Can We Steal Energy from Black Holes? Part 1: Leveling Up Spacetime

Roger Penrose found a way to extract energy from a spinning black hole without breaking any laws of physics. To understand it, we first have to level up our picture of spacetime, from Newton's empty stage to a swirling, draggable fabric.

NASA Starshade Would Enable Astronomers To Directly Image Rocky Exoworlds

Innovative NASA-funded orbital starshade could help capture first direct images from extrasolar earths.

Astronomers Use Rare Ultra-Magnetic Star to Crack a Quantum Mystery

An international team observed a magnetar known as 1E 1547.0–5408 using NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), leading to what could be the first detection of vacuum birefringence taking place in the magnetar’s ultra-strong magnetic field. These findings could potentially resolve a long-standing mystery quantum mechanics.

NASA Highlights Next-Gen Cargo Landers Paving the Way for a Moon Base

NASA and its commercial partners are making progress on their way to a permanent human presence on the Moon. As part of that, a recent press release and accompanying YouTube video hints they may be looking to provide regular updates to the progress of those efforts - and, at least for this first one, that progress looks pretty good.

White Dwarf-Red Dwarf Binaries Power Cosmic Lasers

Researchers have helped unravel the mystery of why certain pairs of stars pulse with regular, long-period bursts of radio waves. The particular class of objects they observed come in pairs that always include a compact dead star, called a white dwarf, locked in orbit with an M dwarf, a red star smaller than our Sun.

Dry Martian Meteorite Reveals Early Water in Mars's Crust

Billions of years ago, Mars was hypothesized to have been a habitable world with flowing liquid water and the potential for life. But directly studying its ancient past is currently limited to orbiters and rovers, as scientists have yet to obtain direct samples from Mars. However, meteorites have been found on Earth to have potentially originated from Mars during large impacts that flung chunks of the Red Planet into space, eventually being grabbed by Earth’s gravity and crashing into the Earth’s surface.

The CosmoQuest Satellite Will Listen to the Early Universe From the Far Side of the Moon

A tiny UK-developed satellite, roughly the size of a small carry-on suitcase, could help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology: what happened in the roughly 150 million years of cosmic dark ages, before the universe’s first stars appeared?

Strange Signals Called Long-period Radio Transits Come From Cataclysmic Variables

Long-period Radio Transients are sources that emit repeating radio and x-ray signals. The signals are polarized and coherent, and are similar to pulsars in some respects. But the type of astrophysical object responsible for them has been vigorously debated. New research says that at least one of them comes from a cataclysmic variable, a binary star where a white dwarf and a red dwarf orbit closely.

New Solar System Models Show Earth Is No Fluke

Astrobiologists use new starting points to produce ‘organic’ models of our solar system’s formation.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, With Some Help From a Korean Spacecraft

A SpaceX Falcon upper stage crashed into the Moon on August 5th. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured images of the crash site from different viewing angles and with different sunlight angles. The images showed that the crater is about 18 meters wide and about 3 meters deep. SpaceX says the crash was an accident.

Mars's Funky Moon Deimos was Shaped by an Impact

Mars' moon Deimos has a large crater on its southern pole. It's also covered by a layer of regolith so deep it buries many other, smaller craters. New research shows that an impact is responsible for both, and that the moon is rather fragile and porous, like a rubble pile asteroid.

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 4: Looking For Us

Some signs of an alien civilization are easier to spot than signs of life itself. On technosignatures, from CFCs and industrial gases to the pandemic dip in pollution, and why Earth's most detectable moment might be right now.

Webb Captures the Treasure Chest at the Heart of the Carina Nebula

This NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope Picture of the Month takes us to a fantastical realm within our home galaxy, where piercing starlight and billowing winds sculpt dust clouds into inventive shapes. This scene is from the Carina Nebula, which lies just 7500 light-years away in the constellation Carina (the Keel).

Pluto Planetary Science is the Gift that Keeps on Giving

Something's wetting the surface of dwarf planet Pluto along the northern edge of Sputnik Planitia, and planetary scientists have found a good explanation for it. A recent study of new Horizons images taken during the 2015 flyby revealed evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising up through cracks in Sputnik Planitia. That's the giant heart-shaped glacial basin we see in all the Pluto images taken by the spacecraft.

The Fastest Star in the Milky Way Will Test Relativity

Astronomers have discovered another S star, the population of stars that orbits the Milky Way's SMBH. This one is the fastest of them all, and also comes closest to the SMBH. It will let astronomers test relativity, especially the Lense-Thirring effect.

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 3: Reading the Face of a Planet

A single pixel of light holds astonishing detail. How ocean glint, rotational mapping, and the vegetation red edge let us read a distant planet's oceans, continents, and even forests, all without ever resolving it as more than a point.

Life On Earth May Have Had A Cold Start

Nitrous oxide (otherwise known as laughing gas) is likely a key atmospheric component of life in the cosmos.

Even Near a Supermassive Black Hole, Stars Enrich the Interstellar Medium

Astronomers know that evolved AGB stars shed their outer layers, contributing to the makeup of the interstellar medium. But new JWST observations show this can happen even near a supermassive black hole, where powerful radiation could obliterate molecules.

Astronomers Finally See the Twisted Magnetic Fields That Drive Protostar Jets

For decades, scientists have theorized that young protostar jets are shaped and driven by complex, twisted magnetic fields. But they couldn't detect them. Now, thanks to ALMA, they've found them around a young binary protostar.

Massive Exoplanets Could Form Around Supermassive Black Holes

Black holes aren't just engines of inexorable destruction. They're complex regions of space and time, and under the right conditions, giant planets can form in their AGN disks.

NASA's SkyFall Mars Helicopters Will Feature a Revolutionary Antenna Design

Engineers developed a unique fabric-based design for a ground-penetrating radar that will be a key instrument on NASA’s SkyFall Mars helicopters. The hardware will enable the SkyFall mission’s trio of planetary rotorcraft to use ground-penetrating radar to study the Martian subsurface.

The JWST Little Red Dots Could Be 'Black Hole Stars'

Little red dots have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in JWST data from the Universe’s deep past. Their ‘powering engines’ might resemble a newly discovered phenomenon dubbed a “black hole star”—an early, rapidly growing black hole wrapped in dense gas. This object, described in a study published today in Nature by researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and international collaborators, may help explain how billion-solar-mass black holes formed so soon after the Big Bang.

Nuking An Asteroid on Short Notice Could Save Us

Readers of a certain age will remember a golden area of asteroid films, capstoned by two with very different endings. Deep Impact engrained the devastating consequences of letting a large piece of rock hit our planet, whereas Armageddon, though arguably the more kitschy of the two films, was an uplifting story about technical ingenuity and sacrifice. And now, the central crux of that movie’s storyline - essentially blasting an asteroid with a nuclear detonation - is taking center stage as our last line of defense against a potential Deep Impact scenario. A new paper from researchers at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, and published in Space: Science & Technology, describes two potential scenarios examining how we might actually be able to nuke a space rock - and whether it would actually save us.

What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 1: The Atmospheric Fingerprint

If an alien civilization could see Earth only as a single pale blue dot, what could they learn? We start with transit spectroscopy, the biosignature cocktail of oxygen, methane, ozone, and water, and why even the James Webb will struggle to find life.

The Planet That Lied About Its Own Spin

A new study warns that astronomers measuring the rotation of distant exoplanets may often be measuring atmospheric winds instead, since the clouds of Venus circle the planet roughly 60 times faster than Venus itself actually spins. Kane proposes using multi-wavelength observations to correct for this, work that will matter enormously once the European Space Agency's PLATO mission launches in 2027 and, researchers predict, discovers several hundred Venus like exoplanets.

The Sun Doesn't Care About Your Flight Schedule

New research shows that extreme space weather can significantly raise radiation exposure on commercial flights and increase electronic faults in aircraft systems. A severe 1956 scale solar storm could expose passengers to a year's worth of radiation in a single flight, and the researchers point to last year's Airbus A320 grounding, triggered by a solar radiation linked flight computer fault, as proof this isn't theoretical. To address the gap, the team has proposed a new aviation specific radiation scale designed to give airlines clearer, more reliable guidance on when to monitor, reroute, or ground flights during severe events.

The Tarantula That Lost Its Fire

A new composite image combining data from Chandra, Hubble, Webb and the retired Spitzer telescope has helped astronomers solve a long standing puzzle in the Tarantula Nebula, a star forming region 160,000 light years away. Young, massive stars there should be heating enough gas to emit X-rays, but observations showed far less X-ray emission than predicted.

Upgraded Sardinia Radio Telescope To Continue Probing Mysterious Fast Radio Bursts

Largest Italian radio telescope located on an out of the way mountain plateau in southern Sardinia sheds light on the cosmos’ still misunderstood Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).

Another First for the JWST: It Detects Three Supermassive Black Holes in the Same Galaxy

Astronomers working with the JWST have found a galaxy only 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang that contains three black holes. Two are close to the galaxy's center and will merge soon. The third is more distant, and is expected to merge much later. The discovery shows that black hole mergers were an important contributor to the masses of the SMBH we find in galaxies today.

A Rare Extragalactic Stellar Stream Reveals Hidden Dark Matter

Scientists have discovered a rare star formation hidden in a distant galaxy, unlike anything seen before beyond the Milky Way. What’s more, the discovery offers a brand new way to measure the distribution of dark matter in distant galaxies.

The Rooms We Build To Survive In, And The Ones We Build To Live In

What does a home actually need to do for us, beyond keeping the weather out? Engineers at MIT have started mapping the answer for astronauts heading to the Moon and Mars, tracing exactly how the walls, layouts and lighting around a person shape their stress, their loneliness and their sense of belonging. It turns out the science of surviving a place and the science of living in one are not the same thing at all, and I have spent enough of the last year thinking about that difference to know how much it matters.

The Ingredients For Planets Turned Up Astonishingly Early

Planet building was supposed to be one of the universe's slow projects, something that only got going billions of years after the Big Bang. New research suggests otherwise. The raw materials for rocky worlds, and perhaps even the water needed for life, may have been ready to go just 100 million years after the Big Bang, long before the first galaxies had even taken shape.

A Massive Stream of Gas Tilted This Planet-Forming Disk

Astronomers found evidence that a giant stream of gas flowing into the GW Orionis young triple-star system may have tilted its planet-forming disk, offering a new explanation for why some planetary systems are misaligned. The next step is to search for shock fronts in the system, and to search for more of these massive streams of gas in other systems.

Amazing Views of Wednesday's Total Solar Eclipse

It was an eclipse for the ages. This past week, many an eclipse chaser and the ‘eclipse curious’ made the journey to stand in the shadow of the Moon, for the only total solar eclipse of 2026. Viewers across northeastern Spain had thrilling views of a low to the horizon eclipse at sunset, while viewers to the north and across Iceland had dicier, cloudy skies to contend with. Here are amazing reader views of the eclipse, along with a few special ones from space.

Two Million X-Ray Sources, and One Cluster That Doesn't Fit

The eROSITA telescope has released its second great catalogue of the X-ray sky with close to two million sources across half the sky, roughly double what it published before. Buried in it is a result from Bonn that matters more than the headline number. A team there went after the faintest part of a massive galaxy cluster, the outer region where fresh material is still arriving along threads of gas stretching between clusters. Nobody had measured that emission before. The gas turns out to be hotter, denser and poorer in heavy elements than the models say it should be.

Twenty Years of Watching One Galaxy, and It Made Less Sense

Blazars are galaxies with a jet aimed almost directly at us, and they flicker across every part of the spectrum at once. Almost everything we think we know about them comes from short observing campaigns just a handful of days, every year or two, in one narrow band of energy. A Polish and German team has now done the opposite, following a single blazar for nearly twenty years with two orbiting observatories and in two observations from 2012 they found something in the spectrum that nobody had predicted.

Nine Hundred Telescopes and One Chance a Year

Reading the atmosphere of another world means catching starlight as it filters through that planet's air during a transit. The signal is about one part in a million and a true Earth twin transits only once a year, so you cannot simply repeat the measurement until the noise averages away. Each attempt has to work on its own. A team led from Shanghai has proposed the alternative to building an impossibly large mirror in space - nine hundred, one metre telescopes, flying together, watching the same transit and analysing the light together.

Every Snowflake Needs a Speck of Dust and So Do Planets

A snowflake cannot form out of nothing. Water vapour will sit in the air quite happily, supercooled and reluctant, until it finds a speck of dust to build on and then it crystallises around it. Cosmochemists have had a version of that problem for decades. The early Solar System was a furnace of gas, and the first solid grains had to condense out of it somehow, yet condensing from a perfectly uniform gas is slow and difficult work. New research from Caltech, analysing fragments of a meteorite that fell over Mexico in 1969, suggests the seeds were already there. Buried inside the oldest solids we possess are specks of stardust from a star that lived and died before the Sun existed.

What If There's a Star Inside a Black Hole?

Ask what lies inside a black hole and the honest answer has always been a bit of a shrug and something about a singularity, a point where density becomes infinite and physics stops being able to tell you anything at all. It is the most unsatisfying answer in astrophysics, second only perhaps to what happened before the Big Bang. Now two theorists in China have produced a solution in which something else sits inside the horizon entirely, a neutron star, whole and intact, twelve kilometres across, its interior perfectly well behaved and apparently defying the laws of physics.

Watching the First Moments in a Star's Death

Astronomers were fortunate when the Einstein Probe detected the difficult-to-observe initial shock break out (SBO) from a supernova. The SBO is the first electromagnetic indication that a star is going to explode, and by observing it and the aftermath, researchers were able to determine what type of progenitor star exploded, and what it's pre-explosion environment was like.

The Odds of Finding Water on Mars

Mars has plenty of water, and almost all of it is in the wrong place. The poles are rich in ice, the equator, where you would actually want to land, has none within reach. That leaves the mid-latitudes, and until now the honest answer about what lies beneath them has been a bit of a shrug. Two new studies from the Planetary Science Institute have changed the shape of that answer. Rather than simply asking whether the data are consistent with buried ice, they have started calculating the odds and can now say, of a given patch of Martian ground, that there is a 64 per cent chance of finding ice if you dig there.

The Telescope That Points Itself

Time on a large professional telescope is one of the scarcest resources in science. Astronomers wait months for a few hours, and every one of those hours is a running argument with the weather, the Moon and the atmosphere. Point at the wrong target at the wrong moment and the data comes back soft, washed out, or useless, with the next chance half a year away. A team has now handed that argument to a machine. Their system was trained not on the rules astronomers use but on what astronomers actually did, night after night, for years.

Interstellar Travel III: Antimatter to the Rescue?

With the end of the Space Age and the winding down of the Cold War, scientists again returned to the question of interstellar flight. Having failed to realize a working concept that could be realized in the near term, more exotic ideas began to be considered, reflecting further breakthroughs in theoretical physics.

Ancient Maltese Seafarers Likely Navigated By The Stars

Ancient Maltese seafarers had both a complex cosmology and likely at least rudimentary skills in celestial navigation. It's thought that they used stars in the southern constellation of Crux to make their way around the south-central Mediterranean.

NASA's MAVEN Illuminates New Understanding of Auroras at Mars

NASA MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission scientists have uncovered a key puzzle piece in understanding certain types of auroras on Mars, finding that they form in a similar way to Earth-based auroras.

SpaceX Junk Hits the Moon. Not a Good Sign

The spent upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has struck the Moon, illustrating the hazard posed by debris in cislunar space. This problem will increase as launches to orbit and to the Moon become more common in the coming years.

Astronomers Find a New Object from the Early Universe Using Webb Data

Homer Dávila Gutierrez, director of SKYCR.ORG, has identified a gravitational arc candidate in the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645 from public data from the James Webb Space Telescope. The object had not been previously reported and is located at a photometric redshift close to 4.4. The preprint is available on arXiv and the manuscript is under review in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Preview to Totality: A Resource Guide to August 12th Total Solar Eclipse

It’s almost show time. We’re just a few days away now, from the only total solar eclipse of 2026. While eclipses are a surety as the celestial gears of the Universe grind on, there are always a few unknowns leading up to eclipse day. We wrote a recent guide to the upcoming total solar eclipse featuring totality across Greenland, Iceland, the North Atlantic and Spain on August 12th. As that date is now only a few days away, it’s a good time to look at prospects and resources to have at the ready leading up to eclipse day.

Scientists Watch as a Distant World's Atmosphere Shrinks and Thins

As dwarf planet Pluto moves along in its distant, high-obliquity 248-year orbit, its atmosphere is changing. That's because it's beginning to travel through colder, darker parts of the outer Solar System for the next 88 years. As a consequence, the mostly-nitrogen atmosphere is expected to grow gradually thinner and eventually freeze out over the coming decades. When that happens, the atmosphere will shrink.

Scientist Constructs "Big Picture" of Mars Water from Rover Data

Rover data from more than 20 years ago has revealed clues to the existence of liquid water on ancient Mars. The NASA Spirit Rover carried a specialized instrument called a Mössbauer Spectrometer that performed mineralogical analyses of soil, rock, and dust on the surface of the Red Planet at Gusev Crater. Individual measurements didn't always indicate definitive proof of water, but when scientist Paolo de Souza of Edith Cowan University in Australia examined years' worth of measurements together, a definite pattern began to show up in the existence of minerals that could only exist in the presence of water. His analysis shows that Mars used to sport a lot more water than scientists expected and that the data showing its existence was in the data all along.