Check this out. There are some experiments that just make you…stop. That make you reconsider everything you’ve ever known.

An international team of astronomers using a combination of ground-based telescopes, including the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, has discovered the first-ever spatially resolved, gravitationally lensed superluminous supernova. The object, dubbed SN 2025wny, offers a rare look at a stellar cataclysm from the early Universe and provides a striking confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Astronomers found a handful of unusual objects in JWST survey data. These 9 point sources are being called 'Astronomy's Platypus' because, like the animal, they seem to defy categorization. They're not like active galactic nuclei, and they're not like star-forming galaxies. What are they?

A team using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a new type of astronomical object —a starless, gas-rich, dark-matter cloud that is considered a “relic” or remnant of early galaxy formation. Nicknamed “Cloud-9,” this is the first confirmed detection of such an object in the Universe. The finding furthers the understanding of galaxy formation, the early Universe, and the nature of dark matter itself.

It feels like every week now we’re writing a new article about how 3I/ATLAS is not an alien technology. But it’s worth re-iterating, and perhaps taking a look at the methodology we used to prove that statement. A new paper, available in pre-print form on arXiv from Sofia Sheikh of the SETI Institute and her co-authors, details how one specific instrument - the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) - contributed to that effort.

Stars and planets are linked together in their formation, evolution, and even in their demises. But many of the details behind this are yet to be revealed. New research outlines an observing strategy that could uncover more critical details.

Without a better grasp of stellar flaring, our understanding of exoplanet habitability is at an impasse. Red dwarfs are the most numerous type of star in the galaxy, and they host many rocky exoplanets in their habitable zones. The problem is, they're known to flare so violently that it may negate their habitable zones. A group of researchers propose a new telescope designed solely to study stellar flaring.

There is a strong relation between the size of a galaxy's black hole and the motion of stars in the galaxy's core, known as the M-sigma relation. It turns out this relation doesn't work well for galaxies with ultramassive black holes.

So far, humanity has yet to find its first “exomoon” - a Moon orbiting a planet outside of the solar system. But that hasn’t been for lack of trying. According to a new paper by Thomas Winterhalder of the European Southern Observatory and his co-authors available as a pre-print on arXiv, the reason isn’t because those Moons don’t exist, but simply because we lack the technology to detect them. They propose a new “kilometric baseline interferometer” that can detect moons as small as the Earth up to 200 parsecs (652 light years) away.

The first results on the iconic active galactic nucleus MCG–6-30-15 captured with the XRISM mission show the most precise signatures yet of its supermassive black hole’s extreme gravity and the outflows that shape its galaxy.

A new study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam shows how gravitational waves from black holes can be used to reveal the presence of dark matter and help determine its properties. The key is a new model, based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity, that tracks in detail how a black hole interacts with the surrounding matter.

Terrestrial planets such as Earth need an early solar system rich in short-lived radioisotopes. But the supernovae that create these elements would tend to rip an early system apart. A new study suggests that these isotopes are produced by a bath of cosmic rays from more distant supernovae.

A team of Canadian astronomers has used Webb's observations of "Milky Way twins" in the early Universe to learn more about our galaxy's turbulent youth.

Sunspots and solar flares go hand in hand. They generally occur in the same region of the Sun around the same time. We've long thought the same would be true for other stars, but a new study finds that isn't the case.

It sneaks up on us, every annual flip of the calendar into the new year. If skies are clear, keep an eye out for the brief but strong Quadrantid meteors this weekend. The Quadrantids or ‘Quads’ have a brief but strong annual peak just after New Year’s Day. This also makes the shower notoriously elusive for observers.

Size matters when it comes to telescopes. The bigger they are, the farther they can see. Prioritizing constructing large ones is therefore high on the priority list for many observational organizations. But doing so comes at a cost, and not just in terms of money. Finding a suitable site can be a challenge, and that has been particularly true for the effort to build a 30-meter telescope in the Northern hemisphere. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Francesco Coti Zelati of the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona and his co-authors, makes the argument for building it at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma.

The Atacama Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), the world's most powerful radio telescope, has received 145 new low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) that will increase its range and sensitivity.

For the first time, astronomers have caught a stellar nursery in the act of blowing giant celestial bubbles, revealing a massive outflow of gas stretching over 650 light-years from one of the Milky Way’s most extraordinary star clusters. Using nearly two decades of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, researchers traced this budding stream of supercharged particles as it expands beneath our Galaxy’s disk, offering crucial insights into how young, massive stars shape galactic evolution.

Lunar dust poses one of the most persistent challenges for spacecraft operations on the Moon, clinging stubbornly to surfaces and infiltrating equipment with potentially devastating consequences. Now, researchers have developed a comprehensive mathematical model that reveals exactly how electrically charged dust particles behave when they collide with spacecraft at low speeds, uncovering surprising insights about what makes them stick and what allows them to bounce away.

Astronomers have measured water streaming from interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS for the first time since it passed closest to the Sun. Using a spacecraft that’s been watching the Sun for nearly three decades, scientists detected hydrogen glowing around the comet and calculated that it was producing water at extraordinary rates. These measurements not only confirm that interstellar comets behave remarkably like our own Solar System’s icy wanderers, but also provide crucial clues about what comets looked like in the early universe.

ESA’s Gaia space telescope has achieved something astronomers thought nearly impossible, detecting planets while they’re still forming inside the dusty discs surrounding newborn stars. By measuring the subtle gravitational wobbles that unseen companions induce on their host stars, Gaia has found hints of planets, brown dwarfs, and companion stars in 31 young stellar systems out of 98 surveyed.

The iconic 2019 and 2022 photographs of black holes M87* and Sagittarius A* captivated astronomers worldwide with their fuzzy orange doughnut shapes. Now, scientists are preparing to take the next giant leap by creating the first ever 3D movies of black holes that could fundamentally reshape our understanding of gravity and the universe’s most violent phenomena.

Two spiral galaxies locked in a slow motion collision have been captured in stunning detail by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The pair grazed past each other millions of years ago, triggering spectacular waves of star formation and distorting their elegant spiral arms into sweeping silver blue streamers. This celestial dance, playing out over hundreds of millions of years, offers astronomers a rare glimpse into the violent yet creative process that shapes galaxies across the universe.

A supernova observed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in 1181 CE didn’t fully explode, instead it sputtered and left behind a rare “zombie star” surrounded by long filaments resembling fireworks. New research by Syracuse University physicist Eric Coughlin explains how these unusual structures formed. After the failed detonation, the surviving white dwarf launched a fast, dense wind that slammed into surrounding gas. The collision created finger-like plumes through a fluid instability, but a second instability that normally tears such structures apart never activated. In some sense, the stars didn’t quite die!

A female mouse that spent two weeks aboard China’s space station has successfully given birth to healthy pups after returning to Earth. This marks the first time offspring have been born from mammals that have traveled in space. The birth demonstrates that short term spaceflight doesn’t impair reproductive capability and provides crucial data for understanding how space environments affect mammalian development, a critical question for future long-l duration human missions beyond Earth.

How did hot Jupiters end up orbiting so close to their stars, thus earning their moniker? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers from The University of Tokyo investigated the orbital evolution of hot Jupiters ended, specifically regarding where their orbits started before orbiting so close to their stars. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.

Scientists have discovered that moons could theoretically orbit all seven planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system despite the complex gravitational environment. Using computer simulations, a team of researchers have mapped stable zones where satellites could survive around each planet. They found that moons can remain stable up to about 40-45% of each planet’s sphere of gravitational influence. The neighbouring planets squeeze these stable zones slightly inward compared to isolated planets, but the effect is modest. Long term calculations suggest only tiny moons, roughly one ten millionth the mass of Earth, could survive the immense tidal forces.

Researchers have been trying to look at interstellar object 3I/ATLAS from every conceivable angle. That includes very unconventional ones. Recently, while 3I/ATLAS passed out of view of the Earth, it moved into a great vantage point for one of our interplanetary probes. Europa Clipper, whose main mission is to explore Jupiter’s active moon, turned its gaze during its six year journey back towards the center of the solar system and observed 3I/ATLAS as it was reaching its perihelion, and out of sight from the Earth.

A team led by the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) analyzed samples of C-type asteroids in a recent study. Their findings support the idea that these asteroids can serve as a crucial source of materials if and when asteroid mining is realized.

Supermassive black holes have a reputation for devouring everything in sight, but new observations from the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array reveal they can be surprisingly picky eaters. Even when galaxy mergers deliver enormous amounts of cold molecular gas directly to a black hole’s doorstep, many choose to nibble rather than gorge raising questions about what triggers feeding episodes. The discovery suggests black hole growth during galaxy collisions may be far more inefficient and episodic than we previously thought.

A joint research team from South Korea has developed a fascinating wheel inspired by origami and Da Vinci bridge principles that could unlock access to the Moon’s most dangerous and scientifically useful terrain. The wheel expands from 230 mm to 500 mm in diameter on demand, allowing small rovers to navigate steep lunar pits and lava tube entrances that would trap conventional vehicles.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the largest planet forming disk ever observed around a young star, stretching nearly 40 times the diameter of our Solar System. Nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito” for its hamburger like appearance when viewed edge on, this massive disk reveals an unexpectedly chaotic and asymmetric structure with wisps of material extending far above and below its central plane. The discovery offers an unprecedented window into how planets might form in extreme environments, challenging previous assumptions about the orderly nature of planetary nurseries.

At the end of their lives, most satellites fall to their death. Many of the smaller ones, including most of those going up as part of the “mega-constellations” currently under construction, are intended to burn up in the atmosphere. This Design for Demise (D4D) principle has unintended consequences, according to a paper by Antoinette Ott and Christophe Bonnal, both of whom work for MaiaSpace, a company designing reusable launch vehicles for the small satellite market.

Launched in March, NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky in 102 colors. This map will enable 3D distance measurements to other galaxies and allow astronomers to measure the influence of Cosmic Inflation on the large-scale structure of the Universe.

Solar sails have some major advantages over traditional propulsion methods - most notably they don’t use any propellant. But, how exactly do they turn? In traditional sailing, a ship’s captain can simply adjust the angle of the sail itself to catch the wind at a different angle. But they also have the added advantage of a rudder, which doesn’t work when sailing on light. This has been a long-standing challenge, but a new paper available in pre-print from arXiv, by Gulzhan Aldan and Igor Bargatin at the University of Pennsylvania describes a new technique to turn solar sails - kirigami.

Even most rocket scientists would rather avoid hard math when they don’t have to do it. So when it comes to figuring out orbits in complex three-body systems, like those in Cis-lunar space, which is between the Earth and the Moon, they’d rather someone else do the work for them. Luckily, some scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seems to have a masochistic streak - or enough of an altruistic one that it overwhelmed the unpleasantness of doing the hard math - to come up with an open-source dataset and software package that maps out 1,000,000 cis-lunar orbits.

Ready for another amazing year of skywatching? 2025 was a wild year, with a steady parade of comets knocking on naked eye visibility, and one extra special interstellar comet, 3I/ATLAS. The sky just keeps on turning into 2026. Watch for mutual eclipse season for the major moons of Jupiter, as the moons pass one if front of the other. The ongoing solar cycle is also still expected to be active into 2026, producing sunspots space weather and more. And (finally!) we’ll see the return of total solar eclipses on August 12th, as umbral shadow of the Moon crosses Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was involved in yet another first discovery recently available in pre-print form on arXiv from Cicero Lu at the Gemini Observatory and his co-authors. This time, humanity’s most advanced space telescope found UV-fluorescent carbon monoxide in a protoplanetary debris disc for the first time ever. It also discovered some features of that disc that have considerable implications for planetary formation theory.

Oleg Orlov, Director of the Institute of Biomedical Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), announced that the Russian Orbital Station (ROS) will include the modules that make up the Russian Orbital Segment of ISS.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, may not have a subsurface ocean after all. That’s according to a re-examination of data captured by NASA’s Cassini mission, which flew by Titan dozens of times starting in 2004. By 2008, all the evidence suggested a subsurface ocean of liquid water waited beneath Titan’s geologically complex crust. But the latest analysis says the interior is more likely to be made of ice and slush, albeit with pockets of warm water that cycle from core to surface.

One of the primary goals of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to detect atmospheres around exoplanets, to try to suss out whether or not they could potentially support life. But, in order to do that, scientists have to know where to look, and the exoplanet has to actually have an atmosphere. While scientists know the location of about 6000 exoplanets currently, they also believe that many of them don’t have atmospheres and that, of the ones that do, many aren’t really Earth-sized. And of those, many are around stars that are too bright for our current crop of telescopes to see their atmosphere. All those restrictions mean, ultimately, even with 6000 potential candidates, the number of Earth-sized ones that we could find an atmosphere for is relatively small. So a new paper available on arXiv from Jonathan Barrientos of Cal Tech and his co-authors that describes five new exoplanets around M-dwarf stars - two of which may have an atmosphere - is big news for astrobiologists and exoplanet hunters alike.

During November 2025, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) used five of its science instruments to observe 3I/ATLAS. The instruments collected information about how the comet is behaving and what it is made of.

Engineers need good data to build lasting things. Even the designers of the Great Pyramids knew the limestone they used to build these massive structures would be steady when stacked on top of one another, even if they didn’t have tables of the compressive strength of those stones. But when attempting to build structures on other worlds, such as the Moon, engineers don’t yet know much about the local materials. Still, due to the costs of getting large amounts of materials off of Earth, they will need to learn to use those materials even for critical applications like a landing pad to support the landing / ascent of massive rockets used in re-supply operations. A new paper published in Acta Astronautica from Shirley Dyke and her team at Purdue University describes how to build a lunar landing pad with just a minimal amount of prior knowledge of the material properties of the regolith used to build it.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of international researchers has discovered chemical fingerprints of gigantic primordial stars that were among the first to form after the Big Bang.

During the deployment of new space telescopes that are several critical steps each has to go through. Launch is probably the one most commonly thought of, another is “first light” of all of the instruments on the telescope. Ultimately, they’re responsible for the data the telescope is intended to collect - if they don’t work properly then the mission itself it a failure. Luckily, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) recently collected first light on its 10 primary instruments, and everything seems to be in working order, according to a press release from the Southwest Research Institute who was responsible for ensuring the delivery of all 10 instruments went off without a hitch.

For the first time, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a pair of catastrophic collisions in another solar system. They were observing Fomalhaut, a bright star about 25 light-years away, and detected a pair of planetesimal collisions and their light-reflecting dust clouds. The system is young, and the collisions reflect what our Solar System was like when it was young.

Ask someone on Earth for the time and they can give you an exact answer, thanks to our planet's intricate timekeeping system, built with atomic clocks, GPS satellites and high-speed telecommunications networks. Ask for the time on Mars and the answer gets much more complicated.

Getting close to things is one way for scientists to collect better data about them. But that's been hard to do for the Sun, since getting close to it typically entails getting burnt to a crisp. Just ask Icarus. But if Icarus had survived his close encounter with the Sun, he might have been able to see massive magnetic “tadpoles” tens of thousands of kilometers wide reconnecting back down to the surface of our star. Or maybe not, because he had human eyes, not the exceptionally sensitive Wide-Field imagers the Parker Solar Probe used to look at the Sun while it made its closest ever pass to our closest star. A new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters from Angelos Vourlidas of Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and his co-authors describes what they say on humanity’s closest brush with the Sun so far.

In a new paper, a team of researchers explores how non-human species (in this case, fireflies) could inform new approaches in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Astronomers may have just seen the first ever ‘superkilonova,’ a combination of a supernova and a kilonova. These are two very different kinds of stellar explosions, and if this discovery stands, it could change the way scientists understand stellar birth and death.