Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange "little red dots" (LRDs) in its infrared images. There are hundreds of these compact blobs at very high redshifts at distances of about 12 billion light-years. Astronomers think they began forming some 600 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them players in the infancy of the cosmos. They appear red in optical light and blue in the ultraviolet. So, what are these strange objects?

A spiral galaxy seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disc fills the view from corner to corner. Its disc is yellow near to the centre and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars, respectively. Thin brown clouds of dust, glowing pink spots of star formation, and sparkling blue patches filled with star clusters swirl through the galaxy. Behind it, small orange dots are very distant galaxies.

There’s a specific sequence in the anime Dragonball Z that for some reason has stuck in my head for over two decades. Goku, the main character of the show, travels to King Kai’s planet and can barely stand up when he arrives because the planet’s gravity is 10 times stronger than Earth’s. Over time, he trains in this gravity, and his body begins to adapt to it. Eventually, after leaving the planet, he’s stronger, faster, and more agile than he ever was before. But would that really happen if you were exposed to 10G over a long period of time? Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) decided to test that idea and report their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But instead of using anime characters, they used fruit flies as their test subjects.

Fifteen years after Western astronomers first discovered ‘buckyballs’ in space, they’re back with stunning images and rich data generated by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The results of their study have revealed the cosmic origin of these strange molecules.

You’re a long-necked Titanosaurs grazing the plains and chomping away on tree leaves about 100 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous in what would eventually become a future Starbucks location. You look up at the night sky and notice a bright dot that seems slightly larger and brighter than usual since you’ve seen it a bunch. You grunt at your cousin (official dinosaur language) asking if he notices it, too. Your cousin grunts back that it does seem bigger and brighter and wonders what’s up.

By the mid-20th century, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence would emerge as an established field of scientific research. The era witnessed the first experiments, and many of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of SETI were proposed during this time.

More than 300 million kilometres from the nearest mechanic, NASA's Curiosity rover found itself in a situation that would make any engineer break into a cold sweat. A rock got stuck to its drill and wouldn't let go. What followed was a week long, long distance rescue operation that says as much about the ingenuity of the people behind the machine as it does about the extraordinary challenges of exploring another world.

Astronomers are puzzling over another oddball on the edge of the solar system: This time, it's an icy object less than a quarter of Pluto's size with a thin atmosphere – a layer of gas that's not typically found around objects so small.

The Department of Defense has released a fresh batch of images and transcripts relating to reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs, including pictures and descriptions from NASA's Apollo missions to the moon.

Black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation, meaning their days are numbered. But a new study finds they could enter a metastable stage where they look similar to white holes.

Aerospace engineers have to consider numerous factors when designing a spacecraft, but one that comes up more and more often is the need to design against Micro-Meteoroids and Orbital Debris (MMOD). While most designers understand the threat, designing structural solutions capable of withstanding the hypervelocity impacts these undercontrolled pieces of material can cause can take a significant bite out of a mission’s mass budget. A new paper from Binkal Kumar Sharma of the University of Bremen and Harshitha Baskar, an independent researcher, provides a detailed review of cutting-edge options for defending against those deadly particles.

When researchers look up at the sky and wonder if we’re not alone, they also realize the origins of life here on Earth might hold the key to finding out. The chaotic chemical soup of our early world eventually led to the staggering complexity of modern life, but how exactly did it start? Proteins were one of the key ingredients in the early years, but we’re still only just discovering how these marvels of modern biology first managed to fold, function, and survive. A new review paper, The borderlands of foldability: lessons from simplified proteins, published recently in Trends in Chemistry, showcases how scientists are attempting to answer this question - by researching “simplified proteins”.

The history of SETI is long and varied, with countless contributions made by some of the most brilliant minds humanity has ever produced. In this series, we will look into the milestones and principles that have led the field to where it is today.

Somewhere out there, hurtling through space in the darkness, is an asteroid with our name on it. We just don't know which one yet. NASA's answer to that uncomfortable truth is NEO Surveyor, a purpose built infrared space telescope currently taking shape in laboratories across America, and scheduled for launch in 2027. The stakes, quite literally, could not be higher.

A team of researchers used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope together with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe almost 9,000 star clusters in four nearby galaxies. They studied younger clusters that were still embedded in their natal gas clouds, and older ones that had dissipated that gas. Their results show that more massive star clusters emerge more quickly from their birth, clearing away gas and filling the galaxy with ultraviolet light. The research presents a better understanding of star formation in galaxies, something lacking in scientific simulations, as well as how and where planets can form.

For years, when something happened on the far side of the Sun, we didn't know much, if anything about it. Sunspots could form there, flares could lash out and the corona could send masses of material out to space. However, we didn't know about any of this until those active regions rotated around to our view. In the late 1900s, scientists came up with a technique called helioseismology to analyze sound waves created by such activity as they echoed through the Sun.

New Curtin University-led research has used a radio telescope that spans the Earth to snap images that measure the immense power of jets from black holes, confirming scientists’ theories of how black holes help shape the structure of the Universe.

In-situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is our best bet for “living off the land” for a future Martian base, but tracking down those resources is no easy task. As of now, we have two options - send a rover to a specific location to scout it, or monitor it from orbit. Since rovers are expensive, and there are an absolute ton of sites that we would eventually want to scout, doing so from orbit would seem a better option. But monitoring for temperature, one of the most important orbital scans we can do, is notoriously blurry - based in part on the fact that most of the main instruments used to collect data on it are a few decades old. Now, a paper from researchers at Curtin University in Australia presented at the International Astronautical Congress meeting last September uses a fancy AI-like algorithm to improve that thermal resolution, and, as a result, provided a much better map to some of the most important resources we’ll be looking for.

Kepler and TESS showed us that there's a radius gap in the exoplanet population. There are very few planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii, according to the data. But new research shows that the gap may not be as significant as thought.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and a city on Mars is likely going to take even longer to build than Rome itself. At the time of the first Martian colonists, it is likely that the entirety of humanity’s industrial capacity, including the infrastructure to make critical materials like metals, will be based in the Earth-Moon system. While Mars has some iron, it also lacks many of the materials needed to make advanced materials, like boron and molybdenum. To alleviate that resource bottleneck, a new study, available in pre-print on arXiv and led by Serena Suriano and a team of researchers, offers a workaround that seems obvious in theory but difficult in practice - mine the necessary material from Main Belt asteroids.