Space News & Blog Articles

Mercury is definitely the troublemaker of our Solar System. The smallest planet orbiting our Sun is also one of the most perplexing, with characteristics so unusual that scientists are still scratching their heads about how it came to be. But new laboratory experiments are finally starting to unravel Mercury's mysteries and what they're revealing could reshape our understanding of rocky planets everywhere.

A first stage in understanding a natural phenomenon is to divide it into steps and give things labels. That gives us a way to talk about the phenomenon. But in nature, there are seldom clear divisions between processes. The entire Universe is a long-running series of intertwined causes and effects set in motion by the Big Bang.

Astronomers have found a new way of accurately mapping the outer gas disk of the Milky Way using the positions of young stars. In the process, they've also discovered that our galaxy's structure is more complex than everyone thought, complete with tufty-looking "flocculent" gas clouds.

Imagine a star so dense that a teaspoon of its material would weigh as much as Mount Everest, spinning hundreds of times per second while beaming radio waves across the universe. These are pulsars, the collapsed cores of massive stars. Some pulsars are breaking the rules of physics as we understand them, and the answer might lie in something as simple as tiny mountains on their surfaces.

When a young star forms, a ring of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk forms around it. Together, the star and the disk are a young solar system, and peering into solar systems much younger than ours reveals clues about how planets form in protoplanetary disks. Our most powerful tool for examining these young systems is ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.

In June 2020, the ESA's Solar Orbiter (SolO) mission launched and became the closest mission ever to orbit the Sun and take images of its surface. In March 2025, the mission made history by becoming the first probe to acquire images of the Sun's polar regions. Until now, all missions have taken images of the Sun's equatorial region because it corresponded to their orbits around the ecliptic plane. But thanks to the Solar Orbiter spacecraft's tilted orbit, it was able to observe the Sun from a whole new perspective.