In a recent paper, an international team proposed an ultra-long wavelength radio interferometer that could examine the Cosmic Dark Ages and Cosmic Dawn. Known as the Dark Ages Explorer (DEX), this telescope could provide fresh insights into how and when the first stars and galaxies formed.
When the JWST came to life and began observations, one of its first jobs was to gaze back in time at the early Universe. The Assembly of Galaxies is one of the space telescope's four main science themes, and when it observed the Universe's first galaxies, it uncovered a mystery. According to our understanding of how galaxies evolve, some were far more massive than they should be.
We don't have to rely solely on the JWST to observe the Universe's oldest stars. Some of the oldest stars in the Universe reside in globular clusters, and the Milky Way has about 150 of them. How old exactly? New research has the answer.
We tend to think of habitability in terms of individual planets and their potential to host life. But barring outliers like rogue planets with internal heating or icy moons with subsurface oceans created by tidal heating, it's exoplanet/star relationships that generate habitability, not individual planets. New research emphasizes that fact.
Supermassive Black Holes reside at the center of large galaxies, where they dominate their surroundings and sometimes eat stars. When they gobble up a star, they emit a distinctive light flare. This makes it easier for astronomers to pinpoint their location. Astronomers have detected one of these flares offset from a galactic center. Is the black hole shifting its location?
One of the unanswered questions in astronomy is just how supermassive black holes grew so big, so quickly. A team of astronomers have tried to answer this question by searching for actively feeding supermassive black holes (aka quasars) as a way to measure how much material material they are actually accumulating. They studied nebulae near the quasars that light up with the quasar is releasing radiation and found that many of the more distant quasars have only been active for a few hundred thousand years, not long enough to grow to the size we see today.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Could Study Dying Planets
The most massive stars in the Milky Way contain one hundred times more mass than the Sun, even more in some cases. These O-type stars are extremely hot, luminous, and blue, and often die in supernova explosions. Astrophysicists want to know how they get so big, and a simple household chemical might hold the answer.
Researchers have identified several features on Mars that look surprisingly similar to conditions on Earth. One notable feature is giant wave-like landforms called solifluction lobes, which are in cold, mountainous regions of Earth, like the Arctic or Rocky Mountains. These are slow-moving patterns similar to fluids running downhill, but on Mars, they're 2.6 times larger because of its lower gravity. They can grow much taller before collapsing on Mars.
To understand how chaotic the early Solar System was, we need only gaze at the Moon. Its cratered surface bears the scars from multitudes of collisions. The early Solar System was like a debris field where objects smashed into each other in cascades of collisions. The same must be true in all young solar systems, and in a new paper, researchers simulated a collision between two massive planets to see what would happen.
What new technologies or methods can be developed for more efficient in-situ planetary subsurface analyses? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how a novel instrument called OptiDrill could fill existing technological voids regarding the sampling and collection of regolith (top dust layer) and subsurface samples on a myriad of planetary bodies throughout the solar system.
When astronomers want to understand brown dwarfs, they often turn to WISE 1049AB. It's a benchmark brown dwarf in astronomy, and the closest and brightest brown dwarf we know of. The binary pair, which is also known as Luhman 16, is about 6.5 light-years away. Brown dwarfs are a crucial bridge between planets and stars, and understanding them helps astronomers understand the dynamics of both exoplanets and stars.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Could Study Dying Planets
The JWST continues to live up to its promise by revealing things hidden from other telescopes. One of its lesser-known observations concerns Free-Floating Planets (FFP). FFPs have no gravitational tether to any star and are difficult to detect because they emit so little light. When the JWST detected 42 of a particular type of FFP in the Orion Nebula Cluster, it gave astronomers an opportunity to study them more closely.
The idea that our Solar System is representative of other solar systems hasn't survived the age of exoplanet discovery. Kepler and TESS have shown us that our system doesn't even contain the most common type of planet: sub-Neptunes. These planets pose a mystery to planetary scientists, and the JWST is helping unravel the mystery.
The solar gravitation lens (SGL) has much potential as a telescope. This point in space, located about 650 AU away from the Sun, uses fundamental properties of physics to amplify the light from extremely far-away objects, allowing us to see them at a level of detail unachievable anywhere else. However, any SGL mission would face plenty of technical and physical challenges. A new paper by independent researcher Viktor Toth is the latest in a series that discusses those challenges when imaging a far-away exoplanet, and in particular, looks at the difficulties in dealing with potential moving cloud cover. He concludes that using the SGL might not be the most effective way of capturing high-resolution images of an exoplanet, after all.
The center of the Milky Way is a busy place, tightly packed with stars and dominated by the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. It also features powerful magnetic fields that regulate star production, influence gas dynamics and gas cloud formation, and even affect the accretion processes around Sagittarius A*. Gigantic filaments of gas that look like bones form along the magnetic field lines, and one of them appears to be fractured.
On 20 April, 2025, the African Space Agency (AfSA) was formally launched at an inauguration ceremony in Cairo, Egypt. The decision to create AfSA was made by the African Union (AU) in 2016 to coordinate the continent's approach to space, and enact the African Space Policy and Strategy. AfSA will coordinate African space cooperation with Europe and other international partners.
The White House Releases its 2026 Budget Request for NASA. Cuts to SLS, Gateway and Orion
We tend to think of Extraterrestrial Intelligences (ETIs)—if they exist—as civilizations that have overcome the problems that still plague us. They're advanced, peaceful, disease-free technological societies that enjoy absolute political stability as they accomplish feats of impeccable engineering. Can that really be true in a Universe where entropy sets the stage upon which events unfold?
The Juno spacecraft circling in Jovian space is the planetary science gift that just keeps on giving. Although it's spending a lot of time in the strong (and damaging) Jovian radiation belts, the spacecraft's instruments are hanging in there quite well. In the process, they're peering into Jupiter's cloud tops and looking beneath the surface of the volcanic moon Io.
As young stars form, they exert a powerful influence on their surroundings and create complex interactions between them and their environments. As they gobble up gas and dust, they generate a rotating disk of material. This protoplanetary disk is where planets form, and new research shows that stars can feed too quickly and end up regurgitating material back into the disk.
Understanding how life started on Earth means understanding the evolution of chemistry in the Solar System. It began in the protoplanetary disk of debris around the Sun and reached a critical point when life appeared on Earth billions of years ago. Close to the Sun, the chain of chemical evidence is broken by the Sun's radiation. But further out in the Solar System, billions of kilometres away, some of that ancient chemistry is preserved.
A team of researchers led by the Los Alamos National Laboratory examined the possibility that the jets coming from collapsing stars could be responsible for creating the heaviest elements in the Universe.
