After five years of development and a nail biting launch from Antarctica, the PUEO experiment has completed a 23 day balloon flight at the edge of space, hunting for some of the most energetic particles in the universe. The instrument flew at 120,000 feet above Antarctica, using the entire continent as a detector to search for ultra high energy neutrinos, elusive particles that could reveal secrets about the universe’s most violent events. Now safely back on the ice with 50-60 terabytes of data, scientists are preparing to search through the results to see if they’ve caught these messengers from distant galaxies.

Astronomers have solved the mystery of a star that dimmed dramatically for nearly 200 days, one of the longest stellar dimming events ever recorded. The culprit appears to be either a brown dwarf or a super Jupiter with an enormous ring system, creating a giant saucer like structure that blocked 97% of the star’s light as it passed in front. This rare alignment offers scientists a unique opportunity to study planetary scale ring systems far beyond our Solar System.

New research has revealed that Mars’ most recent volcanoes weren’t formed by simple, one off eruptions as scientists previously thought. Instead, these volcanic systems evolved over millions of years, fed by complex underground magma chambers that changed and developed over time. By studying surface features and mineral signatures from orbit, researchers have pieced together a far more intricate volcanic story than anyone expected.

A recent study, led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA and using modelling techniques developed at the University of Oxford, has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a nearby galaxy, thanks to observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The work, published in Nature Astronomy, provides new insights into how complex organic molecules and carbon are processed in some of the most extreme environments in the Universe.

On Feb.11th, China successfully conducted a low-altitude demonstration and verification flight test of the Long March-10 rocket and a maximum dynamic pressure escape test of the Mengzhou crewed spaceship system. Credit: Xinhua]

On 14 January, 2025, two colliding black holes sent the clearest gravitational wave signal ever recorded rippling across the universe to Earth’s detectors. This remarkably crisp signal, designated GW250114, has allowed physicists to conduct the most stringent test yet of Einstein’s general relativity by measuring multiple “tones” from the collision. The wave passed the test with flying colours, but researchers remain optimistic that future detections might finally reveal where Einstein’s century old theory breaks down, potentially offering the first glimpses of quantum gravity.

Astronomers have discovered a massive galaxy cluster assembling itself just one billion years after the Big Bang, there’s just one problem… it shouldn’t exist! Current models suggest it shouldn’t have formed when it did, Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope working in tandem, scientists spotted JADES-ID1, a protocluster containing at least 66 galaxies wrapped in a vast cloud of million degree gas forming during what should have been the universe’s infancy.

The Amaterasu particle was detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment in the U.S. It is the second-highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed, carrying around 40 million times more energy than particles accelerated at the Large Hadron Collider. Such particles are exceedingly rare and thought to originate in some of the most extreme environments in the universe.

The universe is a big place, and tracking down some of the more interesting parts of it is tricky. Some of the most interesting parts of it, at least from a physics perspective, are merging black holes, so scientists spend a lot of time trying to track those down. One of the most recent attempts to do so was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration. While they didn’t find any clear-cut evidence of continuous gravitational waves from merging black hole systems, they did manage to point out plenty of false alarms, and even disprove some myths about ones we thought actually existed.

Eclipse season is nigh. The first of two eclipse seasons for 2026 kicks off next week on Tuesday, February 17th, with an annular solar eclipse. And while solar eclipses often inspire viewers to journey to the ends of the Earth in order to stand in the shadow of the Moon, this one occurs over a truly remote stretch of the world, in Antarctica.

Ancient trees hold secrets about the most violent storms our Sun has ever unleashed, catastrophic bursts of radiation that dwarf anything modern civilisation has experienced. Scientists have discovered radioactive carbon signatures frozen in tree rings from solar storms so powerful they could cripple our satellite networks and power grids today.

Every so often (in geologic time) Earth's magnetic field does a flip. The north and south magnetic poles gradually trade places in a phenomenon called a geomagnetic reversal. Scientists long thought this happened every ten thousand years or so. However, new evidence from deep ocean cores show that at least two ancient reversals didn't follow that script. One took about 18,000 years to flip and the other took 70,000 years. Such lengthy time lapses could have seriously affected Earth's atmospheric chemistry, climate, and evolution of life forms during the Eocene period of geologic history.

In a new study, researchers say that non-biological sources they considered could not fully account for the abundance of organic compounds in a sample collected on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover.

Several years ago, an automated sky survey spotted a distant supermassive black hole that tore apart a star. The star that got too close, and the resulting tidal disruption event released a lot of energy. But the SMBH is exhibiting a strong case of cosmic indigestion, and has been burping out the remains of the star for four years. And it keeps getting brighter and brighter.

Astronomers want to collect as much data as possible using as many systems as possible. Sometimes that requires coordination between instruments. The teams that run the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the upcoming Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (Ariel) missions will have plenty of opportunity for that once both telescopes are online in the early 2030s. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from the Ariel-JWST Synergy Working Group details just how exactly the two systems can work together to better analyze exoplanets.

DOI: arXiv:2602.04840 | arXiv:2602.04840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope (EXCITE) is a balloon-borne mission dedicated to measuring spectroscopic phase curves of hot Jupiter-type exoplanets. Phase curve measurements can be used to characterize an exoplanet's longitude-dependent atmospheric composition and energy circulation patterns. EXCITE carries a 0.5 m primary mirror and moderate resolution diffraction-limited spectrograph with spectral coverage from 0.8--3.5 um. EXCITE is...

NASA’s Magellan Mission to Venus is the gift the keeps on giving, providing Italian researchers with the first solid detection of a massive subsurface lava tube on Venus. They detail their findings in a new paper appearing in the journal Nature Communications.

The commercial space giant SpaceX, which Elon Musk founded in 2002 to build a self-sustaining city on Mars, is no longer focusing on the Red Planet. According to a recent statement on X, SpaceX is now pivoting to the Moon as its intended destination for a human settlement.

In a clockwork predictable Universe, comets and how they will ultimately perform is always a big wild card. A new sungrazer comet discovered at the start of this year has given astronomers pause. C/2026 A1 MAPS could put on a memorable if brief show in early April, if it doesn’t join the long list of comets that failed to live up to expectations.

Sending a mission to the Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) is the most effective way of actually directly imaging a potentially habitable planet, as well as its atmosphere, and even possibly some of its cities. But, the SGL is somewhere around 650-900 AU away, making it almost 4 times farther than even Voyager 1 has traveled - and that’s the farthest anything human has made it so far. It will take Voyager 1 another 130+ years to reach the SGL, so obviously traditional propulsion methods won’t work to get any reasonably sized craft there in any reasonable timeframe. A new paper by an SGL mission’s most vocal proponent, Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, walks through the different types of propulsion methods that might eventually get us there - and it looks like we would have a lot of work to do if we plan to do it anytime soon.