Researchers from the University of Oxford have uncovered evidence that Mars once hosted widespread, Earth-like magmatic systems deep beneath its surface – despite the planet lacking the plate tectonics long thought necessary for this kind of geological complexity. The findings, published June 26th in Nature Astronomy, reveal fascinating new possibilities for how rocky planets become habitable.

Giant mirrors in space have been a staple of science fiction for decades. But so far there’s been very little work looking at the actual physics behind the concept - possibly because we’re still so far from making them ourselves. Still, they could potentially serve as a passive technosignature, if we manage to find one. In order to do that, though, we have to understand what we’re looking for. That is the purpose of a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Shauna Sallmen of the University of Wisconsin - LaCrosse, and Eric Korpela of UC Berkeley.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is continuing to have a disruptive impact on ever more parts of humanity. But what does it mean in the long run? A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Austrian researcher Sergey Ivliev, extrapolates what the wide scale adoption of AI means for the future of humanity in space - and in particular what it means for the ultimate question of whether we’re truly alone in the galaxy or not.

When a star strays too close to a supermassive black hole, it is torn apart in a brief, brilliant flare, and astronomers long assumed that was the end of the story. It isn't. Using the Very Large Array to follow dozens of these stellar killings, a team has discovered that many black holes "burp" months or even years later, belching out streams of radio light as they fling part of their meal back into space. These delayed flares let astronomers watch a black hole's appetite change in real time, and reveal that even our Galaxy's quietest looking giants are messier, and far more active, than anyone realised.

The centre of the Milky Way is one of the most violent places in the Galaxy, a churning storm of gas moving faster than sound, and about the last spot you would expect a star to be born. Yet astronomers mapping that chaos with the ALMA telescope have stumbled on a hidden pocket of calm, where the gas slows, settles and quietly begins gathering itself into the seeds of new stars. The find suggests stars may take their first steps the same way everywhere, even here, and that our own Sun was likely born from just such an island of stillness, billions of years ago.

Astronomers have found two of the lightest worlds ever discovered, a pair of giant planets so wispy that, gram for gram, they are less dense than candy floss. Each is roughly the size of Jupiter yet holds almost nothing inside and the two circle the same distant star as siblings, locked in a gravitational dance that sees them tug one another off schedule as they orbit. It was observations from the depths of the Antarctic winter, that let astronomers weigh them and uncover just how astonishingly insubstantial they are. Now they want to know just how a planet ends up barely heavier than air at all.

Star formation is a major driver in galaxy evolution, right up there with the collisions and mergers that shape all galaxies. Researchers led by Ohio State University graduate student Debosmita Pathak, studied 18,000 star-forming regions in nearby spiral galaxies to get a better handle on the influence of starbirth.

Jupiter’s moon, Europa, has become high-value real estate for astrobiologists and the search for life beyond Earth. This is because the small moon, which is slightly smaller than Earth’s Moon, boasts a massive subsurface ocean of liquid water that scientists estimate contains about double the amount of water of all Earth’s oceans combined. As seen on Earth, water equals life, so scientists are eager to continue to explore Europa in any way possible to determine if it could harbor life as we know it, or even as we don’t know it.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features a galaxy cluster, called CL0016+1609 or MACS J0018.5+1626, that is very bright at X-ray wavelengths and is one of the most extensively studied clusters at X-ray and radio wavelengths. The X-ray observations of this cluster revealed that it is two clusters merging along our line of sight.

Researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory have confirmed that two long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) originated from the collapse of neutron stars into black holes.

The event horizon of a black hole should be impossible to study. It’s the point of no return, the boundary where gravity grows so strong that not even light can escape, so by definition nothing can carry word of it back to us. Yet a team of scientists have found a way to reach it and found a hidden signal, a faint trace, never read before, carrying information from the very edge of the horizon in the instant before it formed. From it they measured the new black hole's spin and surface gravity, and opened a fresh way to test whether Einstein's theory survives in the most extreme gravity there is.

Hot Jupiter exoplanets have completely changed how we look at the universe. This is because before the first exoplanet orbiting a Sun-like star was discovered in 1995, 51 Pegasi b, astronomers theorized every solar system looks just like ours: rocky planets orbiting close to the Sun and gas giants orbiting farther away. In contrast, 51 Pegasi b, whose mass is half of Jupiter and radius is about one-quarter larger, was found to orbit its star in just over 4 days.

Comets have play an interesting role in astronomy history. From antiquity, many cultures saw them omens or spirits, portending good or bad news for kings, queens, and emperors. Over the past few hundred years, however, astronomers have studied them intently to understand the science behind these visitors to the inner Solar System. Today we know that these ghostly apparitions in the sky are made of dirty balls of ice and rock blasting through space, scattering dust and gases as they go.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton may have found a supernova remnant near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. If confirmed as a supernova remnant, the ejected material is moving at about two million miles per hour and is about 1,700 years old.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope arrived June 21st, at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the start of final prelaunch preparations before liftoff later this summer.

For decades, scientists have searched for a clear link between the Sun’s explosive storms and the weather that occurs on Earth. A breakthrough study from the University of New Hampshire reveals that in the hours and days following a solar storm, parts of North America can see sharp changes in the weather — such as declines in precipitation — and the more powerful the storm, the more dramatic the shift. However, the exact mechanism behind the effects is still waiting for an explanation.

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express has captured part of Mars’s Mamers Valles: a fascinating valley system speckled with brief, tornado-like whirlwinds known as dust devils.

Astronomers have discovered a galaxy so unlike anything in the textbooks that the researcher who found it, after 25 years studying these objects, says he has never seen its equal. Named RAD-BAARG, it is falling supersonically into a distant cluster of galaxies and ploughing up a glowing arc of radio plasma nearly 1.8 million light years across, shaped uncannily like a bow and arrow. It offers astronomers their clearest view yet of a bow shock, a structure long predicted but almost never glimpsed. And in a final twist, the first person to spot it was not a professional at all, but a student combing through telescope data from a remote hillside in the Himalayas.

When Artemis II swept around the far side of the Moon this April, carrying the first humans beyond Earth orbit in more than fifty years, NASA had prepared its four astronauts for something more than flying the spacecraft. It had trained them to see. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen spent two years learning to read the Moon like field geologists, hunting through impact rocks in Labrador and volcanic ash in Iceland, so that when they finally gazed down on the terrain, they could describe its colours, shadows and history with a scientist's judgement. It’s a quiet revolution in what we send astronauts to the Moon to do, and a glimpse of how the next explorers will work when they finally land.

Uranus and Neptune remain two of the most mysterious objects in the solar system, primarily because they’ve only been visited by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Their “ice giant” moniker comes from longstanding hypotheses that their interiors are comprised of an icy mantle beneath their hydrogen/helium atmospheres. While Jupiter and Saturn are also comprised primarily of hydrogen and helium, Uranus and Neptune are hypothesized to have a layered structure comprised of icy elements within their interiors.

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.

Astronomers have detected a flickering quasar called J0439+1634 as it appeared only 850 million years after the Big Bang. That discovery raises fresh questions about black hole formation and activity in the early Universe. The flickering light of this distant cosmic lighthouse showed that black hole at the heart of the quasr has a flat, pancake-shaped accretion disk. That shape is more familiar in modern-day quasars, which leads astronomers to wonder how these objects formed so quickly in the infant cosmos?

The JWST found a galaxy cluster from 10 billion years ago that's far more developed than it should be, according to cosmological models. The cluster is also the most distant strong gravitational lens that we know of. Detailed observations across the spectrum show that the cluster is still undergoing mergers.

There are multiple ways to form black holes. The one most commonly taught in high school physics classes is that they are created from the collapse of a dying star. But there are another class of black holes, known as Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) that could have been created immediately after the Big Bang by matter collapsing in on it. Or that’s the theory at least. Though long theorized, we’ve never actually seen one of them, though scientists have suggested that they might account for the missing mass of the universe, which we otherwise describe as “dark matter”. But a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at Oakland University in Michigan and Rice University in Texas, calls that theory into question, at least for a certain type of PBH.

Understanding the Martian moon of Phobos’ origin hinges on decoding its interior. Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission due for launch in late 2026 should help.

A new pharmaceutical production method could allow astronauts on long space missions to "grow" fresh medicines on demand using plants. The work could also bring low-cost pharmaceutical production to resource-limited areas on Earth.

Current plans for flagship telescopes in the 2040s are focused on answering a simple question - are we alone? Our best telescopes to date, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have only given us tantalizing glimpses into the atmospheres or other worlds, but not enough to truly determine whether or not life as we know it exists there. Astronomers have been waiting for technology to catch up to their dreams of what is possible in terms of new types of telescopes, and recently the W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies released a report detailing the Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE) mission, which they hope will help provide a definitive answer to that simple question.

A small lump of rock pulled up from the Pacific Ocean seafloor in 1976 is giving scientists new clues about an ancient cosmic event. More than a hundred million years ago, two neutron stars collided. The resulting energetic kilonova sent a rain of long-lived elements, such as isotopes of plutonium, through space. Eventually, this stellar "debris" settled onto Earth. Some sank to the bottom of the ocean and got incorporated into a chunk of ferromanganese rock. Hidden inside were a few hundred atoms of plutonium radioisotopes. They provide the strongest clues about what created them in the merger and how long ago it happened.

Switch off fusion and, for ten thousand years, nothing happens. Then the Sun begins a slow, strange death: shrinking, briefly brightening, and coasting on gravitational heat for tens of millions of years. And the neutrinos give the whole thing away in just eight minutes.

A photon born in the Sun's core takes around 100,000 years to fight its way to the surface, bouncing through a random walk so inefficient that the light on your face is older than human civilization. Why the Sun's surface is a hundred-millennia-delayed broadcast.

We’re still in the definition phase of the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), but it seems like every week a new research group comes out with a paper helping to contribute to what is shaping up to be one of the most important space telescopes of the 2040s. A new paper from a team of researchers led by Daniel Jaffe of the University of Texas at Austin contributes to this ongoing definition work by arguing that it’s time HWO adopted a high-resolution near-IR spectroscopy capability, - which sounds great in practice, but so far hasn’t been attempted due to technological limitations. But, according to the paper, two recent inventions finally make a working version of an extremely high resolution exoplanet hunter viable.