New Comet P1 Nishimura graces the August dawn sky...but how bright will it get?

An image taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's MRO shows evidence of past glaciers away from Mars' polar regions.

The Milky Way and Andromeda are set to collide in a few billion years but are still over two million light-years apart. Cosmologically, this is right next door, but it could still be far enough to measure the effect of dark energy, which is pushing back on the galaxies coming together. According to a new study, the movement of the two galaxies towards each other could give an upper limit on the cosmological constant model of dark energy. Other merging pairs of galaxies could provide more data and help refine the measurements.

NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft has completed its flybys of Pluto and Arrakoth and is now about 8 billion kilometers from Earth. Although astronomers are looking for another Kuiper Belt target, they can send it towards; the spacecraft is perfectly positioned to look at the Universe itself. At such a great distance, the spacecraft is beyond the dust that causes light pollution in the inner Solar System, darker than the darker skies on Earth. This unique vantage point will measure just how dark the Universe is.

Astronomers have confirmed the age of Maisie's galaxy, which existed when the Universe was just 390 million years old, making it one of the earliest ever seen.

This year's Penn State SETI Symposium provided a good rundown of the field and the kinds of studies scientists will be able to do in the near future.

The results from the first three years of Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab provide further evidence for the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model.

While Jupiter has the famous Great Red Spot cyclonic storm, the other giant planets have less turbulent-looking surfaces. But they do have mighty storms all their own. According to a new study, mega-storms on Saturn can flare up every 20-30 years and have long-lasting effects that persist for centuries. The astronomers looked at Saturn's radio emissions and mapped the ammonia gas distribution. They found that the storms churn up this gas and can be used to trace when storms happened in the past.

Astronomers have discovered two interstellar objects, Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov. When the Vera C Rubin Observatory comes online next year, it'll scan the entire southern sky every few nights, revealing thousands of comets and asteroids. Some fraction of these will be interstellar objects, passing briefly through the Solar System. It's estimated that Vera Rubin will discover dozens of interstellar objects, some of which might make the perfect targets for an interceptor mission.

A team of scientists calculated the orbital trajectory for a spacecraft that will make regular trips between the Earth and Moon in the near future.