Scientists have discovered a crucial clue to understanding one of nature's most spectacular light shows, the aurora. Research from the University of Southampton reveals that just before these magnetospheric substorms erupt, a distinct pattern of low frequency radio waves appears above the aurora, radio emissions that surge in strength precisely as mysterious "auroral beads" transform into full storms. This radio signature, detected by spacecraft and ground observatories across multiple events, provides the first direct evidence of the physical processes triggering these dramatic celestial displays, and may explain similar phenomena occurring in the magnetospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.

Scientists at Southwest Research Institute have opened a new laboratory dedicated to answering one of astronomy's most fundamental questions, where do planets come from? The Nebular Origins of the Universe Research (NOUR) Laboratory will recreate the extreme conditions found in interstellar clouds, vast regions of ice, gas, and dust that existed before our Solar System formed to trace how these primordial materials ultimately evolved into the worlds we see today. By simulating the chemistry of pre-planetary environments in specialised vacuum chambers, researchers aim to understand how the building blocks of life, including the components of DNA and RNA, formed in the darkness of space billions of years ago.

A “House of Cards” is a wonderful English phrase that it seems is now primarily associated with a Netflix political drama. However, its original meaning is of a system that is fundamentally unstable. It’s also the term Sarah Thiele, originally a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, and now at Princeton, and her co-authors used to describe our current satellite mega-constellation system in a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv.

After the first protons and neutrons formed, after the first light elements formed, the universe…wasn’t really all that great.

Scientists have achieved an unprecedented view of the Sun by coordinating observations between two of the most powerful solar instruments ever built. For the first time, observations from the Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii and the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft have captured the same solar region simultaneously from different vantage points. This created a stereoscopic view that reveals intricate details of tiny "campfire" features scattered across the Sun's surface. These fleeting brightening, though individually small, occur in such vast numbers that they may collectively shape how the Sun's outer atmosphere is heated and how plasma erupts into space.

Astronomers have performed the deepest radio observations ever of Omega Centauri, searching for signs of an intermediate mass black hole thought to lurk at its center. Despite 170 hours of observations with the Australia Telescope Compact Array achieving unprecedented sensitivity, they detected absolutely nothing where the black hole should be. If an intermediate mass black hole exists in this massive star cluster, as suggested by fast moving stars discovered earlier this year, it must be accreting material at an extraordinarily low rate, barely feeding at all compared to other known black holes.

Researchers have discovered that a close encounter with a rogue planet or brown dwarf during the Sun's early years could have triggered the reshuffling of our Solar System's giant planets. Running 3000 simulations of stellar flybys, the team found that substellar objects passing within 20 astronomical units of the young Sun could destabilise the planets' orbits just enough to match their current configuration without destroying the delicate Kuiper belt. This flyby scenario represents a new possible explanation for one of the Solar System's defining events, with roughly a 1-5 percent probability depending on how common free floating planets actually are in young star clusters.

Astronomers at the University of Tokyo have used gravitational lensing to measure how fast the universe is expanding, adding weight to one of cosmology's most intriguing mysteries. Their technique exploits the way massive galaxies bend light from distant quasars, creating multiple distorted images that arrive at different times. The measurement supports recent observations showing the universe expands faster than predictions based on the early universe suggest, strengthening evidence that the "Hubble tension" represents genuine new physics rather than experimental error.

Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected the strongest evidence yet for an atmosphere on a rocky planet outside our solar system. Observations of the ultra-hot super-Earth TOI-561 b suggest that the exoplanet is surrounded by a thick blanket of gases above a global magma ocean.

Carl Sagan famously said that “We’re all made of star-stuff”. But he didn’t elaborate on how that actually happened. Yes, many of the molecules in our bodies could only have been created in massive supernovae explosions - hence the saying. Scientists have long thought they had the mechanism for how settled - the isotopes created in the supernovae flew here on tiny dust grains (stardust) that eventually accreted into Earth, and later into biological systems. However, a new paper from Martin Bizzarro and his co-authors at the University of Copenhagen upends that theory by showing that much of the material created in supernovae is captured in ice as it travels the interstellar medium. It also suggests that the Earth itself formed through the Pebble Accretion model rather than massive protoplanets slamming together.

The early universe was a very different place than today. And by “early” I don’t mean a billion or even ten billion years ago. The universe is about 13.77 billion years old, and when it was only a handful of seconds old, it was completely unrecognizable.

A new study, analyzing over 1,600 galaxies observed with Chandra over two decades, suggests that smaller galaxies do not contain supermassive black holes nearly as often as larger galaxies do.

In the early 20th century, after years of effort, Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity. This was a massive improvement in our understanding of gravity, giving us a sophisticated view into the inner workings of that fundamental force.

Tracking down resources on the Moon is a critical process if humanity decides to settle there permanently. However, some of our best resources to do that currently are orbiting satellites who use various wavelengths to scan the Moon and determine what the local environment is made out of. One potential confounding factor in those scans is “space weathering” - i.e. how the lunar surface might change based on bombardment from both the solar wind and micrometeroid impacts. A new paper from a researchers at the Southwest Research Institute adds further context to how to interpret ultra-violet data from one of the most prolific of the resource assessment satellites - the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) - and unfortunately, the conclusion they draw is that, for some resources such as titanium, their presence might be entirely obscured by the presence of “old” regolith.

Radio astronomers hunting for the faint whispers of the early universe face an unexpected threat from above: satellites designed to be silent are leaking radio noise into space. New research using the Murchison Widefield Array has set the first limits on unintended radio emissions from distant geostationary satellites, revealing that most remain mercifully quiet in the frequency range crucial for next-generation telescopes. The findings offer cautious hope that the Square Kilometre Array, set to become the world's most sensitive radio telescope, might avoid the radio pollution crisis now plaguing observations of low Earth orbit satellites.

Astronomers have been observing the Cosmic Owl for years, wondering if what they were seeing was a long-predicted runaway black hole. Now, 50 years after scientists first predicted the phenomenon, the JWST has provided the clinching evidence.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on 30 November with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument. At the time, the comet was about 286 million km from Earth. Hubble tracked the comet as it moved across the sky.

A new report identifies searching for life as the top science priority for humanity's first landing on Mars, ranking it above understanding water cycles, mapping geology, or even studying how the Martian environment affects astronaut health. The report outlines four possible exploration campaigns, with the highest ranked approach calling for missions totalling 330 sols at a single scientifically rich site where crews could investigate everything from ancient lava flows to active dust storms. By placing the search for extraterrestrial life at the centre of human Mars exploration, the report reimagines the first crewed mission not just as a milestone for spaceflight but as humanity's best chance to answer whether we're alone in the universe.

Let’s say you are transported back in time to some ancient culture. And along the way you somehow forget everything you knew about modern cosmology (don’t worry about the details, it’s just to get us going here, pretend if you have to that it’s a very strange and selective sort of amnesia introduced by the time traveling device).

The Hubble Tension is one of the great mysteries of cosmology. Solving it might require a fundamental change in how we understand the universe - but scientists have to prove it actually exists first. A new paper from a collective of cosmologist researchers known as the TDCOSMO Collaboration adds further fuel to that first with updated measurements of the “Late Universe” measurement of the Hubble Constant using gravitational lenses of quasars, which shows that the Tension might exist after all.