NASA is facing increasingly sharp challenges as it pursues its goal of landing astronauts on the moon again before this decade is out — and as the space agency braces for another leadership change, it’s clear that the year ahead will also bring further challenges. How will NASA fare?
The James Webb Space Telescope didn't need much time to show us how wrong we were about the early Universe. Mere weeks after it began observations, it found galaxies in the very early Universe that were far more massive than our theories showed. These confounding images required an explanation.
Quasars acting as strong gravitational lenses are among the rarest finds in astronomy. Out of nearly 300,000 quasars catalogued in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, only twelve candidates were identified, and just three confirmed. These systems are exceptionally valuable because they allow astronomers to precisely measure the mass of a quasar's host galaxy, something that is normally impossible given that the overwhelming brightness of the quasar itself drowns out its surroundings.
Nestled on a hillside in Guangdong Province near Zhaoqing City, the Jinlin crater managed to hide in plain sight until researchers identified it as an impact structure. Only about 200 confirmed impact craters exist worldwide, making each discovery scientifically valuable. But this one stands out for its exceptional size and youth.
The case for habitability in Enceladus' warm, ice-capped ocean is growing. Ever since Cassini found evidence of hydrothermal activity in the moon's ocean, and detected life's building blocks in the plumes of material ejected from the ocean, scientists have worked to put this data into context.
Last time I wrote about new data that overturns the standard cosmological model. Before anyone starts dusting off their fringe cosmological models, we should note what this new study doesn't overturn. It doesn't say the Big Bang model is wrong, nor does it say that the Universe isn't expanding or that Hubble's redshift-distance relation needs to be thrown out. It really only says that our Hubble constant model is wrong. But we already knew that thanks to a little thing known as the Hubble tension. These new results could solve that mystery as well.
At this point in history, astronomers and engineers who grew up watching Deep Impact and Armageddon, two movies about the destructive power of asteroid impacts, are likely in relatively high ranking positions at space agencies. Don’t Look Up also provided a more modern, though more pessimistic (or, unfortunately, realistic?), look at what might potentially happen if a “killer” asteroid is found on approach to Earth. So far, life hasn’t imitated art when it comes to potentially one of the most catastrophic events in human history, but most space enthusiasts agree that it's worth preparing for when it will. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Maxime Devogèle of ESA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Coordination Centre and his colleagues analyzes a dry run that happened around a year ago with the discovery of asteroid 2024 YR4.
While the Universe may appear serene and inspiring at first glance, it is actually filled with particles traveling at nearly the speed of light that possess immense energy. These consist primarily of atomic nuclei and subatomic particles, such as protons, electrons, and neutrinos, which constantly bombard Earth. The origin of these particles remains one of the longest-standing mysteries in modern astrophysics. A leading theory is that they are created by extreme events, such as supernovae and tidal disruption events (TDEs), which occur when stars are ripped apart by black holes.
Getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the dream of many astronomers. The most powerful space telescope currently in our arsenal, the JWST has been in operation for almost four years at this point, after a long and tumultuous development time. Now, going into its fifth year of operation, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the science and mission operations centers for the JWST has received its highest number ever of submission for observational programs. Now a team of volunteer judges and the institute's scientists just have to pick which ones will actually get telescope time.
Iron rusts. On Earth, this common chemical reaction often signals the presence of something far more interesting than just corroding metal for example, living microorganisms that make their living by manipulating iron atoms. Now researchers argue these microbial rust makers could provide some of the most promising biosignatures for detecting life on Mars and the icy moons of the outer Solar System.
Astronomers using the Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii have captured the closest ever view of a protoplanetary disk, the swirling cloud of gas and dust where planets form from interstellar debris. Their target, a young star called HD 34282 located 400 light years away, offers a front row seat to planetary birth.
The ESA's Euclid space telescope has been in space for just over a year, investigating some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. By observing cosmic structures up to a distance of 10 billion light-years, the observatory will chart the evolution of the Universe, attempt to constrain the influence of Dark Energy, and study the morphology of galaxies. In terms of galaxies, Euclid will attempt to answer the question of why the Universe contains such a variety of galaxies, characterized by size, shape, and colours.
Blue Origin needed a ship to catch rockets falling from space. They bought a massive roll-on/roll-off cargo ferry, hired engineers to convert it, and named it Jacklyn after Jeff Bezos's mother. Then, after four years of work, they scrapped the entire project and started over.
According to the textbook version of Solar System formation, planets should orbit the Sun in elliptical orbits, all lined up in the same plane. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune don't follow this script. Their orbits are a little more elliptical and tilted relative to each other, not dramatically, but enough to puzzle astronomers for decades. Standard formation models predict the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk on the same plane as the rest of the planets. Instead, something seems to have pushed them off course.
Early one February morning in 2025, Adam Borucki discovered something extraordinary behind his warehouse in Poland, a charred metal tank, roughly 1.5 metres across, sitting in his back yard. It had crashed from space during the night, part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that failed to complete its controlled descent into the Pacific Ocean. The debris damaged some electrical equipment and a concrete block. Nobody was hurt, but the incident raised an uncomfortable question; who pays when a private company's space hardware crashes into your property?
In 2023, gravitational wave detectors picked up the signature of a collision 7 billion light years away. Two black holes had merged in an explosion of warped space-time, but when astronomers analysed the data, they found something that violated the rules of physics. The black holes were spinning faster than any previously observed and fell within a mass range where black holes simply aren't supposed to exist.
When the James Webb Space Telescope detected potential biosignatures in the atmosphere of K2-18 b last year, the discovery sparked intense debate. Here was a sub-Neptune exoplanet 124 light years away, possibly harboring methane, carbon dioxide, and even dimethyl sulfide which is a gas produced by phytoplankton on Earth. But before we get too excited about alien life it’s necessary to understand if this planet's atmosphere can even survive the harsh environment from the host star!
The Moon has no atmosphere, no weather, and no wind. Yet it faces an invisible bombardment more relentless than any terrestrial storm, a constant rain of micrometeoroids, tiny fragments of rock and metal travelling at speeds up to 70 kilometres per second. As NASA's Artemis program prepares to establish a permanent lunar base, understanding this silent threat has become critical to keeping future astronauts safe.
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