The Euclid Space Telescope found some stars hiding in thick gas and dust in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. They're inside a so-called dark cloud named LDN 1641.

A spooky bat has been spotted flying over the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal site in Chile, right in time for Halloween. Thanks to its wide field of view, the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) was able to capture this large cloud of cosmic gas and dust, whose mesmerising appearance resembles the silhouette of a bat.

Trapped in a gravitational push and pull between Jupiter and other Jovian moons, Io is constantly being stretched and compressed. Heat generated by these contortions has melted pockets of the moon's interior so much that Io is our solar system's most volcanically active body. New research shows how its atmosphere is shaped both by volcanoes and by Jupiter's overpowering magnetosphere.

When neutron stars collide, neutrinos can play a significant role in the outcome. Even more so when you take flavor mixing into account.

A new study proposes how we could look for signs of self-replicating (Von Neumann) probes that would prove that the Solar System has been explored by an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI).

Rocky exoplanets orbiting red dwarfs are in a tough spot. Their stars are known for violent flaring that can destroy their atmospheres. But it's possible that asteroid impacts could later recreate their atmospheres.

If we take out all the matter, neutrinos, dark matter, cosmic rays, and radiation from the deepest parts of the voids the only thing left is empty space.

Cosmic inflation helps black holes grow quickly, but it can't explain how supermassive black holes grew to billions of solar masses in less than 500 million years.

A new report outlines the benefits and obstacles to a lunar telescope. It comes from the Keck Institute for Space Studies, and presents an idea for a lunar optical interferometer. The authors say it could outperform powerful space telescopes.

Sometimes space exploration doesn’t go as planned. But even in failure, engineers can learn, adapt, and try again. One of the best ways to do that is to share the learning, and allow others to reproduce the work that might not have succeeded, allowing them to try again. A group from MIT’s Space Enabled Research Group, part of its Media Lab, recently released a paper in Space Science Reviews that describes the design and testing results of a pair of passive sensors sent to the Moon on the ill-fated Rashid-1 rover.

With unprecedented detail, a team of astronomers led by MPE have imaged the youngest disks around new-born stars. Astronomers used to think that planet formation followed star formation. But these glowing, chaotic disks are hotter and heavier than expected, hinting that planets may start forming much earlier than previously thought.

An international team of astronomers using the combined powers of space-based and ground-based observatories, including the W.M. Keck Observatory and Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, have discovered a brown dwarf companion orbiting a nearby red dwarf star, providing key insight into how stars and planets form.

Before a supernova finally explodes, its progenitor ejects massive amounts of gas into its surroundings. When the doomed star finally explodes, its blast wave slams into this material. This is one of a supernova's signatures, and researchers have figured out how to detect it.

The cosmic voids of the universe are empty of matter. But we all know there’s more to the universe than just matter.

Star formation has a lot of complex physics that feed into it. Classical models used something equivalent to a “collapse” of a cloud of gas by gravity, with a star being birthed in the middle. More modern understandings show a feature called a “streamer”, which funnels gas and dust to proto-stars from the surrounding disc of material. But our understanding of those streamers is still in its early stages, like the stars they are forming. So a new paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Pablo Cortes of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and his co-authors is a welcome addition to the literature - and it shows a unique feature of the process for the first time.

Modeling supermassive black holes is hard, but it's a bit easier if you use a non-singular model.

There is a limit to how big we can build particle colliders on Earth, whether that is because of limited space or limited economics. Since size is equivalent to energy output for particle colliders, that also means there’s a limit to how energetic we can make them. And again, since high energies are required to test theories that go Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics, that means we will be limited in our ability to validate those theories until we build a collider big enough. But a team of scientists led by Yang Bai at the University of Wisconsin thinks they might have a better idea - use already existing neutrino detectors as a large scale particle collider that can reach energies way beyond what the LHC is capable of.

Now that we have tools to find vast numbers of voids in the universe, we can finally ask…well, if we crack em open, what do we find inside?

Astronomers found a 3 billion-year-old white dwarf actively accreting material from its former planetary system. This discovery challenges assumptions about the late stages of stellar remnant evolution.

A research team with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) examined samples returned by the Chang'e-6 mission from the far side of the Moon. They identified minerals that appear to be from a carbonaceous chondrite meteor, which are known to contain water and organic molecules. These findings support the theory that water and the ingredients for life were delivered by asteroids and comets to Earth billions of years ago.

To answer that question of what’s inside a void, we have to first decide what a void…is.

Researchers from Keio University have made the most precise measurement yet of the cosmic microwave background radiation's temperature from seven billion years ago, finding it was approximately 5.13 K, roughly twice today's temperature of 2.7 K. By analysing archived data from the ALMA telescope in Chile, the team confirmed a key prediction of Big Bang model, that the universe cools as it expands, meaning it was hotter in the past. This highly accurate measurement provides strong support for the standard cosmological model and helps scientists better understand the thermal history of our universe.

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has undergone dramatic brightening as it approached its closest point to the Sun. Researchers have been using solar monitoring satellites to track it during a period when Earth based observations were impossible due to the comet's position behind the Sun. Analysis of data from STEREO-A, SOHO, and GOES-19 spacecraft revealed the comet brightened at an unexpectedly rapid rate between mid September and late October 2025, with its light showing a distinctly blue colour indicating significant gas emission rather than just reflected sunlight from dust. The comet's unusual behaviour and the cause of its steep brightening remain mysteries that ground based observers will now investigate as it emerges into dark skies.

Scientists at MIT have discovered over 100 different molecules in a stellar nursery called the Taurus Molecular Cloud-1, making it the most chemically diverse interstellar cloud ever observed. Using over 1,400 hours of telescope time, the team found mostly hydrocarbons and nitrogen rich compounds, along with 10 ring shaped aromatic molecules similar to those found in coffee, vanilla, and DNA. This discovery helps solve a decades old mystery about complex organic molecules in space and provides key insights into the chemical conditions that existed before our own Solar System formed.

For the first time, astronomers have mapped the three-dimensional atmosphere of a planet orbiting a distant star, revealing temperature variations and distinct atmospheric regions across an alien world 400 light years away. Using the James Webb Space Telescope to track minute changes in brightness as the scorching gas giant WASP-18b passed behind its star, scientists created a weather map of an exoplanet, transforming these distant worlds from featureless dots into environments we can actually study layer by layer. This new technique could soon map hundreds of other similar hot Jupiters, finally bringing alien atmospheres into focus as real places with their own geography and weather patterns.

Every kilogram of rocket fuel is dead weight once it’s burned, yet conventional spacecraft must carry hundreds, sometimes thousands of tons of propellant to reach even nearby planets. This fundamental limitation has confined humanity to our own Solar System for decades. But a new generation of propulsion concepts promises to break free from this constraint entirely, harnessing radiation pressure, solar wind, and planetary gravity to accelerate spacecraft without carrying a single drop of fuel. These elegant systems could finally make interstellar exploration feasible…if engineers can overcome their formidable technical challenges.

How does water form on exoplanets and what could this mean for the search for life beyond Earth? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated the processes responsible for exoplanets producing liquid water. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life beyond Earth, and specifically which exoplanets could be viable future targets for astrobiology.

NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto has forced astronomers to rewrite their textbooks — but that’s not all: In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, space scientist Les Johnson explains how New Horizons forced him to rewrite "Pluto," the final novel in Ben Bova's Grand Tour series.

Black holes are usually described as having an event horizon and a singularity, but there are alternative models that don't have these bothersome mathematical paradoxes.

So where do we go after years of empty searches for dark matter? We haven’t learned nothing.

How could the principle of “radical mundanity” proposed by the Fermi paradox help explain why humans haven’t found evidence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations (ETCs)? This is what a recently submitted study hopes to address as a lone researcher investigated the prospect for finding ETCs based on this principle. This study has the potential to help scientists and the public better understand why we haven’t identified intelligent life beyond Earth and how we might narrow the search for it.

The Vera Rubin Observatory saw first light in June 2025. Its images from that time are called the Virgo First Look images because they focus on the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. M61 is one of the galaxies in that cluster, and the VRO has detected a stellar stream of stars around the distant spiral galaxy in Rubin's images.

Astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia have created a stunning new radio colour image of the Milky Way. By mapping different radio frequencies to RGB colours, the image reveals large-scale astrophysical phenomena and gives researchers a new tool to understand the lifecycle of stars.

What if I told you that while you can’t see dark matter, maybe you can hear it?

We successfully plugged the hole in the ozone layer that was discovered in the 1980s by banning ozone depleting substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). But, it seems we might be unintentionally creating another potential atmospheric calamity by using the upper atmosphere to destroy huge constellations of satellites after a very short (i.e. 5 year) lifetime. According to a new paper by Leonard Schulz of the Technical University of Braunschweig and his co-authors, material from satellites that burn up in the atmosphere, especially transition metals, could have unforeseen consequences on atmospheric chemistry - and we’re now the biggest contributor of some of those elements.

Why is it important to know about exoplanets having their atmospheres stripped while orbiting F-type stars? This is what a recent study submitted to The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of scientists conducted a first-time investigation into atmospheric escape on planets orbiting F-type stars, the latter of which are larger and hotter than our Sun. Atmospheric escape occurs on planets orbiting extremely close to their stars, resulting in the extreme temperature and radiation from the host star slowly stripping away the planet’s atmosphere.

The gas giant’s early growth carved rings in the protoplanetary disk that surrounded our Sun billions of years ago. This process set the architecture for the inner Solar System and prevented Earth from spiraling into the Sun.

New research from Tel Aviv University reveals that the first stars in the Universe formed in binary systems. These stars played a vital role in the evolution of early galaxies, giving rise to black holes and seeding the Universe with the ingredients for life.

A tiny dim satellite galaxy of the Milky Way doesn't have enough stars to hold itself together. Its properties suggest that its dark matter halo is holding it together, but new research counters that. Researchers say that it's not dark matter but a massive black hole that's keeping the dwarf galaxy intact.

Current gravitational wave observatories can't see a range of frequencies known as mid-band. That could change with a new detector that uses a trick from atomic clocks.

As a kid you ever play that game Guess Who? If you haven’t, it’s actually kinda fun.

Lockheed Martin Skunk Works has executed the first test flight of the X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft in partnership with NASA. The first flight was subsonic, but eventually the plane will demonstrate technologies aimed at reducing sonic booms to gentle thumps.

Black holes are eating each other and growing fat on the remains! They then seem to move on, finding new partners to devour in what can only be described as a cycle of violence. Two gravitational wave detections from late 2024 have caught these “second generation" black holes in the act, one spinning so fast it ranks among the most extreme ever observed, the other rotating backwards. These aren't simple collisions between black holes born from dying stars, instead they're the products of earlier mergers now colliding again in crowded stellar neighbourhoods, carrying the scars and strange spins of their violent pasts into the fabric of spacetime itself.

A giant spider sprawls across space, its three light year legs stretching into the cosmos powered by a star in its death throes. The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the Red Spider Nebula in stunning new detail, revealing not just the spectacular structure of a dying Sun like star, but also hints of a hidden companion influencing the show. What appeared faint and unremarkable in previous observations now blazes with infrared light, exposing hot dust shrouding the central star and fast moving jets of ionized iron creating ripples through expelled stellar material.

I tour a science show around the UK and have often fancied a flame thrower based demo, theatres are not so keen though. Imagine the Sun as a flamethrower in its youth, hurling solar storms and plasma bombs into space with incredible ferocity. Scientists have just witnessed what those ancient events might look like by observing a young star similar to our infant Sun, and the findings are both alarming and fascinating. Using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground observatories across three countries, researchers captured a two stage plasma eruption far more powerful than anything we see from the modern Sun, the kind of violence that may have either destroyed early life on Earth or surprisingly made it possible in the first place.

The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is slated to be the next Great Observatory for the world. Its main focus has been searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-like exoplanets. However, to do that, it will require a significant amount of effort with only a coronagraph, the currently planned primary instrument, no matter how powerful that coronagraph is. As new paper from Fabien Malbet of the University of Grenoble Alpes and his co-authors suggest an improvement - add a second instrument to HWO’s payload that will be able to astrometrically track planets down to a precision of .5 micro-arcseconds (µas). That would allow HWO to detect Earth-size planets around hundreds of nearby stars - dramatically increasing the number of potential candidates for atmospheric analysis.

Can water-rich exoplanets survive orbiting white dwarf stars, the latter of which are remnants of Sun-like stars? This is what a recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the likelihood of small, rocky worlds with close orbits to white dwarfs could harbor life. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life as we know it, or don’t know it, and where to find it.

A team of scientists has released a new survey mapping massive galaxy clusters, some of the largest structures in the universe, to test whether our fundamental understanding of the laws of the universe need revision. The analysis, using six years of Dark Energy Survey data, addresses an ongoing debate about whether the universe has more structure than our best models predict, ultimately reinforcing that our current rules remain accurate while demonstrating that galaxy clusters provide a powerful independent method for probing the universe's deepest mysteries.

Astronomers have created the first large scale map of dark molecular gas in the Milky Way, revealing vast networks of invisible star forming material that have so far have remained undetected. Using the Green Bank Radio Telescope to observe faint signals from carbon, the research team has finally started to uncover one of astronomy's biggest mysteries. Their discovery uncovers turbulent flows of gas moving faster than expected and show how raw galactic matter transforms into the molecular clouds where stars are born.

A new study has reviewed how space habitat designs have evolved from inflatable bubbles to 3D-printed structures built from Martian dust. The research traces how engineers have wrestled with extreme temperatures, the bombardment of radiation, and the challenge of building on worlds without breathable air, transforming each obstacle into solved problems with innovative ideas and designs that could soon house the first permanent residents of the Moon and Mars.