The ESA's Euclid space telescope took 26 hours to capture this portrait of the Milky Way's central bulge. This isn't part of its primary mission; instead it's kind of like bonus science. It'll be used in the Roman Space Telescope's gravitational microlensing search for exoplanets. Regardless of the science, it's an impressive image.

For its first billion years the universe was lost in fog, a thick haze of hydrogen that swallowed light whole. Something burned it away, and astronomers have long wondered what. Now Hubble has caught a tiny, furious galaxy in the very act of clearing the murk, glimpsed as it was just 1.4 billion years after the big bang. It may be the smoking gun for how the universe first became clear.

Welcome to the final installment in the Fermi series, where we look at the impact that making contact with extraterrestrials could have and the rules governing how such an event should be treated.

A chip of zircon found in Western Australian rocks at a place called North Pole Dome revealed the age of Earth's oldest known impact crater. The team that found it was working on age-dating the crater, which is located in a region called the Pilbara Craton. They used mineral dating to pinpoint the exact time it was dug out by an impactor. Team lead Chris Kirkland from the Timescales of Minerals Systems Group within Curtin University's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the findings help resolve a longstanding question about the timing of the impact. The results of the team's analysis of several minerals at the site, along with zircon, indicated that the North Pole Dome impact occurred at 3.024 billion years ago (plus or minus a few million years).

Stars form inside molecular clouds where cold gas collapses gravitationally on itself. But there's more to this process than gravity. New research shows how magnetic field lines funnel gas through sub-filaments into star formation sites.

For a long time, astrophysicists thought that the Universe's first stars, called Population III stars, were uniformly massive. It seemed like the conditions they formed in were calm and serene, which favoured massive stars. But new research based on high-resolution simulations show that conditions were more chaotic than thought, and gas cloud turbulence means that Population III stars were not all massive. This affected the metallicity of the next stars to form.

Half the stars in the universe live in pairs and when one of them dies it can feed hungrily off the other in a slow, violent dance. Now a Korean team has caught a couple of stars breaking the rules, locked in an orbit so impossibly fast that our best theories of how stars grow old cannot account for it. So what is this dying star trying to tell us?

Twelve million light years away, a galaxy is living fast and burning bright, forging new stars ten times quicker than our own Milky Way in a frenzy that cannot possibly last. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has cut clean through its veil of dust to count an astonishing 16.5 million of its stars, one by one. So what is driving the Cigar Galaxy to burn so furiously?

A team of 14 researchers from the United States and Chile have found evidence of a subgiant star eating one of its planets. The star, called TOI-5882, was already known to astronomers because of its massive companion, a brown dwarf called TOI-5882 b. The companion may well have helped kick a planet onto a spiraling journey into the star.

Found in 2013, Pink Planet was too faint to study with ground-based telescopes. In new study, scientists used JWST and advanced processing methods to obtain its spectrum for the first time. Observations provided some of the first direct evidence for salt clouds in a cold object atmosphere. Pink Planet could be a giant planet or brown dwarf, so astronomers refer to it as a ‘planetary-mass companion’.

The JWST looked back in time and saw 6 galaxies merging into one. At the heart of the assembly, a supermassive black hole is lurking. It all happened when the Universe was only about 1.5 billion years old, and the red-shifted light is just reaching us now.

We’ve known for a long time that there are organic molecules on Mars. Rovers and landers keep turning them up wherever they look. But, “organic” simply means a molecule is made up of carbon and hydrogen atoms, not that it was created by life - there are plenty of non-biological processes that can create organic molecules. But there is one feature of organic molecules that can point very strongly in the direction of life or not - its chirality, and a new instrument on the Rosalind Franklin rover, planned for launch to Mars in the 2030s, just proved it can successfully look for it.

You’re the grillmaster at the annual family 4th of July BBQ and you’re sweating bullets standing over the grill in the sweltering summer heat. You’re trying to stay cool by pressing a cold beer can on your forehead, but to no avail. You can’t go inside because, once again, you’re the grillmaster and need to watch the food simmering on your freshly cleaned grill. Your brother-in-law is a university astronomy professor and walks over asking how you’re doing. You say, “This heat is killing me. I feel hotter than the barbeque!” Your science teacher brother-in-law slyly says, “Try being an exoplanet.” You roll your eyes.

The asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs also created an underground environment suited to supporting new life, and new research suggests it lasted for millions of years longer than previously suspected. While previous research showed the buried hydrothermal system of porous rock, hot water, and chemical nutrients may have lasted 2 million years, new research says it lasted for 8 million years.

Many of Earth's mass extinctions await clear explanations. We know an impact wiped out the dinosaurs, but what about the planet's other extinction events? New research says flybys of planetary mass objects could've been responsible.

Astronomers have discovered a huge reservoir of cold molecular gas, the direct fuel for star formation, in REBELS-25, a massive, star-forming galaxy.The team, led from ​​Leiden University, focused on REBELS-25, seen when the universe was only about 700 million years old, around 5% of its current age. Astronomers use “redshift” to describe this distance, which measures how much the universe’s expansion has stretched a galaxy’s light to redder wavelengths.

On 17 June at 09:21 local time (13:21 BST, 14:21 CEST) Ariane 6 flight VA269 soared to orbit from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana. 36 satellites for Amazon’s Leo constellation were placed into their orbit just over an hour after liftoff – the eighth successful mission insertion in a row for Europe’s newest rocket.

Astrophysicists have found what is likely the very first pair of sibling supernova remnants. One is the well-known Jellyfish Nebula, and the other was long thought to be hidden in the bright glare from the Jellyfish. The pair are connected by a bright filament of gas.

It feels like every few months we get to report on another academic paper coming out singing the praises of the Solar Gravitational SGL (SGL). Partly, this is due to Dr. Slava Turyshev’s astounding productivity in terms of pumping out academic articles, but partly because such a ground-breaking mission has lots of positive aspects, but also challenges that need to be addressed. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Turyshev, stresses an often overlooked feature of the SGL - how useful it can be at imaging things other than far away exoplanets.

A proposal to create a new network for monitoring cosmic threats to off-world infrastructure has won this year's Schweickart Prize, which recognizes bright ideas for planetary defense.