Space News & Blog Articles

For decades, scientists have observed the cosmos with radio antennas to visualize the dark, distant regions of the Universe. This includes the gas and dust of the interstellar medium (ISM), planet-forming disks, and objects that cannot be observed in visible light. In this field, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile stands out as one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes. Using its 66 parabolic antennas, ALMA observes the millimeter and submillimeter radiation emitted by cold molecular clouds from which new stars are born.

Hidden behind veils of interstellar dust lies Westerlund 1, the most massive, luminous, and nearby super star cluster in the Milky Way. Despite being a stellar powerhouse just 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Ara, it remains invisible to the naked eye. Yet this stellar congregation has just revealed something remarkable: it’s actively blowing an enormous bubble of gamma rays into the space beneath our galaxy’s disk.

Apollo astronauts discovered an unexpected enemy on the Moon. Fine dust, kicked up by their movements and attracted by static electricity, coated everything. It found its way through seals, scratched visors, and clung to suits despite vigorous brushing. Eugene Cernan described it as one of the most aggravating aspects of lunar operations. More than five decades later, as humanity prepares to return to the Moon with increasingly sophisticated equipment, solving the lunar dust problem has become critical.

When 3I/ATLAS swept past the Sun in late October 2025, it became only the third confirmed visitor from interstellar space ever detected. Unlike the mysterious ‘Oumuamua, which revealed almost nothing about itself during its brief flyby in 2017, or even 2I/Borisov which appeared in 2019, this latest interstellar traveler arrived with perfect timing for detailed study.

Planets form inside swirling discs of gas and dust surrounding newborn stars, hidden that make them extraordinarily difficult to detect. Astronomers know these protoplanetary discs contain the raw ingredients for planetary systems because our own Solar System condensed from such a disc 4.6 billion years ago, but actually spotting planets while they’re still forming has remained one of astronomy’s great challenges. Until now, very few planets have been confirmed around stars that are still in their infancy.

The first photograph of a black hole arrived in 2019 like a revelation. That blurred orange ring surrounding the supermassive black hole M87*, 55 million light years away represented one of astronomy’s greatest achievements, the first direct visual confirmation of objects so extreme that not even light escapes their gravitational grip. Three years later, a second image captured Sagittarius A*, the black hole lurking at our own Galaxy’s centre. Both photographs captivated billions of people and opened an entirely new scientific frontier.

Galaxies don’t exactly move with urgency. At distances measured in hundreds of thousands of light years and timescales spanning hundreds of millions of years, even a direct collision unfolds slowly. The two spiral galaxies captured in NASA’s latest composite image, IC 2163 and NGC 2207, brushed past each other millions of years ago at speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second. From our perspective, they appear frozen mid embrace, their spiral arms reaching toward one another like dancers caught in an eternal waltz.