The European Space Agency’s Mars Express has captured part of Mars’s Mamers Valles: a fascinating valley system speckled with brief, tornado-like whirlwinds known as dust devils.

Astronomers have discovered a galaxy so unlike anything in the textbooks that the researcher who found it, after 25 years studying these objects, says he has never seen its equal. Named RAD-BAARG, it is falling supersonically into a distant cluster of galaxies and ploughing up a glowing arc of […]

When Artemis II swept around the far side of the Moon this April, carrying the first humans beyond Earth orbit in more than fifty years, NASA had prepared its four astronauts for something more than flying the spacecraft. It had trained them to see. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and […]

Uranus and Neptune remain two of the most mysterious objects in the solar system, primarily because they’ve only been visited by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986 and 1989, respectively. Their “ice giant” moniker comes from longstanding hypotheses that their interiors are comprised of an […]

The ESA's Euclid space telescope took 26 hours to capture this portrait of the Milky Way's central bulge. This isn't part of its primary mission; instead it's kind of like bonus science. It'll be used in the Roman Space Telescope's gravitational microlensing search for exoplanets. Regardless of the […]

For its first billion years the universe was lost in fog, a thick haze of hydrogen that swallowed light whole. Something burned it away, and astronomers have long wondered what. Now Hubble has caught a tiny, furious galaxy in the very act of clearing the murk, glimpsed as it was just 1.4 billion […]

Welcome to the final installment in the Fermi series, where we look at the impact that making contact with extraterrestrials could have and the rules governing how such an event should be treated.

A chip of zircon found in Western Australian rocks at a place called North Pole Dome revealed the age of Earth's oldest known impact crater. The team that found it was working on age-dating the crater, which is located in a region called the Pilbara Craton. They used mineral dating to pinpoint the […]

Stars form inside molecular clouds where cold gas collapses gravitationally on itself. But there's more to this process than gravity. New research shows how magnetic field lines funnel gas through sub-filaments into star formation sites.

For a long time, astrophysicists thought that the Universe's first stars, called Population III stars, were uniformly massive. It seemed like the conditions they formed in were calm and serene, which favoured massive stars. But new research based on high-resolution simulations show that conditions […]