New Algorithm Cracks the Asteroid Routing Problem

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.

What If the Universe Had No Beginning? Part 2: No Boundary, No Problem

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.

Bizarre Venus Surface Formations Puzzle Planetary Scientists

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.

Turbulence in the Milky Way's ISM Distorts Light from Distant Quasars

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.

NASA Captures Volatile Changes in Earth's Artificial Light

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

We've Been Listening for Ten Years. Here's What We Heard

For ten years, astronomers at UCLA have been pointing one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes at the stars and listening. Not for pulsars or gas clouds, or the hiss of the cosmic microwave background, but for something far more extraordinary. A signal from another civilisation. The result of a decade's work, 70,000 stars, and 100 million candidate signals is now in and every single one of them was us! But far from being a disappointment, the findings are among the most rigorous and revealing in the history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

UC Student Gets a Closer Look at Lonely Gas Giant

University of Cincinnati astrophysicist Paul Smith is part of an international team studying TOI-2031Ab, a gas giant orbiting a star 901 light years from Earth. Smith and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope to study its atmosphere.