Astronomers have found a candidate Jellyfish Galaxy only about 5 billion years after the Big Bang. This is earlier than expected, since the ram pressure stripping responsible for it wasn't thought to be possible so early in the Universe's history. The galaxy could explain the puzzling "Red Nugget" galaxies, but first it has to be confirmed.

The early Universe was a busy place. As the infant cosmos exanded, that epoch saw the massive first stars forming, along with protogalaxies. It turns out those extremely massive early stars were stirring up chemical changes in the first globular clusters, as well. Not only that, many of those monster stars ultimately collapsed as black holes.

We know galaxies by their powerful illumination, generated by multitudes of stars. But some galaxies can be very dim. These are hypothesized to be dark galaxies, or dark matter galaxies. They're theoretical, and only candidates have been identified, but researchers may have confirmed the very first one.

Lunar dust remains one of the biggest challenges for a long-term human presence on the Moon. Its jagged, clingy nature makes it naturally stick to everything from solar panels to the inside of human lungs. And while we have some methods of dealing with it, there is still plenty of experimentation to do here on Earth before we use any such system in the lunar environment. A new paper in Acta Astronautica from Francesco Pacelli and Alvaro Romero-Calvo of Georgia Tech and their co-authors describes two types of flexible Electrodynamic Dust Shields (EDSs) that could one day be used in such an environment.

Just a few hundred light-years from Earth, the famous variable star Mira A is huffing and puffing its outer layers to space. Its most recent mass-loss event ejected more material at higher velocity than in past events. A team of astronomers led by Theo Khouri, Chalmers University in Sweden discovered two large clouds of material expanding away from Mira A in observations done by the Very Large Telescope and ALMA telescopes in South America in 2015 and 2023. Those clouds form two lobes of a cosmic "heart" shape surrounding the star. That structure is basically a cloud of dust at the edges, filled by gas from the star.

There’s been plenty in the news about 3I/ATLAS over the course of the past 8 months. Our third confirmed interstellar visitor went behind the Sun during its closest approach, but reemerged in December with plenty of eyes watching it. Papers describing what it looks like following its closest brush with the power of a star in probably billions of years are starting to come out, including a new one available in pre-print on arXiv from Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University and his co-authors, which shows how much the comet - and it is definitely a comet - has changed in the matter of only a few months.

We know that supermassive black holes can inhibit star formation in their galaxies. But new research and JWST observations show that the most luminous quasars can actually suppress star formation in neighbouring galaxies. SMBH may have played a more pronounced role in shaping the early Universe than previously thought.

When we think of ice on Mars, we typically think of the poles, where we can see it visibly through probes and even ground-based telescopes. But the poles are hard to access, and even more so given the restrictions on exploration there due to potential biological contamination. Scientists have long hoped to find water closer to the equator, making it more accessible to human explorers. There are parts of the mid-latitudes of Mars that appear to be glaciers covered by thick layers of dust and rock. So are these features really holding massive reserves of water close to where humans might first step foot on the Red Planet? They might be, according to a new paper from M.A. de Pablo and their co-authors, recently published in Icarus.

The Milky Way's center is densely-packed with stars and there should be abundant pulsars there. But for some reason, we can't find them. New research presents a candidate pulsar in the GC. It's close enough to the Milky Way's supermassive black hole that it can test Einstein's General Relativity. But first, it has to be confirmed.

NASA said Tuesday it will now target a March launch of its new moon rocket after running into exasperating fuel leaks during a make-or-break test a day earlier.

New research presents a timeline for recent (astronomically speaking) events in the Saturnian system. It shows that Titan collided with a proto-Hyperion, and the collision smoothed Titan's surface while some of the debris accreted onto a new Hyperion and also created Saturn's rings. The research can also explain some of the Saturnian system's other unusual characteristics.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk now says he wants to build a city on the moon before building a city on Mars. Is either scenario realistic? In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, biologist Scott Solomon, the author of a new book titled "Becoming Martian," does a reality check on humanity's prospects for living on other worlds.

Results are coming out from the samples returned by China’s Chang’e-6 sample return mission to the far side of the Moon. They offer our first close-up look at the geology and history of the far side, and a recent paper published in Science Advances from researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has very interesting insights about the impact history of the Moon itself, and even some for the solar system at large.

Using local resources will be key to any mission to either the Moon or Mars - in large part because of how expensive it is to bring those resources up from Earth to our newest outposts. But Mars in particular has one local resource that has long been thought of as a negative - perchlorates. These chemicals, which are toxic to almost all life, make up between 0.5-1% of Martian soil, and have long been thought to be a hindrance rather than a help to our colonization efforts for the new planet. But a new paper from researchers at the Indian Institute of Science and the University of Florida shows that, when making the bricks that will build the outpost, perchlorates actually help.

According to the researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, some of the amino acids found in the asteroid Bennu likely formed in a different way than was previously thought, effectively challenging what we thought we knew about the origins of life.

A complex web of interrelated factors make Earth a life-supporting planet, and some of those factors are chemical. New research shows how oxygen abundance regulates the availability of the important chemicals phosphorous and nitrogen on planets, and that few planets get it right. While discouraging, it could help us optimize our search for habitable worlds.

The Moon has a busy next two weeks ahead of it. Fresh off of Tuesday’s annular solar eclipse, the Moon begins an evening tour of the planets in the last half of February 2026. The waxing Moon actually slides by every planet except Mars over the next week. As a highlight, the waxing crescent Moon actually occults the planet Mercury in a rare celestial event on the night of Wednesday, February 18th.

Dark energy is one of those cosmological features that we are still learning about. While we can’t see it directly, we can most famously observe its effects on the universe - primarily how it is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. But recently, physicists have begun to question even that narrative, pointing to results that show the expansion isn’t happening at the same rate our math would have predicted. In essence, dark energy might be changing over time, and that would have a huge impact on the universe’s expansion and cosmological physics in general. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Dr. Slava Turyshev, who is also famously the most vocal advocate of the Solar Gravitational Lens mission, explores an alternative possibility that our data is actually just messy from inaccuracies in how we measure particular cosmological features - like supernovae.

The smell of rotten eggs has solved one of exoplanet science's most persistent mysteries. Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have detected hydrogen sulfide gas in the atmospheres of four massive Jupiter like planets orbiting the star HR 8799, marking the first time this molecule has been identified beyond our Solar System. The discovery settles a long standing debate about whether these enormous worlds are truly planets or failed stars called brown dwarfs because the sulfur had to come from solid matter accreted during planet formation, not gas!

The third interstellar object detected in our Solar System (3I/ATLAS) has a unique and continually unfolding story to tell of its nature and origin. In a recent paper, scientists from the i4is show how a spacecraft performing a Solar Oberth Manoeuvre (SOM) could intercept 3I/ATLAS to learn its secrets.