White dwarfs are the dense, hot cores left behind when Sun like stars die. Imagine squeezing the entire mass of our Sun into something the size of Earth, that’s a white dwarf and our Sun will become one in the distant future. These stellar corpses are incredibly dense, with just a teaspoon weighing as much as a large car.
The search for habitable planets in other star systems has progressed considerably in the past few decades. As of the writing of this article, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 5,989 planets in over 4,500 planetary systems, with over 15,000 candidates yet to be confirmed. At the same time, next-generation observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have made amazing breakthroughs in exoplanet characterization. Unfortunately, scientists are still not at the point where they can characterize smaller planets located closer to their suns, where Earth-like planets are likely to reside.
Binary star systems are not rare. Neither are systems where one star is a remnant like a white dwarf or neutron star, and its companion is on the main sequence. In those systems, the dense remnant can draw material away from the main sequence star. This can create violent Type 1a supernovae in the case of a white dwarf, and the emission of extremely powerful x-rays in the case of a neutron star.
In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made a discovery. It found towering geysers of water erupting from fractures called "tiger stripes" near Enceladus's south pole. This water comes from a vast ocean hidden beneath the moon's icy crust, kept liquid by the powerful gravitational forces from Saturn that constantly squeeze and stretch the interior of Enceladus.
The Sun's magnetic cycle works much like planetary seasons, but on a vastly different timescale. During solar “summer,” otherwise known as solar maximum, our star becomes dramatically more active, sprouting dark sunspots across its surface and hurling massive flares into space. These solar storms send charged particles racing across the Solar System, creating the spectacular aurora displays. We’re currently experiencing this peak activity phase, with Solar Cycle 25 having possibly reached its maximum in 2024.
Has it finally happened? Has NASA finally found biosignatures from ancient Martian life? It's too early to reach that conclusion, but the Perseverance Rover did find chemical compounds that microbes could've used as an energy-rich food. They also found minerals that could've been created by biological reactions.
TRAPPIST-1 is a red dwarf star located about 40 light years away that hosts seven Earth sized rocky planets, with at least three orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water could potentially exist. This makes it one of the most Solar System like exoplanet systems discovered, with TRAPPIST-1e considered among the best potentially habitable exoplanets. The system's proximity and multiple potentially habitable worlds make it an ideal target for searching for technological civilisations.
Comet 3I/ATLAS is the third ISO ever detected. It was discovered by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) station on 1 July 2025. It's travelling through the inner Solar System at about 220,000 km/h and will make it's closest approach to the Sun in late October. Multiple telescopes have observed it, including the JWST, and will continue to observe it. Interplanetary missions like the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) and Mars Express will also get a crack at it in the future. NASA's Juno may even observe it from its mission to the Jovian System.
Science advances through data that don’t fit our current understanding. At least that was Thomas Kuhn’s theory in his famous On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So scientists should welcome new data that challenges their understanding of how the universe works. A recent paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) might just had found some data that can do that. It looked at an exoplanet around a millisecond pulsar and found its atmosphere is made up of almost entirely pure carbon.
Our knowledge of black holes is incomplete. We know there are stellar mass black holes that are created when massive stars collapse on themselves at the end of their lives of fusion. We know that supermassive black holes reside in the hearts of galaxies and sometimes merge with each other. The fact that there are two other hypothetical types of black holes that may or may not exist—primordial black holes and intermediate mass black holes—illustrates how our understanding is lacking.
When a massive asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, the solution seems straightforward; smash a spacecraft into it and knock it off course. That’s exactly what NASA successfully did with the DART mission in 2022, they proved this concept works and dramatically altered the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos. But new research reveals the chilling possibility that an asteroid hit in the wrong spot, and you might just be postponing the impact!
The story of minor planet discovery began in 1801 when Giuseppe Piazzi spotted Ceres between Mars and Jupiter, beginning an era of thousands of asteroid discoveries. The classification of these minor bodies has evolved dramatically over the years with Ceres itself moving from planet to asteroid to dwarf planet by 2006. Pluto's discovery in 1930 revealed an entirely different population of icy worlds in the outer Solar System, and advanced sky surveys later uncovered the Kuiper Belt populated by fascinating objects like Eris and Haumea. Today we know of hundreds of thousands of minor planets, from tiny asteroids to dwarf planets rivalling Mercury in size.
One of the issues that motivates astronomers concerns star formation. There are many unanswered questions about this fundamental process, including if it has always worked the same throughout the Universe's long history. One of the reasons the JWST was built and launched is to address this question, a testament to curiosity about the subject.
Interstellar visitors like Comet 3I/ATLAS grant astronomers a rare opportunity to study something from another solar system. It was first discovered on July 1st when it was entering the inner Solar System and was about 4.5 au from the Sun. It's an active comet with an icy nucleus, meaning it's warming up as it approaches the Sun and releasing gas and dust that form a coma and tail.
There are plenty of labs working on solutions to Kessler Syndrome, where there’s so much debris in low Earth orbit that rockets are no longer capable of reaching it without being hit with hypersonic parts of defunct equipment. While we haven’t yet gotten to the point where we’ve lost access to space, there will come a day where that will happen if we don’t do something about it. A new paper from Kazunori Takahashi of Tohoku University in Japan looks at a novel solution that uses a type of magnetic field typically seen in fusion reactors to decelerate debris using a plasma beam while balancing itself with an equal and opposite thrust on the other side.
How well do we understand the Universe if we struggle to understand its most energetic events? This question can trigger a wide-ranging philosophical or even epistemological discussion. It's the kind of question that can bring the Universe's most mysterious incidents into the foreground of busy lives.
The InSight lander arrived on Mars's surface in November 2018 with the singular purpose of taking the planet's vital signs: its pulse, temperature, and reflexes. This largely consisted of using an advanced seismometer to measure "marsquakes," seismic waves caused by rocks cracking under heat and pressure or meteoroid impacts. By analyzing how these waves pass through the planet, scientists were able to gain valuable insight (no pun!) into the interior structure and composition of Mars. While the InSight lander ended operations in 2022, scientists are still poring over the data it collected during its four-year primary mission.
Extremophiles are a favorite tool of astrobiologists. But not only are they good for understanding the kind of extreme environments that life can survive in, sometimes they are useful as actual tools, creating materials necessary for other life, like oxygen, in those extreme environments. A recent paper from Daniella Billi of the University of Rome Tor Vergata , published in pre-print form in Acta Astronautica, reviews how one particular extremophile fills the role of both useful test subject and useful tool all at once.
When the JWST finally began its long-awaited science operations in July 2022, there was a long list of targets awaiting its attention. Scientists compete for observing time by submitting proposals, and for every nine submitted proposals, only one gets approved. In the most recent Cycle 4 of the telescope's mission, scientists requested about 78,000 hours of observing time when only about 8700 were available.
The best opportunity to study black holes is when they're actively accreting matter. During these times, matter gathers in an accretion disk around the black hole, where it heats up and emits electromagnetic radiation. At other times, there's simply no light.
Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and is about 25 light-years away, making it a galaxy amenable to detailed observations. It's also a young star, only about 440 million years old. At that age, stars like Fomalhaut are surrounded by active debris disks made of rock and dust from collisions between planetesimals. Exoplanets form in these disks, and one of the hot topics in exoplanet science concerns how planets form in these circumstellar disks.
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