Astronomy

As it heads out of the solar system never to return, the deep space probe Voyager 1 is headed for yet another cosmic milestone. In late 2026, it will become the first spacecraft to travel so far that a radio signal from Earth takes 24 hours, or one light day, to reach it.

Sierra Space and NASA have renegotiated their contract for the Dream Chaser spaceplane that will allow the spacecraft to make its first orbital flight next year as a free flier instead of visiting the International Space Station (ISS).

Proving that you can't keep a good technology down, Reaction Engines' Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) has a new lease on life after a British-led consortium announced Invictus, a new program to build a Mach 5+ spaceplane.

It’s small, blurry, and shaped like a Corn Flake, but the image taken of Earth’s tiny “quasi” moon, Kamo'oalewa, is one for the family album. China’s Tianwen-2 probe snapped the picture of the rock on July 2, making history.

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration made history with the first-ever image of a black hole – an object that, until then, had never been directly observed by humanity. Turns out that was just the beginning of breakthroughs.

Orbiting around the star TOI-2155 is something interesting: a much smaller object called TOI-2155b, which we only know from observing the tiny changes in light from the host star. What is TOI-2155b? A mini-star? A giant planet? Or something in between?

A recent discovery could challenge this cornerstone of cosmology, with an international team of physicists finding that our Universe looks a little too much like noodles for anybody’s liking.

For the first time in more than 15 years, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) committee has significantly revised the protocols governing how scientists “evaluate, verify, and announce evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence.”

On June 5, 2026, NASA ordered five astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to shelter in a docked spacecraft and prepare to abandon ship. The reason was a longstanding, but worsening, air leak in the Russian part of the station.

The “loudest” black hole merger event on record was detected last year. Known as GW250114, this cataclysmic collision has now revealed an exceptionally clear view of the newly formed black hole, revealing subtle signatures tied to its event horizon.

When our team first reported these rocks in 2025, we suggested they were part of an ancient impact crater at the ironically named North Pole Dome. But one question remained difficult: exactly how old was the impact?

It’s not often that we get guests. So when the interstellar intruder 3I/ATLAS came zooming through our Solar System last year, it provided astronomers with a perfect opportunity to study a rock from another part of the galaxy.

In simulations, Boston University researcher Brian Walsh and colleagues found that their system, dubbed StormWall, could halve the intensity of a geomagnetic storm.

Researchers at the University of Warwick in the UK, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and McMaster University in Canada have shown that the structures of dust rings surrounding young stars can be used to estimate the masses of hidden planets.

Three years ago, a single “ghost particle” soared into the Mediterranean with more energy than any ever observed before. Now, a team of researchers in Italy claims the particle may have originated in a specific class of blazars.

New research is offering a dramatic new way to read Dante Alighieri’s Inferno: not simply as a religious vision of Hell, but as an early attempt to imagine the effects of a catastrophic planetary impact.

By determining the ages of more than 100,000 giant stars, researchers have identified the edge of our galaxy's star-forming disc for the first time, revealing that the most recent star formation is closer to the center than we expected.

We're a step closer to understanding how energy is spread across the Universe, with the most detailed map of intergalactic magnetism ever produced. It's more than five times larger than all earlier surveys combined.