Chinese-born cryptocurrency investor Chun Wang has become the latest deep-pocketed space enthusiast to set his sights on a trip around Mars. But first, he wants to take a ride around the moon on SpaceX's Starship. And SpaceX is willing to work with him.
The Southwest Research Institute-led Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) instruments aboard ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) spacecraft and NASA’s Europa Clipper made unique observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS in late 2025. SwRI leads the UVS instruments on both spacecraft, simultaneously imaging both hemispheres of the comet and detecting the comet’s ultraviolet emissions.
Superluminous supernovae are the royalty in the supernova world. They're up to 100 times brighter than a standard supernova, and astrophysicists want to know why. New research shows that magnetars are responsible.
Exoplanet hunters are keen to find the next extrasolar earthlike planet, one that may harbor life as we know it. But preliminary results from a new study indicate that our galaxy may be filled with a plethora of exo-Venuses. Yet as one exoplanetary researcher notes: the template for such exo-worlds --- our own Venus --- has been ‘criminally underexplored.’
Spacecraft often use planets for gravity-assist or "slingshot" maneuvers. NASA's Psyche mission used Mars for that purpose during a May 15th flyby. The flyby accelerated the spacecraft and aimed it at its eventual destination, the asteroid 16 Psyche. The flyby was also an opportunity to take some pictures of Mars, and to test and calibrate the spacecraft's science instruments.
In 2014, researchers presented the discovery of water vapour plumes being emitted from Jupiter's moon Europa. This caused quite a stir; it meant that the moon's buried ocean was accessible without contending with the thick ice shell that concealed it. But new research by the same researchers questions those detections.
Typically when we think of astronomy, we think of pictures of M87 captured on a backyard telescope or the soaring colorful peaks of the Eagle Nebula seen by Hubble. But perhaps the most influential type of astronomy of the last 100+ years doesn’t directly result in the stunning pictures we’re so accustomed to today. It captures radio waves from some of the most interesting objects in the universe. And in her new book, The Echoing Universe: How Radio Astronomy Helps Us See the Invisible, Dr. Emma Chapman, a radio astronomer at the University of Nottingham, tracks how these longest wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum have influenced the practice of astronomy and our understanding of our place in the universe.
Years of grievance against dust. It ruins lungs, suits, rovers, and Mars missions. The first installment of an apology, sort of, to the most annoying substance in the cosmos.
In the closing decades of the 20th century, several proposed explanations were put forward for why humanity has not yet found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in the cosmos.
Ever since the JWST found over-massive black holes in the early Universe, researchers have been trying to understand them. Theory showed that black holes and their galaxies grew in synchronization with each other. That can't explain the JWST's findings, but new research might.
There's a distinct category of exoworlds out there that orbit two stars. They're called "circumbinary" planets and up until recently, astronomers had only found about 18 of them among the 6000+ other known exoplanets and candidates. Now, a team at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, have found 27 more potential circumbinary worlds. They credit a new method, called apsidal precession, for their finding.
During the 1970s, the first interstellar probes were launched, carrying messages specifically designed to be intelligible to extraterrestrial species. The messages were essentially a "message in a bottle" intended for an advanced civilization, should they find the probes someday.
Our Solar System is currently passing through the Local Interstellar Cloud, a region of highly diluted gas and dust between the stars. On its path, Earth continuously accumulates iron-60, a rare radioactive isotope of iron produced in stellar explosions. This has now been confirmed by an international research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) through the analysis of Antarctic ice tens of thousands of years old. From the steady but time-varying influx, the researchers conclude that the radioactive isotope has been stored within the cloud since a long-past stellar explosion.
Asteroid mining seems simple in theory. A spacecraft flies up to a giant rock in space, scoops out some material, and either processes it on site or returns it back to a huge central processing facility. But in practice, it is certainly not that simple, and a new paper from some Spanish researchers, available in pre-print form on arXiv, showcases one of the reasons why - many small asteroids are spinning ridiculously fast.
How can astronomers observe ancient galaxies when they're so challenging to resolve? By looking at a whole bunch of them at once in a single spectral line and seeing how it changes over time. That's what a new instrument called the Tomographic Ionized-carbon Mapping Experiment (TIME) does.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A study of NASA's Black Marble data reveals a pattern of regional volatility in nighttime illumination across the planet.
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.
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.
One of the core community surveys of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, is expected to locate over a thousand exoplanets that orbit far away from their stars, beyond the orbital distance of Earth from the Sun. Although Roman hasn’t launched yet, astronomers already are gathering useful supporting data by utilizing NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which could assist astronomers in analyzing Roman data.
Every time an astronomer points a telescope at a distant supernova, they're trying to measure how far away it is. But the light from these stellar explosions arrives tangled up with interference from dust, the age of the host galaxy and the chemical make up of the original star . Unpicking it all has always been a painstaking business. Now a team of researchers has used artificial intelligence to cut through the noise in a single step, potentially making cosmological measurements four times more precise. In a universe full of unanswered questions, that's a very significant leap forward.
During the 1970s, pioneering experiments were conducted that are known today as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). At the same time, NASA launched four spacecraft bound for interstellar space, each carrying "messages in a bottle" intended for extraterrestrial beings.
The search for life elsewhere focuses on biosignatures. These are chemicals in atmospheres that can only be attributed to life. But despite the prowess of the JWST, finding slam-dunk proof of life on other worlds is a confounding exercise. New research suggests that rather than focus on individual chemicals, we should look for statistical patterns.
Extremely powerful quasars in the early Universe drove star-forming gas out of their galaxies. These Super-quasars are behind the JWST's puzzling early Universe observations.
When NASA's Artemis II spacecraft carried four astronauts around the Moon earlier this year, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope was quietly watching from a quiet valley in West Virginia. The Green Bank Telescope tracked the Orion capsule across 213,000 miles of empty space with a precision that would embarrass most speedometers and what it produced isn't just an engineering triumph. It's a glimpse of how the world's most sensitive ears are becoming indispensable to the future of human spaceflight.
You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. You’re chilling for several hours and eventually notice the water hasn’t touched you. You remember over-hearing some otherworldly fellows who briefly landed and discussed the landscape didn’t look well formed, so they left.
Jupiter, the gravitational behemoth that makes up a lion’s share of our solar system’s planetary content, is much more complicated than ever previously thought. Or so say leaders from NASA’s highly successful Juno mission.
A new study by planetary scientists at Harvard offers an explanation for one of Earth’s great climate puzzles: how the Sturtian glaciation, an ancient ice age when the planet was nearly entirely frozen, could have lasted 56 million years. A large igneous province in Canada helped them figure it out.
A new international scientific study by the Hellenic Space Center (HSC) has identified some of the most promising candidate cryovolcanic regions on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. These regions represent important targets for future observations by the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE).
By the 1960s, two major contributions were made to the field of SETI, both of which considered how more advanced civilizations could be found based on the types of structures they might build and the levels of energy they could harness.
The search for Earth 2.0 has begun in earnest. But there’s a huge variety of exoplanets out there, so narrowing down the search to focus valuable telescope time on only the best candidates is critical. One variable of a planet that will have a huge impact on its habitability is its size. A new paper, now available in pre-print on arXiv, by researchers at the University of California Riverside, looks into the impact of a planet’s size on one of its more critical features for habitability - whether it holds onto an atmosphere - and determines that slightly smaller than Earth is likely the smallest a planet can be and still be viable for life to develop.
Ever since JWST first began peering out at the early Universe a few years ago, astronomers have been spotting strange "little red dots" (LRDs) in its infrared images. There are hundreds of these compact blobs at very high redshifts at distances of about 12 billion light-years. Astronomers think they began forming some 600 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them players in the infancy of the cosmos. They appear red in optical light and blue in the ultraviolet. So, what are these strange objects?
A spiral galaxy seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disc fills the view from corner to corner. Its disc is yellow near to the centre and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars, respectively. Thin brown clouds of dust, glowing pink spots of star formation, and sparkling blue patches filled with star clusters swirl through the galaxy. Behind it, small orange dots are very distant galaxies.
There’s a specific sequence in the anime Dragonball Z that for some reason has stuck in my head for over two decades. Goku, the main character of the show, travels to King Kai’s planet and can barely stand up when he arrives because the planet’s gravity is 10 times stronger than Earth’s. Over time, he trains in this gravity, and his body begins to adapt to it. Eventually, after leaving the planet, he’s stronger, faster, and more agile than he ever was before. But would that really happen if you were exposed to 10G over a long period of time? Researchers at the University of California Riverside (UCR) decided to test that idea and report their results in a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology. But instead of using anime characters, they used fruit flies as their test subjects.
Fifteen years after Western astronomers first discovered ‘buckyballs’ in space, they’re back with stunning images and rich data generated by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The results of their study have revealed the cosmic origin of these strange molecules.
You’re a long-necked Titanosaurs grazing the plains and chomping away on tree leaves about 100 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous in what would eventually become a future Starbucks location. You look up at the night sky and notice a bright dot that seems slightly larger and brighter than usual since you’ve seen it a bunch. You grunt at your cousin (official dinosaur language) asking if he notices it, too. Your cousin grunts back that it does seem bigger and brighter and wonders what’s up.
By the mid-20th century, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence would emerge as an established field of scientific research. The era witnessed the first experiments, and many of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of SETI were proposed during this time.
More than 300 million kilometres from the nearest mechanic, NASA's Curiosity rover found itself in a situation that would make any engineer break into a cold sweat. A rock got stuck to its drill and wouldn't let go. What followed was a week long, long distance rescue operation that says as much about the ingenuity of the people behind the machine as it does about the extraordinary challenges of exploring another world.
Astronomers are puzzling over another oddball on the edge of the solar system: This time, it's an icy object less than a quarter of Pluto's size with a thin atmosphere – a layer of gas that's not typically found around objects so small.
The Department of Defense has released a fresh batch of images and transcripts relating to reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs, including pictures and descriptions from NASA's Apollo missions to the moon.
Somewhere out there, hurtling through space in the darkness, is an asteroid with our name on it. We just don't know which one yet. NASA's answer to that uncomfortable truth is NEO Surveyor, a purpose built infrared space telescope currently taking shape in laboratories across America, and scheduled for launch in 2027. The stakes, quite literally, could not be higher.
For years, when something happened on the far side of the Sun, we didn't know much, if anything about it. Sunspots could form there, flares could lash out and the corona could send masses of material out to space. However, we didn't know about any of this until those active regions rotated around to our view. In the late 1900s, scientists came up with a technique called helioseismology to analyze sound waves created by such activity as they echoed through the Sun.
New Curtin University-led research has used a radio telescope that spans the Earth to snap images that measure the immense power of jets from black holes, confirming scientists’ theories of how black holes help shape the structure of the Universe.
A new mission promises to 'open the box' on exoplanet science. Scientists and engineers recently released the first engineering images from the Pandora exoplanet survey mission. The pictures represent the first ever images from a NASA Astrophysics Pioneers Program mission. Established in 2020, the program looks to test the feasibility of small low cost missions designed to address key questions in astronomy and astrophysics.
The Subaru Telescope observed the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS (C/2025 N1) on January 7, 2026 (UT), after it made its closest approach to the Sun. By observing colors in the coma around the comet, astronomers could estimate the ratio of carbon dioxide to water. This ratio is much lower than that inferred from earlier observations by space telescopes. These findings suggest that the chemistry of the coma is evolving over time and offers clues to the structure of comet 3I/ATLAS.
Mars has lots of glaciers located along its mid-latitudes. We’ve known this for years thanks to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO’s) SHARAD sounder. But, despite all of the excellent data it’s managed to gather, SHARAD doesn’t have high enough resolution to accurately measure the boundary between the glacier itself and the rocky material that has been deposited on top of it over the course of billions of years. A new study, published in the journal JGR Planets, details a potential method of finding that boundary—by using a drone.
Our Moon is still guarding its secrets decades after the last of the Apollo missions lifted off the lunar surface. Lunar scientists still puzzle over just when and how a giant Earth impactor formed our Moon, completely altering our early Earth in the process.
