It's quite a challenge to make an Earth-like world. You need enough mass to hold an atmosphere and generate a good magnetic field, but not so much mass that you hang on to light elements such as hydrogen and helium. You also need to be close enough to your star that you remain comfortably warm, but not so warm that all your water gets baked away. And then you need an abundance of short-lived radioisotopes (SLRs).
The Milky Way has a long and fascinating history that extends back to the early Universe - ca. 13.61 billion years ago. In that time, it has evolved considerably and merged with other galaxies to become the galaxy we see today. In a recent study, a team of Canadian astronomers has created the most detailed reconstruction of how the Milky Way evolved from its earliest phases to its current phase. Using data provided by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the team examined 877 galaxies whose masses and properties closely match what astronomers expect the Milky Way looked like over time ("Milky Way twins").
The Sun is not only our closest stellar neighbor, it's also the star we understand the most. As we've observed it over the centuries, we've learned that the Sun is not an immortal constant. It goes through active and quiet cycles, it has become warmer over geologic time scales, and it occasionally batters the Earth with solar flares. We've generally thought that other main sequence stars behave in much the same way, but when it comes to solar flares, that isn't always true.
Size matters when it comes to telescopes. The bigger they are, the farther they can see. Prioritizing constructing large ones is therefore high on the priority list for many observational organizations. But doing so comes at a cost, and not just in terms of money. Finding a suitable site can be a challenge, and that has been particularly true for the effort to build a 30-meter telescope in the Northern hemisphere. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv by Francesco Coti Zelati of the Spanish Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona and his co-authors, makes the argument for building it at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma in the Canary Islands.
For decades, scientists have observed the cosmos with radio antennas to visualize the dark, distant regions of the Universe. This includes the gas and dust of the interstellar medium (ISM), planet-forming disks, and objects that cannot be observed in visible light. In this field, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile stands out as one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes. Using its 66 parabolic antennas, ALMA observes the millimeter and submillimeter radiation emitted by cold molecular clouds from which new stars are born.
Hidden behind veils of interstellar dust lies Westerlund 1, the most massive, luminous, and nearby super star cluster in the Milky Way. Despite being a stellar powerhouse just 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Ara, it remains invisible to the naked eye. Yet this stellar congregation has just revealed something remarkable: it’s actively blowing an enormous bubble of gamma rays into the space beneath our galaxy’s disk.
Apollo astronauts discovered an unexpected enemy on the Moon. Fine dust, kicked up by their movements and attracted by static electricity, coated everything. It found its way through seals, scratched visors, and clung to suits despite vigorous brushing. Eugene Cernan described it as one of the most aggravating aspects of lunar operations. More than five decades later, as humanity prepares to return to the Moon with increasingly sophisticated equipment, solving the lunar dust problem has become critical.
When 3I/ATLAS swept past the Sun in late October 2025, it became only the third confirmed visitor from interstellar space ever detected. Unlike the mysterious ‘Oumuamua, which revealed almost nothing about itself during its brief flyby in 2017, or even 2I/Borisov which appeared in 2019, this latest interstellar traveler arrived with perfect timing for detailed study.
Planets form inside swirling discs of gas and dust surrounding newborn stars, hidden that make them extraordinarily difficult to detect. Astronomers know these protoplanetary discs contain the raw ingredients for planetary systems because our own Solar System condensed from such a disc 4.6 billion years ago, but actually spotting planets while they’re still forming has remained one of astronomy’s great challenges. Until now, very few planets have been confirmed around stars that are still in their infancy.
The first photograph of a black hole arrived in 2019 like a revelation. That blurred orange ring surrounding the supermassive black hole M87*, 55 million light years away represented one of astronomy’s greatest achievements, the first direct visual confirmation of objects so extreme that not even light escapes their gravitational grip. Three years later, a second image captured Sagittarius A*, the black hole lurking at our own Galaxy’s centre. Both photographs captivated billions of people and opened an entirely new scientific frontier.
Galaxies don’t exactly move with urgency. At distances measured in hundreds of thousands of light years and timescales spanning hundreds of millions of years, even a direct collision unfolds slowly. The two spiral galaxies captured in NASA’s latest composite image, IC 2163 and NGC 2207, brushed past each other millions of years ago at speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second. From our perspective, they appear frozen mid embrace, their spiral arms reaching toward one another like dancers caught in an eternal waltz.
Many stars die spectacularly when they explode as supernovae. During these violent explosions, they leave behind thick, chaotic clouds of debris shaped like cauliflowers. But supernova remnant Pa 30 looks nothing like that.
Four mice went to space as astronauts. One came back and became a mother. And that simple fact might matter more than you’d think for humanity’s future beyond Earth.
How did hot Jupiters end up orbiting so close to their stars, thus earning their moniker? This is what a recent study published in *The Astronomical Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers from The University of Tokyo investigated the orbital evolution of hot Jupiters ended, specifically regarding where their orbits started before orbiting so close to their stars. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets and what this could mean for finding life beyond Earth.
Forty light years away, seven Earth sized planets orbit around a dim red dwarf star in one of the most tightly packed planetary systems ever discovered. The TRAPPIST-1 system has captivated astronomers since 2017, with three of its planets orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water might exist. But there’s been a lingering question whether any of these worlds could hold onto moons?
Researchers have been trying to look at interstellar object 3I/ATLAS from every conceivable angle. That includes very unconventional ones. Recently, while 3I/ATLAS passed out of view of the Earth, it moved into a great vantage point for one of our interplanetary probes. Europa Clipper, whose main mission is to explore Jupiter’s active moon, turned its gaze during its six year journey back towards the center of the solar system and observed 3I/ATLAS as it was reaching its perihelion, and out of sight from the Earth.
A few years ago, asteroid mining was all the rage. With the commercial space sector rapidly growing, the dream of commercializing space seemed almost imminent. Basically, the notion of having platforms and spacecraft that could rendezvous and mine Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), then return them to space-based foundries, was right up there with sending commercial crews to Mars. After a great deal of speculation and ventures going under, these plans were placed on the back burner until the technology matured and other milestones could be accomplished first.
Black holes are often referred to as cosmic vacuum cleaners, indiscriminately swallowing everything that strays too close. The bigger they are, the hungrier they should be. But observations of seven nearby galaxy mergers have revealed something strange: even when presented with gas clouds, supermassive black holes often ‘refuse to eat.’
Beneath the Moon’s cratered surface lie networks of lava tubes and deep pits, natural caves that could shelter future lunar bases from cosmic radiation and wild temperature swings. These underground structures represent some of the most scientifically valuable areas in the Solar System, but they come with the very real challenge of simply getting there!
A thousand light years from Earth, something enormous is happening. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed, a swirling mass of gas and dust that spans nearly 640 billion km. To put that in perspective, it’s 40 times wider than our entire Solar System, from the Sun to the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt where comets drift in the darkness.
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