When two black holes collide and merge, they release gravitational waves. These waves can be detected by sensitive instruments on Earth, allowing scientists to determine the mass and spin of the black holes. The clearest black hole merger signal yet, named GW250114 and recorded by LIGO in January 2025, offers new insights into these mysterious objects.

NASA says we now know of 6,000 confirmed exoplanets. At first there was just a trickle of discoveries. But the pace has quickened and shows no signs of slowing down.

New research shows that the purported water world K2-18b isn't a marine world with a deep ocean. In fact, so-named Hycean worlds may not exist at all. But on the bright side, Earth's water content may not be unusual.

Subtle astronomical events can still produce memorable scenes, hidden away in distant locales. Such a spectacle goes down on Sunday/Monday, September 21st/22nd, with a partial solar eclipse. Although the eclipse only skims the southernmost portion of the South Pacific, viewers along the eastern coast of Australia, Antarctica and all of New Zealand will see an unforgettable sight, as a partially-eclipsed Sun rises out of the sea.

Hayabusa 2 may need to alter its visit to its next target. VLT observations show that the asteroid 1998 KY26 is three times smaller than thought and spinning much more rapidly.

Before we get to Mars, we’re going to have to practice. And develop radical leaps in technology, but also practice.

Exoplanet surveys are useful for more than just astrobiology or increasing the tally of known planets in other solar systems. They can also help us understand the evolution of planetary systems themselves. That’s what a new paper from researchers led by astronomers at the University of Geneva and published in Astronomy & Astrophysics attempts to do - by looking at a large population of “exo-Neptunes” they are attempting to understand the intricacies of how planetary systems are formed.

Researchers have dated the appearance of microbial life in a 78 million year old impact crater. Life colonized the fractured hydrothermal system the impact created, and thrived for millions of years. It could do the same on other worlds.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged an extremely large and symmetric protostellar jet at the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy. From tip to tip, this protostellar jet is 8 light-years across, about double the distance from our Sun to its closest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri.

You know, if you take away the lack of air and water, the weaker Sun, the lower gravity, and the toxic soil, Mars isn’t all that bad of a place to live.

It seems like most of the planets have fled the evening scene. But that’s about to change this week. Saturn reaches opposition on Sunday, September 21st, passing closest to the Earth at just over 8.5 Astronomical Units (AU) or 1.3 billion kilometers distant, and rising opposite to the setting Sun. This marks the best time to view the ringed world, as it dominates the night sky from sunset until sunrise.

When considering the unnamed major features of all the moons, asteroids, and comets in our solar system there are still a lot of places out there that need proper names. That means the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the non-governmental body responsible for naming astronomical objects, has its work cut out for them. Recently they tackled a relatively easy challenge by approving a series of names on the asteroid Donaldjohnson, the first and only target of NASA’s Lucy mission in the main asteroid belt. With those names come a whole new way to talk about one of the asteroids that humanity has studied most closely thus far.

Earth has a new co-moving neighbour. It's a new member of the group of asteroids that follow Earth-like orbits and are called quasi-satellites. Together, they constitute an asteroid belt.

Here we fly through Gaia’s new 3D map of stellar nurseries. This new map includes 3D-views of the Gum Nebula, the North American Nebula, the California Nebula, and the Orion-Eridanus superbubble. It allows us to fly around, through, and above these areas containing stellar nurseries. At the end of the animation, we arrive at our Sun.

Blue Origin's breakthrough in-space resource utilization system aims to turn lunar regolith into solar arrays, metals, and breathable and propellant-grade oxygen, enabling sustainable robotic and human Moon missions and future Mars exploration.

A swarm of fragments from an air burst comet could've triggered the Younger Dryas cooling period. A wave of megafauna extinctions followed, as did the disappearance of the Clovis culture.

One possibility to explain the constants of nature is that there’s more than one universe.

Sometimes, it seems as if the Universe is literally smiling down upon us. If skies are clear this coming Friday September 19th, be sure to wake up early to catch a bizarre celestial scene as Venus, Regulus and the slim crescent Moon huddle together in the eastern dawn. This triple play is a complicated one, evolving one of the best conjunctions for 2025.

Gaia Proves Our Skies Are Filled with Chains of Starry Gatherings Gaia Proves Our Skies Are Filled with Chains of Starry Gatherings https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia/Gaia_proves_our_skies_are_filled_with_chains_of_starry_gatherings

There are plenty of theories about what dark matter is and how it might be gravitationally affecting the universe. However, proving those theories out is hard since it hardly ever interacts with anything, especially on “small” scales like galaxies. So when a research team claims to have found evidence for dark matter in our own galaxy, it's worth taking a look at how. A new paper from Dr. Surkanya Chakrabati and her lab at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) does just that. They found evidence for a dark matter “sub-halo” in the galactic neighborhood, by looking at signals from binary pulsars.