The Large Hadron Collider has changed particle physics, and now scientists are dreaming up even bigger supercolliders. But humanity can't match the raw particle-colliding power of a supermassive black hole. In a new paper, researchers describe how supermassive black holes create a dense environment where particles are spinning at relativistic speeds and crashing into each other, releasing other particles that could be detectable on Earth.

The monster black hole lurking at the center of galaxy M87 is an absolute beast. It is one of the largest in our vicinity and was the ideal first target for the Event Horizon Telescope. Scientists have taken a fresh look at the supermassive black hole using those iconic Event Horizon Telescope images and have now figured out just how fast this monster is spinning and how much material it's devouring.

Japan's private space company ispace experienced another setback on Thursday 5th June when its Resilience lunar lander crashed into the surface of the Moon, marking the company's second consecutive failed landing attempt in just over two years.

Titan has no liquid water whatsoever on its surface. But it does have liquids. Seas, lakes, streams, rivers…of methane and ethane.

It's official. NASA's Fiscal Year 2026 Discretionary Budget Request (FY 2026) has been released, and the news is decidedly mixed. In a previous article, we examined the FY 2026 Budget Request (released on May 2nd) and its recommendations for the coming year. With the release of the FY 2026 Budget, what was previewed and the anxiety it caused for many have been confirmed. While the Budget bolsters funding for NASA's exploration programs for the Moon and Mars, it also contains deep cuts to many other programs and the cancellation of key elements in NASA's Moon to Mars architecture.

The discovery of a Saturn-sized gas giant orbiting a small red dwarf is urging astronomers to reconsider their theories of planet formation. Core accretion theory is the most widely accepted explanation for planetary formation. It describes how planet formation begins with tiny dust grains gathering together and forming planetary cores that grow larger through accretion. It explains much of what we see in our Solar System and others. This discovery introduces some doubt.

Across the universe, dramatic events occur when a black hole meets a neutron star. A neutron star is the ultra-dense remains of a massive star that exploded — imagine all the mass of our Sun compressed into a sphere just a few tens of kilometres wide. When a black hole and neutron star spiral toward each other, the result is one of nature's most violent spectacles.

For years, scientists have been scratching their heads over the "Hubble Tension,” the mismatch between how fast the cosmos was expanding in its youth versus how fast it's expanding today. But now, armed with the most precise data ever captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have found the perceived gap is starting to narrow! In fact, the expansion rate measured by Cepheid variables versus the cosmic background has overlapping error bars again. Will the tension mystery finally be resolved?

When the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto and Charon in 2015, it revealed two amazingly complex worlds and an active atmosphere on Pluto. Those snapshots redefined our understanding of the system. Now, new observations using the James Webb Space Telescope taken over the space of a week, show that Pluto's atmosphere is completely different from any other one in the Solar System.

Astronomers have found another super-Earth. It's about 10 times more massive than Earth, and orbits in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star about 2475 light-years away. These massive Earth-like planets hold key information about how planets form and evolve.

As the years go by, the chance of Europa hosting life seems to keep going down. But it's not out of contention yet.

On the surface (you're welcome for the joke), Venus is not even close to being hospitable to life. But that's not the end of the story.

Chinese rocket startup Space Epoch put on a show recently, with a demonstration test launch of their reusable Yanxinghe-1 rocket booster.

Mars is by far the most Earth-like planet in the solar system…but that's not saying much.

In a recent paper, UCSB physicist Jack Kingdon identified a trajectory for a rapid transit (90 days) to Mars using SpaceX's Starship. This proposal offers an alternative to mission architectures that rely on nuclear propulsion to reduce transit times.

The challenge in the search for habitable worlds is clear. We need to be able to identify habitable worlds and distinguish between biotic and abiotic processes. Ideally, scientists would do this on entire populations of exoplanets rather than on a case-by-case basis. Exoplanets' natural thermostats might provide a way of doing this.

The idea that the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) will collide emerged after decades of observations by a host of astronomers. The Hubble played a decisive role in the determination during the early 2000s. It was a triumph of precision astronomy and space telescopes. Now, the Hubble has played an equally important role in cancelling the collision.

How can humanity use the developing Lunar Gateway as an appropriate starting point for advancing human space exploration beyond the Moon? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a team of researchers evaluated a myriad of ways that Lunar Gateway could be used as a testbed for future technologies involving sending humans to Mars and Ceres. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, astronauts, and mission planners develop novel strategies for advancing long-term human space exploration.

The search for life on other worlds needs a way to sift through the chemistry of their atmospheres. If another species observed Earth to search for life, they'd look for "smoking gun" chemistry in the atmosphere. That includes looking for oxygen, since it is created through photosynthesis by plants and some bacteria. So, the key is to look for life-dependent chemical "signals" at exoplanets.

Solar storms have the potential to cause catastrophic damage. One that occurred around the end of October 2003 (now called the 2003 Halloween Storm) caused an estimated $27B in damages. That number will only increase as humanity has become more reliant on space-based and electrical infrastructure. However, if we could predict when storms would hit with some accuracy and adjust our use of the technologies that could be affected, we could avoid the worst damage. But, as of now, we don't have such a system that could help predict the types of events that could cause that damage accurately enough. That is where a new Sun activity monitoring system, described in a recent paper by Leonidas Askianakis of the Technical University of Munich, would help.

How can fission-powered propulsion help advance deep space exploration, specifically to the outer planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from India investigated the financial, logistical, and reliability of using fission power for future deep space missions. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and future astronauts develop next-generation technologies as humanity continues to expand its presence in space.

The grainy videos from the Apollo Moon landings are treasured historical artifacts. For many of us, that footage will be lodged in our minds until our final synaptic spark sputters out. But like all technology since the space race days, video technology has advanced enormously, and the next Moon landings will be captured in high-definition video. The ESA is so focused on getting it right that they're practicing filming lunar landings in a special studio that mimics the conditions on the lunar surface.

Not all Full Moons are created the same. Follow the familiar Moon long enough, and you'll notice something strange, as it seems to wander across the sky from north to south, from one cycle to the next. Welcome to the fantastic precession of our natural satellite the Moon. Last December, we saw the 'Long Night's Full Moon,' as the Full Moon nearest to the solstice rode the highest in the sky for the last two decades. Now, its time for the southern hemisphere to get a turn, as the Moon heads steeply southward, on its way to Full on June 11th.

In a universe of a billion galaxies, Earth is the world known to have life. If we're a common example of what happens in the Universe, then our location can tell us something about habitability. A new study is about to flip everything we thought we knew about habitability on its head, examining the potential for life in exotic environments, such as rogue planets, water worlds, and tidally locked planets, and calculate how habitable they would be compared to Earth. As we learn more about these other worlds, if they are more habitable, it can give new predictions.

Just when astronomers think they're starting to understand stellar activity, something strange grabs their attention. That's the case with a newly discovered stellar object called ASKAP J1832-0911. It lies about 15,000 light-years from Earth and belongs to a class of stellar objects called "long-period radio transients." That means it emits radio waves that vary in their intensity on a schedule of only 44 minutes per cycle. It does the same thing in X-ray intensities, which is the first time anybody's seen such a thing coupled with long-period radio transits.

You'd think that icy worlds are frozen in time and space because they're - well - icy. However, planetary scientists know that all worlds can and do change, no matter how long it takes. That's true for Europa, one of Jupiter's four largest moons. Recent observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) zero in on the Europan surface ices and show they're constantly changing.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is equipped with a powerful tool called SHARAD (Shallow Radar), designed to peer beneath the Martian surface and uncover hidden layers of ice, rock, and geological secrets. To accommodate it, engineers mounted SHARAD on the side of the spacecraft, requiring the orbiter to roll 28° during operation to boost signal quality. But computer models hinted at something else: if the orbiter rolled more than 120°, the radar performance could dramatically improve. Scientists put this daring idea to the test—and it paid off. The extreme roll manoeuvre worked, unlocking an even clearer view of Mars's buried past.

Betelgeuse is dying—but not quietly. This colossal red supergiant, already famous for its brightness fluctuations, has now revealed a strange long-term rhythm: a secondary pulse every 2,100 days. One tantalising theory suggests a hidden companion—possibly a second star orbiting Betelgeuse at roughly the distance between Saturn and the Sun, circling every six years. Astronomers recently pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at the giant in search of this elusive "Betel-Buddy" but failed to find it constraining its size and orbit.

Exoplanet science is shifting from finding any detectable exoplanets we can to searching for those in their stars' habitable zones. NASA's proposed Habitable World Observatory and other similar efforts are focused on these worlds. The problem is, habitable zones aren't static.

Frameworks are a critical, if underappreciated, component of any space exploration mission. They can range from the overall mission architecture, capturing scientific and technical goals, to the structure of messages sent between two internal components of the system. One of the most interesting frameworks that is getting much attention in the space exploration community is the interaction of multiple robots for a single purpose, known as a multiple-robot system, or MRS. On top of that, one of the most common frameworks for robots on Earth or in space is the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS), which is commonly used to run everything from vacuum cleaners to giant mining trucks. Its most recent iteration, ROS2, even uses yet another framework, known as a middleware, to handle aspects of robot communication such as networking and packetizing data. However, there are plenty of different middlewares to choose from for ROS2, so a team of researchers from the University of Luxembourg decided to try to pick one that would be best for planetary exploration applications.

We've been gazing at the Moon for a long time, yet it's still mysterious. We've sent numerous orbiters and landers to our satellite, and even brought some of it back to our labs. Those rocks only presented more mysteries, in some ways. Lunar rocks are magnetic, yet the Moon doesn't have a magnetosphere. How did this happen?

In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) is commonly cited as being a critical step towards a sustainable human presence in space, especially on the Moon. Just how crucial it is, and how much its by-products will affect other uses of the Moon, is still up for debate. A new paper from Evangelia Gkaravela and Hao Chen of the Stevens Institute of Technology dives into those questions and comes up with a promising answer - ISRU is absolutely worth it, if we can control the waste products.

Just because we can find ozone in the atmosphere of other planets doesn't mean there's life. Ozone is a sign of life on Earth, but its detection on Venus shows that it can also be produced abiotically. This indicates that there are different pathways for its creation, not only on Venus but also on other Venus-like exoplanets.

What happens when you see something that just doesn't make sense? Perhaps you rub your eyes and consider it an anomaly. But what if you see it in an experiment? Say, travelling electrons that make different patterns depending upon whether they were detected? Then, you might want to change your sense of reality. Now, if you can develop a theory for the observations, then maybe you can start a new field of science. It has happened. Quantum mechanics is the name given to this relatively new field and it's the topic that Sean Carroll writes in his book, "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe – Quanta and Fields". In his book, there's much ado about particles, fields, groups and diagrams; all with the aim of enabling any reader to make sense of it.

China's Tianwen-2 mission blasted off on Wednesday, embarking on an epic 8-year journey that will help to unlock the secrets of an asteroid and a comet before delivering the precious cargo back to Earth. The spacecraft will first hunt down Kamoʻoalewa (asteroid 2016 HO3) which it will study for a year, extracting samples from its surface. After returning the sample to Earth, Tianwen-2 will head back out into the Solar System taking another 7 years to intercept the main belt comet 311P/Pan-STARRS. It will undertake a flyby study of this object that has never been studied before.

Lunar exploration is gaining momentum, but one of the biggest challenges remains the Moon's long, cold night, which lasts about two weeks. To address this, a team of researchers has proposed deploying a constellation of solar power satellites in lunar orbit. These satellites would beam energy wirelessly to a base on the Moon, providing a continuous supply of 1,600 kW of power, day or night. Their proposal includes launching 300 satellites by 2035, supporting long term plans for establishing permanent lunar bases.

A team of geophysicists from the University of Chicago showed how clouds on exoplanets could enhance the search for biosignatures. Their findings could have significant implications for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) and other next-generation telescopes that will study exoplanets via direct imaging.

Studies of the Solar System's dynamics generally treat it in isolation and do not consider the influence a passing star could have on the orbits of the planets over time. According to a recent study by a team of astronomers, stars passing close to the Solar System could result in the loss of planets over the next 5 billion years.

Ultraviolet astronomical observations have always been hindered by one simple fact - the Earth's atmosphere blocks most UV photons, especially in the UV-C and UV-B range of 100-315nm wavelengths. So, astronomers must have a collector above the atmosphere if they want to know what is happening in those wavelengths. A consortium from Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC) hopes to provide additional insight into that realm with their PhotSat mission, a CubeSat that will observe the whole sky in UV and visible light once every few days.

Generation starships may be the only way humans travel to other stars. These hypothetical spacecraft would travel at sub-light speed and take generations to reach their destination. Over the hundreds or even thousands of years, generations of human beings would be born, live, and then die on these ships. Even if that awkward arrangement could be made to work, how would everything else function for so long? What about the spacecraft? What about the AI?

People always want to know what will happen to Earth when the Sun eventually swells up as a red giant. For one thing, the expanding Sun will turn the inner planets into cinders. It will almost certainly spell the end of life on our planet. Mars might become more temperate and hospitable to life. In addition, it could well be a boon for the gas giant Jupiter and its moons. That's because the habitable zone of the Solar System will move outward from where it is now, to a spot encompassing the Jovian system and forcing changes on all of those worlds.

Raman spectroscopy uses scattered to identify a substance's chemical ingredients and is one of the most widely used scientific methods in space exploration. It is used for lunar exploration to identify volcanic minerals, water ice, and space weathering, and has been limited to obtaining data from lunar orbiters. But how can Raman spectroscopy be conducted on the lunar surface to help us better understand our nearest celestial neighbor? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of NASA and academic researchers discussed the Raman Cube Rover (R3R), which would be delivered to the lunar surface via the private space company, Astrobotic.

SpaceX's Starship super-rocket got off to a great start for its ninth flight test, but the second stage ran into a host of issues and made an uncontrolled re-entry.

The galaxy cluster Abell S1063 dominates the center of this JWST image. It's a massive cluster of galaxies about 4.5 billion light-years away. While it dominates the picture, it's not the primary target. It serves as a gravitational lens that magnifies even more distant galaxies that appear as glowing streaks of light around its circular edges.

Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) has stood as a promising potential alternative propulsion technology for decades. Chemical rockets have begun to reach their theoretical maximum efficiency, and their developers have switched their focus to making them cheaper rather than more efficient. NTP should answer that by offering high thrust and specific impulse. NASA's DRACO Program, the standard-bearer for NTP systems, provides a specific impulse of around 900 seconds, about double a traditional chemical rocket, but half that of most ion thrusters. To increase that number even further, researchers at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and The Ohio State University have been working on a novel configuration of NTP called the Centrifugal Nuclear Thermal Rocket (CNTR) that promises almost to double the specific impulse of traditional NTP systems while maintaining similar thrust levels. However, the system has some engineering challenges to overcome, and a new paper coming out in Acta Astronautica describes some incremental progress on making this improved engine a reality.

Modern ground-based telescopes rely on adaptive optics (AO) to deliver clear images. By correcting for atmospheric distortion, they give us exceptional pictures of planets, stars, and other celestial objects. Now, a team at the National Solar Observatory is using AO to examine the Sun's corona in unprecedented detail.

Astronomers have spotted a pulsar in a binary system, taking about 3.6 hours for the stars to orbit one another. Their orbit is so close that, from our vantage point, the pulsar's radio signals vanish for roughly one-sixth of each cycle—blocked by the companion's interference. Researchers think that the more massive star died first, exploding as a supernova and collapsing into a neutron star, passing within the atmosphere of the other. It took about 1,000 years to blow away the envelope of material.

On May 10th, while striking a selfie to mark its 1,500th day on Mars, NASA's Perseverance Rover got an unexpected guest star—a towering dust devil swirling in the distance photobombed the shot. The rover was on Witch Hazel Hill, an area on the rim of Jezero Crater that it has been exploring for the last 5 months. The dust devil on the other hand was sneaking into the background from a distance of 5 km away. The selfie image was made up of 59 separate photos taken by the rover using its WATSON camera.

Over the past 90 years, astronomers have successfully matched several Chinese historical records of "guest stars" with known supernovae. However, identifying historical novae (smaller stellar explosions) has proven to be far more challenging, with many proposed candidates later turning out to be comets or meteors instead. One particularly debated case involves a guest star recorded in 1408 CE by Chinese astronomers. A team of astronomers now think they may have finally been able to identify the event, a rare nova that could potentially solve this centuries old astronomical mystery.