You’re doing some late afternoon work on the habitat as part of humanity’s first exoplanet settlement, but the sun is going down so you’re trying to speed things up. Just as the light dims, everything suddenly starts getting brighter. You look up and see the sun starting to rise again, except it’s your second sun. You kick yourself for not checking the daily sunrise and sunset logs, but you’re happy you get to put in a bit more work before you eat dinner.

There's a distinct category of exoworlds out there that orbit two stars. They're called "circumbinary" planets and up until recently, astronomers had only found about 18 of them among the 6000+ other known exoplanets and candidates. Now, a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, have found 27 more potential circumbinary worlds. They credit a new method, called apsidal precession, for their finding.

During the 1970s, the first interstellar probes were launched, carrying messages specifically designed to be intelligible to extraterrestrial species. The messages were essentially a "message in a bottle" intended for an advanced civilization, should they find the probes someday.

Our Solar System is currently passing through the Local Interstellar Cloud, a region of highly diluted gas and dust between the stars. On its path, Earth continuously accumulates iron-60, a rare radioactive isotope of iron produced in stellar explosions. This has now been confirmed by an international research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) through the analysis of Antarctic ice tens of thousands of years old. From the steady but time-varying influx, the researchers conclude that the radioactive isotope has been stored within the cloud since a long-past stellar explosion.

Asteroid mining seems simple in theory. A spacecraft flies up to a giant rock in space, scoops out some material, and either processes it on site or returns it back to a huge central processing facility. But in practice, it is certainly not that simple, and a new paper from some Spanish researchers, available in pre-print form on arXiv, showcases one of the reasons why - many small asteroids are spinning ridiculously fast.

How can astronomers observe ancient galaxies when they're so challenging to resolve? By looking at a whole bunch of them at once in a single spectral line and seeing how it changes over time. That's what a new instrument called the Tomographic Ionized-carbon Mapping Experiment (TIME) does.

Run Hawking's machinery and out pops something startling: the most likely universe looks an awful lot like ours, complete with inflation, a low-entropy beginning, and an arrow of time. All of cosmology, falling out for free. Almost.

We may be getting better images of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole in the future. Astronomers used 10 years of observations of a distant blazar to detect turbulence in the Milky Way's interstellar medium. This turbulence makes images of Sagittarius A-star blurry.

The Traveling Salesman is a classic problem in mathematics that requires a solution to the most efficient path to take to visit a given number of cities in the least amount of time. But scale this relatively simple concept up to space travel and the calculation becomes much more complex. Instead of visiting a stationary spot on Earth, when calculating the most efficient path to visit asteroids you must account for the fact they are traveling tens of thousands of miles an hour, and their exact position will change based on when a spacecraft leaves. This is known as the Asteroid Routing Problem, and a new paper from a group of Canadian and European researchers lays out a framework that can find the exact solution to any particular combination of asteroids to be visited.

Hawking faced a question with no answer hiding behind it. The best boundary condition for the universe, he decided, was that there was no boundary at all. To make that statement into physics, he had to do something deeply strange to time.

The equations of general relativity give up at the singularity. Decades before Stephen Hawking dared to guess what came before, John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt built the strange mathematical machinery that would make the question askable in the first place.

A study led by UC Riverside physicist Hai-Bo Yu suggests that a new type of dark matter could explain three astrophysical puzzles across vastly different environments.

Enigmatic crownlike surface formations on Venus hold keys to understanding our twin planet’s deep interior. Or so says a new paper presented at the recent European Geosciences Union 2026 general assembly in Vienna.

A study of NASA's Black Marble data reveals a pattern of regional volatility in nighttime illumination across the planet.

The galaxy cluster Abell 2029 is sometimes described as “the most relaxed cluster in the Universe.” This moniker does not arise from some sort of mellow vibe, but rather because of how calm and undisturbed the superheated gas that pervades the cluster appears to be. But new Chandra X-ray observations of the massive cluster highlight a major merger 4 billion years ago that still shape it today.

Earth has a group of cosmic stalkers. Known as “co-orbitals”, these small bits of rock have a 1:1 mean motion resonance with Earth. Basically, they take the exact same amount of time to orbit the Sun as we do. Astronomers have long believed these objects wandered in from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but recent spectral analysis suggests they better match the space-weathered lunar silicates that make up the Moon’s surface. As such, there has been an ongoing debate about whether these cosmic stalkers are actually visitors from the belt or blasted pieces of the Moon. A new study, published in Icarus, from researchers Elisa Alessi and Robert Jedicke provides strong hints that the belt is the more likely source - but pretty soon we’ll get a definitive answer from a spacecraft.

The Moon has a busy week ahead of it. If skies are clear, be sure to get outside on the evenings of May 18th/19th and surrounding nights to check out the evolving view to the west, in one of the best sky shows for 2026.

Dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. We have never directly detected a single particle of it. But a new method developed by physicists at MIT and across Europe may have just opened a door we didn't know existed. When two black holes collide and merge, they send ripples through the fabric of spacetime, these are known as gravitational waves and if those black holes happened to spiral through a dense cloud of dark matter on their way in, those waves carry an imprint of it. For the first time, scientists have a technique to read that imprint and one signal in the existing data is already raising eyebrows.

Artemis II has barely left the headlines. On April 1st 2026, four astronauts climbed aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, rode the most powerful rocket ever to carry humans beyond low Earth orbit, and swung around the far side of the Moon. The world watched. Now, before the dust has settled, NASA has outlined its plans for what comes next. Artemis III won't be landing on the Moon. But what it will do is arguably just as important and if history is any guide, it's exactly the kind of mission that makes the difference between a Moon landing and a disaster.

Right now, as you read this, Earth is drifting through a cloud of debris from an ancient stellar explosion. Stardust, real stardust, is raining down on us so thinly scattered that we have only just found the proof. Locked inside Antarctic ice cores up to 80,000 years old, an international team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has discovered traces of iron-60, a radioactive isotope that can only be created in the heart of an exploding star.