Professor Erin Kara of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research is helping advance our understanding of the most extreme objects in the Universe by analyzing X-ray reverberations and other astrophysical data.

The Vera Rubin Observatory's Commissioning Camera operated for about 7 weeks in 2024, before the observatory released its well-known first look images. It's an engineering camera, and its job was to test the VRO's equipment and procedures. Now, the VRO has released the ComCam's image of the Seagull nebula. It's a pretty stunning image for an engineering camera.

SMBH jets are driven by thick, hot accretion disks with powerful magnetic fields. But there's a bit of a paradox. Some SMBH produce jets, even though they appear to have thin, cold accretion disks. New research has solved this paradox, showing that disks can be truncated into an outer cold disk and an inner hot disk.

Theory says that during some SMBH mergers, the merger remnant receives a recoil kick from gravitational waves. Instead of sitting placidly in the galactic center, these recoiled SMBH are sent on a pendulum-like motion, back and forth through the galactic center. New research has found statistical evidence supporting their existence.

Where have all the planets gone? Late October 2026 sees a decided dearth of planets in the dusk sky, with only bashful Mercury receding from view, and Saturn fresh off of opposition. Venus, the former lucida of the evening sky is now lost from view, taking the plunge sunward. But this vanishing act allows for a dramatic transformation this weekend, as our nearest planetary neighbor brushes past the Sun and transitions into the dawn sky.

Private companies are getting better and better at launching more and more mass into space with larger and larger rockets. But, there is still a major constraint on the size of objects we can get into orbit - fairing size. This places physical constraints on the overall shape of what we can launch, and severely limits the sizes of, say, a communications array or a power satellite. But a new paper from researchers at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Beijing Institute of Technology offers a solution - a self-shaping, deployable module that can fine-tune both its positioning and its own dimensions.

The Epoch of Reionization is when radiation from early galaxies and their stars reionized neutral hydrogen and let light travel freely through the cosmos. Some research shows that supernovae helped the process. But new research shows that, though they may have helped initially, supernovae eventually slowed reionization.

Solar flaring is complex behaviour triggered by reconnection, when magnetic field lines break and then snap back to the Sun's surface. The flaring is complex behaviour, and its details are difficult to observe. Researchers found a new way to study flaring behaviour.

This Webb infrared image, released on October 6th, 2026, shows the star-forming region NGC 7129, about 3,300 light-years from Earth. The central star, LkHα 234, is a young star of 5–8 solar masses whose outflows have cleared a cavity about 3.5 light-years across. On the right side of the region, younger protostars shoot jets of very hot material that create shocks in the surrounding gas.

Stellar-mass black holes should be in our neighbourhood within about 50 light years of the Solar System. But they're likely isolated, without much to feed on, making them difficult to find. Gaia found some candidates, but confirming them is tough.

Figuring out how the Milky Way's thin and thick disks formed is a tough question in astronomy. It relies on determining individual stellar ages accurately. Gaia was pretty good at that, and new research based on its data may have found the answer.

In the early Universe, neutrinos interacted strongly with other matter before some of them "decoupled." The heaviest of these decoupled neutrinos may be the solution to the matter-antimatter cosmic mystery.

Using a planet’s atmosphere to secure a satellite’s place in orbit, a process known as “aerocapture”, has been the dream of flight engineers for decades. The only problem? It’s really hard to actually do. It requires control systems, thermal management, and orbital mechanics to all coordinate in a dance that allows a spacecraft to not just slow down while passing by another planet (or moon in some cases) but to start to orbit it without the use of lots of additional propellant. For now, that remains a dream, but a recent NASA contract to a California start-up called Inversion is another step towards making it a reality.

There has been a torrent of solar physics data lately, largely thanks to new spacecraft that have begun actively observing the Sun. One of those spacecraft, Solar Orbiter, happened to have a serendipitous encounter with a type of solar physics phenomenon known as a “switchback”. A new paper, available in Nature Astronomy from researcher Jesse T. Coburn and their co-authors, describes how that serendipitous encounter allowed them to track the switchback back to its birthplace in the solar corona for the first time.

On Earth, water ice is simply water ice. But under extreme pressure, it takes on an unusual asymmetric form. It stops being molecular and its atoms are forced into a strange asymmetry.

It may not be as obvious, but just like Earth, Mars has seasons. And every day of every summer, an 1,800 kilometer long thin white cloud appears to the west of Arsia Mons, a 20 kilometer high extinct shield volcano. At least for a few hours, before it dissipates until it reappears the next morning. Scientists have known about this feature, which they call the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC), for decades, but planetary scientists have been unable to explain it using traditional atmospheric models. But a new paper, published in Nature Geoscience by a research team led by Dr. Jorge Hernández-Bernal of the Sorbonne, suggests that the cloud could be the first documented real-world example of a cloud flash-freezing out of thin air.

Billions of years ago, rain may have helped shape where the chemistry of life could begin on Mars. A new study maps how formaldehyde, an important prebiotic molecule, may have reached the surface. This map could help guide future missions searching for signs of past life on Mars.

JAXA successfully launched its Martian Moon eXplorer on its way to Mars and Phobos. It'll reach Mars in about six months, and will orbit the planet for about a month before transferring to an orbit around Phobos. It will deploy a small lander, which will help select a sample-gathering location for the main part of the mission. By 2031, the regolith sample from Phobos should be back on Earth.

The region near Sagittarius A-star, the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, is enriched in metals, although only modestly. The likely cause is supernovae explosions, which synthesize elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Over time, this metal-rich gas found its way towards the SMBH. The increased metallicity and heat from the supernova affect how fast gas flows into the SMBH.

Magnetars are neutron stars with magnetic fields a thousand times stronger than normal. One way that magnetars might form is through the merger of two small neutron stars.

The Moon is slowly cooling and slowly shrinking. A study of its scarp faults calculates the rate of shrinkage, showing that it's extremely small. But the shrinking could still create landslides, a potential hazard for missions to the lunar surface.

When picturing a star, typically people think of giant balls of burning gas in the sky that emit enough light they are hard to miss. Planets, on the other hand, come in one of two general categories - rocky worlds like Earth or gas giants similar to Jupiter. But there is a third category of astronomical object that doesn’t really fit either of those descriptions, and also doesn’t exist in our own solar system. Known as a brown dwarf, they are sometimes called a “failed star” as they form the same way stars do, but never reach the critical mass of material to create active fusion in the cores. They are also much too massive to be considered a regular planet. But a new paper from researchers led by Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona describes one similarity between the coldest known brown dwarf and some of the planets in our solar system - it has water-ice clouds.

Young stars form in molecular clouds, and once they're turned on, they begin to shape their natal clouds with radiation. Researchers developed a new 3D model of one feature of the Orion Nebula star-forming region called the Orion Bar. Their model matches JWST observations, and explains how the uneven structure in stellar nurseries creates shadowed regions that alters the astrochemistry in the clouds.

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month features the brilliant golden galaxies belonging to the MACS J0454.1-0300 galaxy cluster.

The ESA's Euclid space telescope was launched in July, 2026, and its mission is to observe billions of galaxies. The goal is to measure their redshifts over 10 billion years of Universal expansion, to better understand dark matter and dark energy. Surprisingly, the telescope has discovered a brand new comet, now named C/2026 S1 (Euclid).

Supermassive black holes power tremendous jets that extend far beyond their galaxy. A new study finds how they can also warm material at the outer edge of a galaxy and reduce the rate of star production over time.

Researchers have confirmed the existence of the first microblazar. Unlike blazars, which are extragalctic and powered by supermassive black holes, microblazars are inside the Milky Way, and are powered by stellar mass black holes. The microblazar may be the source for the most energetic particles in the galaxy.

A new study in Science Advances addresses the pressing questions about how long-duration exposure to microgravity affects the human genome.

Despite the upcoming Bepi Colombo visit to Mercury, we need a lander mission to fully understand our solar system’s innermost planet.

Astronomers used decades of archival data and new radial velocity measurements to search for exoplanets around a neaby binary star, 70 Oph AB. They didn't find any, which can seem like a failure. But in this case, their work only ruled out large, Jupiter-mass planets at certain distances. There could still be Earth-sized planets there, and their precise findings will only fuel a deeper search with more powerful telescopes.

Neutrinos come in three different flavors. A new study finds that neutrino flavor could play a significant role in whether a dying star becomes a supernova or collapses directly into a black hole.

Years ago, astronomers spotted a strange radio formation beyond the Zone of Avoidance. The formation resembles a treble clef, a symbol in musical notation, and the nickname has stuck. Determining what created it has been difficult, but new research has revealed that the Treble Clef is a radio phoenix.

The El Gordo supercluster is unusually large given its distance. How could such a large galaxy cluster form so quickly? The answer could be that dark matter is self-interacting in an interesting two-state way.

As part of the ALMA COMPASS Large program, an international research team has detected a rare form of methanol in space for the first time.

New research draws a link between a host star and the characteristics of its planetary system. Higher mass stars create one family of systems, while lower mass stars create another. These results provide a new, more detailed template for understanding exoplanet systems.

Fall meteor season has begun. Late October not only sees dusk falling ever earlier as ghouls and goblins walk the Earth on Halloween, but it also sees the peak of two fine annual meteor showers kicking off Halloween season: the Orionid and Taurid meteor showers.

Brown dwarfs are the black (or brown?) sheep of astronomy. They’re too big to be considered a traditional gas planet, but they are too small to have started nuclear fusion and made the full transition to star-hood. They also change dramatically over time, cooling, shrinking, and spinning faster as they age. Or at least we think they do - our models of the atmospheres of these celestial objects aren’t the best, according to a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by a team led by Zafar Rustamkulov at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA's Perseverance Rover has reached another milestone. It now holds the record for the longest distance travelled on another world, meaning Mars and Earth's Moon. It's all thanks the ingenuity behind AutoNav, it's hazard-detection driving system. It's a win for science, as more distance travelled means more scientific objectives are reached.

The edge of the Sun appears darker than its central region. This effect is known as limb darkening and tells us about the solar atmosphere. This same limb darkening effect has now been observed on several nearby stars and could help us improve our understanding of stellar atmospheres.

When a supernova exploded in 1181, Chinese and Japanese sky-watchers recorded it. They couldn't have known what the object was, and why it appeared for six months then disappeared. But in our modern times, we know it was a supernova, and we've even, most likely, found its remnant. New observations reveal more detail than ever in the unusual and rare supernova remnant.

The Chandrasekhar limit states that a white dwarf can be no larger than 1.4 solar masses. A new study demonstrates how highly magnetized white dwarfs could overcome that limit, and how such super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs could form.

Mars is a planetary geologist’s paradise. NASA’s Curiosity rover drove that home recently, with a captivating panorama seen from the slopes of Mount Sharp. The image shows a stunning vista, and was not white-balance adjusted during processing, to show just what a viewer might really see at sunrise standing of Mars.

When astronauts first travel to Mars, or anywhere else in deep space, they will have to contend with two problems that our planet itself protects us from on its surface - radiation and weightlessness. Scientists already know both can have a profound impact on the human body, but just how much of one, and how long that impact can last, remain a mystery. A new paper by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and published in PLoS One, tackles those questions, and unfortunately comes up with some less than ideal answers in terms of the long term implications of deep space exposure.

Using observations from NASA's Juno spacecraft, an international team led by Shandong University shows that Jupiter's magnetodisk is a rippling structure that rotates with the planet, contrary to what scientists previously thought.

Astrophysicists think that hypernovae are the most powerful stellar explosions in the Universe. They're the most explosive type of core-collapse supernova. But the evidence for them is not voluminous, and new research pokes holes in it, pointing out that hypernovae may not actually exist.

Astronomers detected an unusual triangular light curve about 300 light years away. They were searching for Black Widow Binaries, where a dense neutron star eats its companion. But they found something different: an M dwarf slowly eating its binary companion brown dwarf.

In just one more month, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission will make history. Moving at 12 kilometers per second versus Earth, the mission is about to rendezvous with the binary Dimorphos-Didymos asteroid pair. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission slammed into Dimorphos in 2022, and now Hera will provide a follow up view of the mission’s resulting handiwork. The European Space Agency (ESA) recently released a thought-provoking look at the perspectives of Hera, and what an astronaut might see from the surface of the asteroids as the mission speeds by.

Looking for biosignatures across the solar system requires looking for asymmetry. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are famously either “left-handed” (L) or “right-handed” (D). We know abiotic processes (i.e. those that create amino acids but don’t involve life) create a 50/50 mixture of the two types, which is called a racemic mixture. But life as we know it almost exclusively relies on left-handed amino acids to fold proteins and right-handed ones to construct nucleic acids. So if we find an imbalance in the types of amino acids we analyze from somewhere in the solar system, it's a good indication that life is behind that imbalance. Differentiating between the two “chiralities”, as they’re called, is possible, but typically requires advanced equipment and chemical disposables that make them burdensome for spaceflight applications. But a new paper in Nature Communications from researchers led by Takahito Ohshiro and Masateru Taniguchi of Osaka University offers an alternative - a solid-state quantum tunneling sensor that can read the chirality of a single amino acid molecule using basically just some gold wire.

Diligent sleuthing by astronomers has broken open a cold case in the data archive of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. In a study published Monday in Nature Astronomy, researchers report uncovering a surprising chemical clue that indicates the white dwarf star HS 0209+0832 may host a second-generation planet.

Most helium in the Universe is primordial helium, formed during the Big Bang. But a fraction of helium was formed by long-dead stars. Distinguishing between the two allows astronomers to further confirm our observations of the Big Bang.