Mars' North Pole Ice Is Far Cleaner Than Expected

The planet Mars is known for its massive dust storms, dust devils, and two large polar ice caps, with its north polar cap being one of the Red Planet’s most striking features. Comprised of water ice, the north polar cap not only holds potential for being a source of water for future human missions, but it also helps researchers’ piece together past climates on Mars. But an ongoing debate within the scientific community is the ice-dust relationship at the north polar cap, specifically how much dust comprises the north polar cap compared to the much larger amount of water ice.

First Direct Image of Protoplanet Swirling Surrounding Gas

The formation and evolution of planets is the driving force behind both where and how we might find life beyond Earth. This complex and lengthy process first begins with a massive ball of gas and dust that swirls until it flattens into a disk, followed by rocks ranging in size from pebbles to kilometer-scale objects clumping together in a process known as accretion, as they too swirl around within the larger disk and form rocky planets closer to the star and the farther out planets collect the gas, ice, and dust that the star couldn’t evaporate. Until now, researchers have been limited to visualizing the swirling gas and dust forming planets through computer models.

Coldest Lava Exoplanet Found to Hold an Atmosphere

Exoplanets continue to challenge our understanding of planetary formation, evolution, and whether they might be able to support life as we know it. Scientists often use planets in our solar system as analogs for exoplanets, studying exoplanets with extremely short orbital periods forces scientists to constantly rethink our understanding of what planets can withstand during their lifetimes. One such type of exoplanet that has entered the foray in recent years are “lava world” exoplanets, and especially lava exoplanets that orbit dangerously close to their stars. But while it has been long known that lava worlds on with higher temperatures have atmospheres, “colder” lava worlds have been found to lack atmospheres.

Strange giant planet TOI-1355 b set to vanish from view in 2033

Since their first discovery in 1995, hot Jupiter exoplanets (hot Jupiters, for short) quickly challenged our understanding of exoplanet formation and evolution, including exoplanetary system architecture. This is because, as their name implies, they orbit at extremely close distances to their host stars, ranging from a few days to a few hours. Some of their orbits are even oval-shaped, called eccentric in the scientific community, meaning their orbit is oval-shaped. But could such an orbit cause a hot Jupiter to completely vanish from view, preventing astronomers from studying it?

The Rate of Starbirth is Crashing in the "Modern" Universe

The Universe has been making fewer stars lately and astronomers want to know why. The obvious answer is: there hasn't been enough starbirth material. But, is that true? Is some other process at play? An international team led by researcher Hong Guo of the Chinese Academy of Sciences decided to dig into the reasons why it looks like starbirth is falling off.

Measuring the Distance Between Quasar Pairs Just Got Easier

A new way to accurately measure the distance between quasar pairs is showing promise through University of Alberta research.

A New Test Looks For A Subtle Twist In Ancient Light

The standard model of cosmology predicts that the Universe is homogeneous. A new study tests this using the polarization of the cosmic microwave background and finds this isn't quite true. This study supports an earlier study which also found a small polarization bias.

Diving into an Out-of-sync Galaxy

Galaxies are like snowflakes, no two exactly alike, even the spirals. The Hubble Space Telescope did a visual dive into the distant spiral NGC 4693 and found some intriguing hints to its past. For one thing, this member of the Virgo Cluster seems to have a central region that's rotating out of sync with the spiral arms and bulge. Those arms don't seem to connect to the central region, and the bulge itself seems to extend out above the plane of the galaxy.

SpaceX's Starship Rocket Does Its Job During First Orbital Flight

SpaceX sent its Starship super-rocket on its first orbital flight — a shorter-than-planned test mission that put operational Starlink satellites into orbit for the first time.

Mars Has a Warm Region Inside

Something deep inside Mars has scientists looking for clues to its internal evolution. A team at the University of Arizona led by Alexander Byrne, used a technique called "tidal tomography" to probe a heat anomaly in the southern hemisphere mantle. It turns out this subsurface region measures about 200 to 400 degrees Celsius warmer than the rest of the mantle. That warm spot may contain information about how Mars has changed over its lifetime.

Why the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope Had to Tweak Nature’s Perfect Sunflower Spiral

Scientists love taking inspiration from nature. The evolutionary processes that have created such a diverse panoply of life on Earth can be a great source of ideas in solving technical problems. One such example is the pattern of sunflower seeds - they are arranged in a mathematically optimized pattern known as a Vogel spiral, and the international team building the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in Australia decided to lay out their antennas in a similar pattern. But, as they report in a paper recently published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, when they did so they found a huge blind spot in the data which hints that maybe this particular natural pattern might need to be modified to work well for this particular application.

A 1,000°C Lunar Microreactor Could Power the Next Era of Moon Bases

As humanity continues to move towards a permanent settlement on the Moon, we still have at least one big hurdle to face - the lunar night, which lasts for roughly fourteen days straight and can drop temperatures to a bone-chilling -223°C. In order to survive those conditions, we need a power source that doesn’t come and go with the Sun, or rely on non-existent stock of coal, gas or wind. In other words, we need nuclear power, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Julius Mercz of the Technical University of Munich and his co-authors, describes a new type of nuclear reactor that wouldn’t just power a habitat’s environmental systems, but also enable its materials extraction technologies as well.

The Solar System’s First Planets Were Made of Fire, Not Ice

The early stages of the solar system remain shrouded in mystery. Not much remains from that time, but scientists have developed plenty of theories about what was going on back then. One of those theories attempts to answer a simple question - did the early system prefer “fire” or “ice”? A new paper published in Nature Astrophysics from lead author Damanveer Grewal, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Yale, and his co-authors, have a definitive answer to that question - the early solar system preferred fire.

JWST Finds Dynamic Structural Evolution in Chariklo’s Rings

When we think of asteroids, we often think of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that contains the majority of the known asteroids in our solar system. However, our solar system hosts several other populations of asteroids and icy rocks, including the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that orbit in Jupiter’s orbit, and the icy bodies and comets of the Kuiper Belt. But there’s one population of asteroids that often gets overlooked called Centaurs, primarily because their orbits are not in a fixed location and instead whose orbits cross the orbits of the outer planets.

Carbon Rocks Deep Underground Could Hold the Evidence of Mars' Watery Past.

A new geochemical modeling study led by researchers at JAXA and the University of Tokyo addresses Mars' "missing" stores of carbonate rocks.

Astronomers Find a Sub-Neptune Orbiting Completely Backward Around a Red Dwarf

In our own solar system, all eight planets orbit our Sun in a nice, orderly fashion. None are more than 7° or so out of alignment with the equator, and all of them rotate in the same direction as the Sun itself. But that’s not the case for all solar systems, and a new paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics from a team of researchers led by Yann Carteret, a PhD student at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), describes the first time we’ve ever found an exoplanet orbiting the opposite direction of its red dwarf parent star - and it has major implications for our understanding of planet formation theory.

Perseverance Reveals How Complex Water Systems Shaped the Jezero Crater on Early Mars

A new study reveals that Jezero Crater’s enigmatic ‘Margin Unit’ was shaped by a complex sequence of ancient lakes, groundwater systems, and hydrothermal fluids.

Stanford Engineers Teach Spacecraft to "Dream" Their Way to the Space Station

Docking with the ISS may seem simple. However, actually doing so is a showcase in how difficult orbital mechanics can be. It’s equivalent to traveling down a highway at 28,000 km/hr and parallel parking into an open garage on a multi-billion dollar laboratory traveling at the same speed. If you try to accelerate forward you actually drift up, and there’s no air friction to naturally slow you down. Oh, and if you hit the lab, everyone onboard both your craft and the station dies, and the resultant debris field could both wipe out dozens of satellites and even people on the ground. No pressure, obviously. For decades, aerospace engineers have been docking successfully using hard coded physics equations and human pilots to correct them. But now, a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at Stanford, is taking a shot at building an AI to perform a series of “mental simulations” that could fundamentally change how future spacecraft interact with each other.

Strange Galaxies in the Early Universe Were Shaped by Weird Stars

Galaxies and their stars in the early Universe look a lot weirder than those we see today, and astronomers want to know why. A team of researchers at the University of Utah decided to survey certain stars in nearby galaxies as analogs of those that existed when the Universe was still in its infancy. The survey, called the "Treasury of Extremely Metal-Poor O Stars (TEMPOS), used the ultraviolet (UV) light streaming from those relatively close-by stars as detected by the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

New Lunar Crater Offers Keys To Moon’s Shallow Subsurface

Asteroids which strike the Moon and create new craters offer lunar scientists a window onto the workings of our natural satellite’s shallow subsurface.

JUICE Mission to Swing by Earth on September 28

The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will return to Earth on 28 September, with flight controllers guiding the spacecraft close to our home planet to alter its speed and direction en route to Jupiter.

Astronomers Directly Image the Youngest Exoplanet Ever

Most exoplanets we find have been around a long time. They’ve cleared out their orbital path (one of the requirements of planethood, as fans of Pluto well know), have their own gravitational pull, and in many cases shine with their own infrared light. But it takes a long time to get to that point - finding “young” planets is much harder. But a new paper available in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by a research team led by Andrea Bernardi of Diego Portales University in Chile describes a new paper that definitely takes the prize as the youngest exoplanet we’ve yet found.

How Diffractive Solar Sails Could Stop a Killer Asteroid at 100 km/s

Asteroids don’t come with a warning label that they might one day hit Earth. While we don’t know of any currently on course to do so, we are finding thousands of new ones each year, and there’s always a potential that one could. We proved a viable technique for dealing with that eventuality - the DART mission successfully moved a small asteroid using a “kinetic impactor” - basically a big rod designed to push the asteroid off its trajectory. But DART had one big flaw - it was traveling in the same direction as the asteroid, and approached it from behind, eventually hitting it with an impactor launched while in orbit around it. That technique might work if we have enough warning, but would require years of orbital mechanical maneuvering to pull off. An alternative, proposed by researchers at Beihang University, is to use a new type of solar sail to deflect a potentially hazardous asteroid by hitting it head on.

SKA May Detect Magnetic Fields on Distant Exoplanets

Studying exoplanets has provided astronomers with a plethora of insights regarding what characteristics need to be searched to find life beyond Earth. For the longest time, astronomers merely thought an exoplanet in a star’s habitable zone was a sufficient criterion for an Earth-like world. However, astronomers have learned that certain stars are more active than our Sun, resulting in exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zone being blasted with far more radiation than Earth could handle. In recent years, astronomers have recognized that a planet’s magnetic field, which shields the Earth from harmful radiation, could be a prime characteristic for identifying Earth-like worlds.

First Diagnostic X-Rays in Space Mark New Era for Astronaut Health

A team of researchers acquired the first diagnostic X-ray images during a commercial spaceflight, demonstrating that X-ray medicine can be performed in space.

3I/ATLAS Has An Extreme Taste For Heavy Water

More and more details about 3I/ATLAS are filtering through the scientific process as time goes on. Our third known interstellar visitor attracted the attention of some of the most powerful observatories in the world when it was discovered in July 2025, and some of those telescopes found something peculiar - the isotopes it contained appeared different. A new paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters (and available in pre-print on arXiv) by Kenji Furuya of the RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute in Japan and his co-authors, shows how that isotopic discrepancy is likely due to the “low-metallicity” of the stellar nursery 3I/ATLAS was born in.

Space Rocks Carry Hundreds of Thousands of Complex Organic Molecules—and We Just Photographed Them

Scientists have known for a while that meteorites contain the “building blocks” of life - complex organic molecules such as amino acids, simple sugars, or even the chemical rungs of DNA. But anyone who has taken an organic chemistry class knows there are plenty of other carbon-based molecules out there, and a new study from Joseph W. Frye-Jones of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Florida State, which was published in The Planetary Science Journal, found tens of thousands of types of previously unseen organic compounds in two of the world’s most famous meteorites.

A Rare, Distant Clump of Early Galaxies Reveals Ancient Cosmic Secrets

The discovery of a very early and rare proto-supercluster of infant galaxies may help give clues to the formation of such clusters and their connection to the Cosmic Web.

Smashed Icy Moons Cool Too Rapidly to Retain Oceans

There are more than 450 confirmed moons orbiting the eight major planets, but only a handful of them provide unique scientific value to pique the interests of the scientific community, specifically their potential for hosting life as we know it. This is due to the subsurface oceans that exist beneath icy crusts, including Jupiter’s Europa and Ganymede, and Saturn’s Enceladus. But what processes are responsible for producing these subsurface oceans, or potentially preventing them from forming in the first place?

Earth's Center of Mass Drifts Less Than We Thought

Earth's center of mass isn't stationary. It drifts seasonally and over the course of years. A new study measures this down to the scale of millimeters and finds the seasonal drift is smaller than we thought.

Solar Orbiter Catches the Sun’s Missing High-Speed Vibrations

The Sun’s magnetic fields are a twisty, curvy, ever changing mess. In particular, our star’s polar regions host regions called polar coronal holes that host invisible magnetic highways that stretch out into interplanetary space. But there’s a lot we don’t know about how those highways actually work, and in particular how they give the particles that form the fast solar wind an extra “kick” that sends them zooming at hundreds of kilometers per second. A new paper from a team led by Dr. Yuhang Gao and Prof. Hui Tian at Peking University, and published recently in the journal National Science Review, thinks they might have found an answer by using high-speed shots from Solar Orbiter to detect never-before seen rapid, high-frequency magnetic waves in those areas.

Astronomers Uncover "Hypersoft" X-ray Sources

X-rays showcase some of the most unique astronomical objects in the universe. Neutron stars and black holes siphoning gas from companion stars stick out like sore thumbs at this level of radiation. However, according to a new paper by Mustafa Muhibullah and Jimmy Irwin from the University of Alabama and Rosanne Di Stefano from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & the Smithsonian, there appears to be another group of ultra-bright X-ray emitters that we’ve completely missed until now. They call them Hypersoft X-ray Sources (HSSs) and, according to a press release accompanying the paper, might answer two long-standing astronomical questions.

The Sun Is Physically Capable of Producing a "Superflare" According To A New Study

We have long known that the Sun is active. It “flares” quite often, sending huge amounts of energy off in a certain direction - sometimes directly at Earth. But we also know that, compared to other Sun-like stars, it seems relatively quiet, and not capable of producing the “superflares” we sometimes see in its stellar equivalents. That sounds like great news for humanity, and some scientists have even argued that lack of superflares was a critical impetus for the development of complex life on Earth. But a new paper from Natalie Krivova of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and her co-authors in the journal Philosophical Transactions A calls the assumption that our Sun is incapable of such dramatic outbursts into question. That also means that, eventually, our highly technological society could bear the brunt of one of them.

MIT Research Could Lead to Refueling Depots on Mars

MIT PhD candidate Lanie McKinney is developing technology to convert the chemicals in the Martian atmosphere into propellant to bring astronauts home.

Researchers Measure the Environment Where the First Supermassive Black Holes Formed

Scientists theorize that the rapid emergence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the early Universe can be explained by the direct-collapse black hole (DCBH) scenario. In a recent study, astronomers investigated the potential host environments of DCBHs and found that this scenario is a plausible explanation for how the "seeds" of SMBH formed.

BepiColombo Makes Up-Close Measurement of Mercury's Solar Bombardment

BepiColombo's measurements of particle bombardment at Mercury will help assess the impact of space storms on Mercury's surface and on Earth's atmosphere.

The Red Planet Has a Purple Side

Mars appears red because of iron oxides in the regolith. But it's not uniformly red. Different lighting conditions and different materials accumulated on the surface can make it appear purple, as in these images from Mars Express and its High-Resolution Stereo Camera.

To Understand The Solar Cycle, Notice How The Sun Sleeps

Astronomer Sandra Chapman has found a connection between the quiet period of one solar cycle and the active period of the next. Her data shows how a critical cutoff point is the key, but the real test will be the solar maximum of Cycle 26 in the 2030s.

Astronomy’s Decades-Long Quest To Understand Cosmic Topology

Cosmic topology is as esoteric as cosmology can get. But a growing number of astrophysicists think it holds keys to understanding the universe on its largest scales.

Researchers Develop a Way to Check the Weather on a Exoplanet

Scientists from Trinity have developed a powerful way to unravel the changing weather patterns on distant worlds. Using this approach, they discovered that the weather on a well-studied brown dwarf, “SIMP 0136”, previously linked with Northern Lights-like phenomena, is largely shaped by just two dominant processes: changes in temperature and the vertical structure of its clouds.

A Zombie White Dwarf Star is Born Again. Hallelujah!

30 years ago, an amateur astronomer noticed a white dwarf star suddenly getting brighter. New research shows this is due to a Very Late Thermal Pulse, a type of helium flash. The star has heated up and become brighter, and is now called a 'born again' star. It's evolved into a Wolf-Rayet type star, and astronomers will get to watch as it continues to evolve on human timescales.

The Sun May Have Swallowed a Planet

New research suggests that some unusual characteristics of the Sun may be explained if it swallowed a large planet sometime during the Solar System’s formation.

Mercury is Shrinking, But Faster Than Previously Thought

The rough, impact-debris-covered surface of Mercury has hidden the true rate at which Mercury has been shrinking, which scientists previously underestimated by 30%

When Stars Engulf Rocky Planets, Beryllium Gives It Away

Astronomers know that stars can engulf planets when they stray too close. But how can they know, by looking at a star, if it has ever done so? The answer lies in Beryllium, an element not synthesized inside stars.

Webb Searches for Brown Dwarfs in a Stunning Star-Forming Region

How small can brown dwarfs be before the definition breaks down? That question is at the heart of new research, and new JWST images. Using the space telescope, researchers have discovered a new class of brown dwarfs with low masses, marked by a peculiar hydrocarbon feature.

For Trans-Neptunian Objects, The Past Is Written On Their Surface

Some Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) formed closer to the Sun and migrated to the outer solar system, while others formed there originally. A new study finds that "hot" and "cold" origin TNOs can be distinguished not only by their orbits, but also by their surface color.

Saturn's South Pole Features Newly Formed Atmospheric Decagon

The planet Saturn is arguably the most recognizable planetary object in the entire solar system because of its massive rings. Anytime a child is asked what their favorite planet is, the answer is often “The one with the rings!” But, while Saturn’s rings are its most striking feature, the famed planet has a myriad of other unique features that often get overlooked, specifically its polar activity. This includes a long-known rotating hexagon in its north polar region, but what kinds of activity could be occurring in Saturn’s southern polar region, and what could this teach scientists about planetary formation and evolution?

If Venus Had An Ancient Moon, It Was Doomed

Earth has a big beautiful Moon, while Venus, its 'sister planet', doesn't. Why is that? Did it ever have one? If it did, new research shows it was never going to last very long.

From 10 to 22 years: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Mission Has Just Been Extended.

More good news for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The telescope's first mid-course correction was extremely efficient, using only 10% of the fuel allotted for it. This efficiency, coupled with other factors, means the powerful space telescope will likely have an additional ~12 years of observing time.

ALMA is Watching a Massive Binary Star System Form

Astronomers used 8 years of observations to create a 3D image of a very young, very massive binary star as it forms. The image shows that the disks in the system are all misaligned. Those misalignments, together with the orbit, are clues to the system's chaotic history.