For decades, astronomers thought they knew that pulsars broadcast their signatight beams of radio waves fired from near the surface, close to the magnetic poles. A new study of nearly 200 of the fastest spinning pulsars in the universe has just turned that idea on its head. It turns out these extraordinary objects are broadcasting from two completely separate locations at once, and one of them lies right at the outer edge of their magnetic grip on space itself.

The Sun doesn't just pump out light and heat, it blasts a continuous stream of charged particles across the Solar System, and that solar wind is far more complex than it looks. Hidden within it are waves that act as invisible middlemen, constantly shuffling energy between particles as the wind expands outward. Now, thanks to the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter spacecraft, we have our clearest picture yet of how those waves behave close to the Sun itself.

Finding another Earth is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time and the biggest obstacle isn't the distance, it's the glare. An Earth like planet orbiting a Sun like star is ten billion times fainter than its host. A team of NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing a remarkable piece of optical wizardry that could solve the problem of seeing planets hidden by the stellar glare and they're already within striking distance of the performance needed to make it work.

Twelve million light years away, a galaxy is throwing a tantrum on a cosmic scale. M82, the Cigar Galaxy is forming stars at ten times the rate of our own Milky Way, and all that frenzied activity has been blasting superheated gas outward in a colossal wind stretching 40,000 light years. Scientists have long known the wind exists, but now, for the first time, they've measured exactly how fast it's moving and the answer raises as many questions as it answers.

Asteroids don’t get the love they deserve. They don’t get “cool points” because they’re not a planet or a potential life-harboring moon. They’re “just a bunch of rocks”. But asteroids are so much more, as they are time capsules of the early solar system that have survived billions of years untouched by weathering or plate tectonics. One of the most intriguing asteroids that has been explored is asteroid Bennu, and specifically how its physical characteristics greater differed from Earth-based observations in 2007 after NASA OSIRIS-REx spacecraft visited Bennu in 2018.

Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however, stable conditions that are conducive to life could exist far from any sun. A research team from the Excellence Cluster ORIGINS at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) has shown that moons around free-floating planets can keep their water oceans liquid for up to 4.3 billion years by virtue of dense hydrogen atmospheres and tidal heating—that is to say, for almost as long as Earth has existed and sufficient time for complex life to develop.

The criteria for finding an Earth-like planet unofficially comes down to two things: water and the habitable zone. But a phenomenon known as atmospheric escape often “escapes” the minds of many astronomy fans, and it turns out that atmospheric escape is one of the key characteristics for finding an Earth-like world. Although extensive research has been conducted on how the planet Mars might have lost its atmosphere, and potentially the ability to sustain life, how would the atmosphere enveloping a Mars-like exoplanet respond to stars different from our own?

On 12 November 2025, LIGO picked up a gravitational wave signal that stopped astronomers in their tracks. The object that produced it was too small to be any known type of black hole, smaller in fact, than our own Sun. If confirmed, it would be something that has never been directly detected before, a primordial black hole forged in the violent chaos of the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Now two astrophysicists believe they can explain exactly what LIGO found and why it could crack open one of the deepest mysteries in cosmology.

Water is the difference between a temporary visit and a permanent home. If humanity is serious about building a lasting presence on the Moon, finding usable ice near the lunar south pole isn't just a scientific curiosity, it's a practical necessity. Now NASA is sending a clever instrument that hunts for water without digging a single hole, using the behaviour of subatomic particles to sniff out hidden ice deposits up to three feet underground.

In September 2022, humanity crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid - on purpose. The objective of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was to see if we could intentionally modify the orbit of Dimorphos, the small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. According to all accounts, the mission worked spectacularly, but it was a one-way trip, so our ability to see what happened to the binary asteroid system has so far been limited to ground-based telescopes. That wasn’t good enough for the planetary defense community, so they planned a follow up mission called Hera, which, according to a recent press release from its operator, the European Space Agency (ESA), just successfully completed its most dramatic deep-space orbital maneuver.

A team led by Professor Mian Long from the Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, investigated the effects of space microgravity on cultured liver cells aboard the China Space Station.

Juno observations show that Jupiter's lightning, already known to be powerful, is far more energetic than thought. Lightning triggered by a stealth superstorm in 2021-22 could be up to one million times more powerful than terrestrial lightning.

It’s out. The top sci-fi draw of the year Project Hail Mary is now showing in a theater near you. The movie tells the tale of middle school teacher Ryland Grace, who is sent on a one way, last ditch mission to save humanity. The story is a refreshing take on first contact and just how different life out there could be… but are there real ‘Adrians’ or ‘Erids’ out there? A new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society identifies 45 rocky worlds with a potential for life, out of the currently 6,281 exoplanets known.

Douglas Adams famously told us the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42. Astronomers have been wrestling with their own version of that answer for years, except their number is the Hubble constant, a measure of how fast the universe is expanding, and nobody can agree what it is. Now a new study using ripples in spacetime as a measuring tools has produced a fresh value that might just help resolve one of the biggest arguments in modern cosmology.

Look up on a clear night and you can spot the distinctive 'W' shape of Cassiopeia with the naked eye. The middle star of that W, which has the catchy name of Gamma Cas, has been puzzling astronomers since 1866, and for the last fifty years it's been blazing with peculiar high energy X-rays that simply shouldn't be there. Now, thanks to a next generation space telescope with extraordinary precision, the mystery has finally been solved. The culprit is a hungry invisible companion, quietly feeding in the dark.

Venus is increasingly becoming a touch point for our studies of the exoplanets, as missions like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)and the upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) begin to characterize rocky exoplanets around other stars. Understanding the difference between the evolutions of Venus and Earth, which ended up with such different results, is a key to understanding whether we might be looking at an Earth-analogue or a hellish landscape like Venus. A new paper by Rodolfo Garcia of the University of Washington and his colleagues, which is available in pre-print form on arXiv, simulates Venus’ 4.5 billion year evolution as part of the solar system to try to understand some of those differences.

Astronomers have observed two planets forming in the disc around a young star named WISPIT 2. Having previously detected one planet, the team have now employed European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes to confirm the presence of another. These observations, and the unique structure of the disc around the star, indicate that the WISPIT 2 system could resemble our young Solar System.

With the ISS set to retire in 2030, several plans are in place to replace it. These include existing space stations, proposals by rising national space agencies, and commercial space stations. In terms of the commercial space sector, the plans are diverse and numerous.

NASA is serving up a double scoop of delicious Saturn imagery in two flavors — near-infrared from the James Webb Space Telescope, and visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Neptune has always been something of a puzzle. The distant ice giant sits tilted at an awkward angle, although not as extreme as Uranus, that astronomers have long struggled to explain. Now new research suggests the answer may have been lurking in its own backyard all along and the culprit is Triton, Neptune's strange, rebellious moon.