trick from atomic clocks.

As a kid you ever play that game Guess Who? If you haven’t, it’s actually kinda fun.

Lockheed Martin Skunk Works has executed the first test flight of the X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft in partnership with NASA. The first flight was subsonic, but eventually the plane will demonstrate technologies aimed at reducing sonic booms to gentle thumps.

Black holes are eating each other and growing fat on the remains! They then seem to move on, finding new partners to devour in what can only be described as a cycle of violence. Two gravitational wave detections from late 2024 have caught these “second generation" black holes in the act, one spinning so fast it ranks among the most extreme ever observed, the other rotating backwards. These aren't simple collisions between black holes born from dying stars, instead they're the products of earlier mergers now colliding again in crowded stellar neighbourhoods, carrying the scars and strange spins of their violent pasts into the fabric of spacetime itself.

A giant spider sprawls across space, its three light year legs stretching into the cosmos powered by a star in its death throes. The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the Red Spider Nebula in stunning new detail, revealing not just the spectacular structure of a dying Sun like star, but also hints of a hidden companion influencing the show. What appeared faint and unremarkable in previous observations now blazes with infrared light, exposing hot dust shrouding the central star and fast moving jets of ionized iron creating ripples through expelled stellar material.

I tour a science show around the UK and have often fancied a flame thrower based demo, theatres are not so keen though. Imagine the Sun as a flamethrower in its youth, hurling solar storms and plasma bombs into space with incredible ferocity. Scientists have just witnessed what those ancient events might look like by observing a young star similar to our infant Sun, and the findings are both alarming and fascinating. Using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground observatories across three countries, researchers captured a two stage plasma eruption far more powerful than anything we see from the modern Sun, the kind of violence that may have either destroyed early life on Earth or surprisingly made it possible in the first place.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is slated to be the next Great Observatory for the world. Its main focus has been searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-like exoplanets. However, to do that, it will require a significant amount of effort with only a coronagraph, the currently planned primary instrument, no matter how powerful that coronagraph is. As new paper from Fabien Malbet of the University of Grenoble Alpes and his co-authors suggest an improvement - add a second instrument to HWO’s payload that will be able to astrometrically track planets down to a precision of .5 micro-arcseconds (µas). That would allow HWO to detect Earth-size planets around hundreds of nearby stars - dramatically increasing the number of potential candidates for atmospheric analysis.

Can water-rich exoplanets survive orbiting white dwarf stars, the latter of which are remnants of Sun-like stars? This is what a recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the likelihood of small, rocky worlds with close orbits to white dwarfs could harbor life. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life as we know it, or don’t know it, and where to find it.

A team of scientists has released a new survey mapping massive galaxy clusters, some of the largest structures in the universe, to test whether our fundamental understanding of the laws of the universe need revision. The analysis, using six years of Dark Energy Survey data, addresses an ongoing debate about whether the universe has more structure than our best models predict, ultimately reinforcing that our current rules remain accurate while demonstrating that galaxy clusters provide a powerful independent method for probing the universe's deepest mysteries.

Astronomers have created the first large scale map of dark molecular gas in the Milky Way, revealing vast networks of invisible star forming material that have so far have remained undetected. Using the Green Bank Radio Telescope to observe faint signals from carbon, the research team has finally started to uncover one of astronomy's biggest mysteries. Their discovery uncovers turbulent flows of gas moving faster than expected and show how raw galactic matter transforms into the molecular clouds where stars are born.

A new study has reviewed how space habitat designs have evolved from inflatable bubbles to 3D-printed structures built from Martian dust. The research traces how engineers have wrestled with extreme temperatures, the bombardment of radiation, and the challenge of building on worlds without breathable air, transforming each obstacle into solved problems with innovative ideas and designs that could soon house the first permanent residents of the Moon and Mars.

Everyone’s favorite interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS isn’t really hiding near perihelion this week, as amateur astronomers reveal. Don’t believe the breathless ballyhoo that you’re currently reading around the web about interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS. In a clockwork Universe, comets are the big wildcard, and interstellar comets doubly so. This particular comet is scientifically interesting enough in its own right, no alien interlopers needed.

In the 1970’s Vera Rubin didn’t set out to upend modern cosmology.

Asteroids spin. Most of them do so rather slowly, and up until now most theories of asteroid rotation have failed to explain exactly why. A new paper from Wen-Han Zhou at the University of Tokyo and his co-authors might finally be able to fully explain that mystery as well as a few others related to asteroid rotation. Their work was presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in late September and could impact our understanding of how best to defend against a potentially hazardous asteroid.

Could scientists find life in the clouds of exoplanet atmospheres? This is what a recently submitted manuscript hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how the biosignatures of microbes could be identified in exoplanet atmospheres and clouds. This study has the potential to help scientists develop new methods for finding life on exoplanets, either as we know it or even as we don’t know it.

A team led by a University of Maryland astronomer detected large complex organic molecules in ices outside of the Milky Way for the first time, offering a glimpse into the chemistry of the early universe.

We cannot see directly beyond the cosmic microwave background, which means we can't directly observe the first 380,000 years of the Universe. But there are indirect ways we might observe this period.

Satellites orbiting Earth face a constant assault from highly reactive single atom of oxygen which are created when solar radiation splits oxygen molecules in the upper atmosphere. These atoms don't just create drag that pulls spacecraft back to Earth, they also bind to satellite surfaces, causing corrosion that limits most satellites to roughly five year lifespans. A team of engineers at the University of Texas at Dallas have been developing a protective coating using techniques borrowed from microelectronics and optical manufacturing to counter the effects. The process the team have developed enables satellites to withstand conditions even harsher than those found in space. If successful, this coating could not only extend satellite lifetimes but enable spacecraft to operate in very low Earth orbit, a region currently too hostile for most missions.

Astronomers have discovered a clever way to make a single telescope capture sharper details than should be physically possible. The technique involves feeding starlight through a special optical fibre called a photonic lantern. Anyone else thinking of a certain glowing green lantern from a movie? Alas not, instead of special powers, it splits light according to its spatial patterns like separating a musical chords into individual notes. The researchers achieved resolution that has never been achieved before without linking multiple telescopes together. When they tested the technique on a star 162 light-years away, they not only proved it works but stumbled upon an unexpected discovery, that the star's surrounding gas disc is mysteriously lopsided.

The famous Tycho supernova of 1572, witnessed by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, didn't explode in empty space as has been assumed. New analysis reveals it detonated inside a planetary nebula, the ghostly shell of gas expelled by an earlier dying star. The evidence lies in two "ear" shaped structures that were sticking out from the remnant's main shell, matching similar features in three other supernovae previously identified as explosions within planetary nebulae. This discovery supports the "core-degenerate" model where a white dwarf star merges with a companion star's core, with the explosion occurring hundreds of thousands of years later while the nebula remains intact. Most strikingly, if Tycho follows this pattern, it suggests that 70-90% of normal Type Ia supernovae may actually be supernovae inside planetary nebulae!

In a recent paper, a team of researchers proposes how humanity may someday relocate its entire civilization near the center of our galaxy to take advantage of the relativistic effects of the supermassive black hole there. They also indicate how other advanced civilizations could have done so already.

How can artificial intelligence (AI) help astronomers identify celestial objects in the night sky? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the potential for using AI to conduct astrophysical surveys of celestial events, including black holes consuming stars or even exploding stars themselves. This study has the potential to help astronomers use AI to enhance the field by reducing time and resources that have traditionally been used to scan the night sky.

On Monday, Chinese company LandSpace executed a static-fire test with its 217-foot-tall Zhuque-3, a reusable rocket that China hopes will rival SpaceX. The rocket is on the way to its inaugural test flight expected at some point later this year.

Astronomers have found a new super-Earth only about 20 light years away. At that distance, it's a candidate for direct imaging.

The Universe is a strange place. The X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) orbiting observatory recently highlighted this fact, when it was turned on a pulsar to document its powerful cosmic winds. The discovery comes courtesy of ESA’s Resolve instrument, a soft X-ray spectrometer aboard XRISM. The study looked at neutron star GX 13+1. This is a strong X-ray source located in the constellation Sagittarius, very near the galactic plane towards the core of our galaxy. GX 13+1 is about 23,000 light-years distant.

Driving on the Moon for the first time has got to be an exhilarating experience. But driving the same path on the Moon for the 500th time probably won’t be nearly as exciting to whatever poor astronaut got stuck with that duty for the day. With that in mind, a team of researchers led by PhD student Alec Krawciw and Professor Tim Barfoot of the University of Toronto are working on a way to automate the mundane task of driving goods back and forth from a lunar landing site to a nascent lunar exploration base.

Are we alone? It’s probably one of the, if not the most basic questions of human existence. People have been trying to answer it for millennia in one form or another, but only recently have we gained the tools and knowledge to start tractably trying to estimate whether we are or not. Those efforts take the form of famous tools like the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation, but there’s always room for a more nuanced understanding. A new paper in Acta Astronautica from Antal Veres of the Hungarian University of Agriculture introduces a new one - The Solitude Zone.

Threats from space aren’t always obvious, but statistically its only a matter of time before one of them happens. One of the most concerning for many space experts is a massive solar storm, like the one that literally lit telegraph paper on fire when it hit back in 1859. In the last 150 years our technology has improved by leaps and bounds, but that also means it's much more susceptible to damage if another event like the “Carrington Event”, as the storm in 1859 is called. Estimates for potential damage range into the trillions of dollars, with full economic recovery taking well over a decade if something isn’t done to mitigate the damage beforehand. As part of that preparedness, the European Space Agency (ESA) has started requiring the operational crew of new satellites, which would be on the frontlines of any solar storm catastrophe, to simulate how they would handle such an event, as described in a recent press release focused on one of those simulations.

A new study has revealed how phosphorus, a nutrient essential for photosynthesis, surged into ancient oceans and started Earth's first major rise in atmospheric oxygen more than 2 billion years ago.

Acting NASA chief Sean Duffy announces that NASA's plan to land astronauts on the Moon by 2027 is no longer achievable and announces new competitions to develop a lunar lander.

The chemistry of a galaxy changes over time as generations of stars live and die, spreading the results of their nucleosynthesis out into space. But stars with different masses produce different elements, and these stars have different lifespans. That means that over time, the materials readily available for planet formation also change.

Astronomers working with the JWST, along with help from the Hubble, have found a red supergiant star that eventually exploded as a supernova. The discovery helps solve the 'red supergiant problem' that confounds efforts to understand how these stars serve as progenitors that eventually explode as Type II supernova.

Dark matter could tint light passing through it, depending on the model. While the effect is tiny, it is just on the edge of our ability to detect it.

For the first time, astronomers have managed to capture a radio image showing two black holes orbiting each other. The observation confirmed the existence of black hole pairs. In the past, astronomers have only managed to image individual black holes.

Astronomers have detected an extremely fast asteroid in the blinding light of the Sun. Objects are extremely difficult to discern in the Sun's glare, but these 'twilight' asteroids could pose a threat to Earth. It's important that we find them all.