A massive coronal mass ejection erupted from the sun's far side late on Oct. 21, 2025 and was captured by a NOAA coronagraph.
Black holes it seems, are recyclers and a team of scientists have just caught them in the act. Two gravitational wave detections from late 2024 have revealed black holes with bizarre spins and lopsided masses, the telltale signs of cannibalism on a universal scale.
New images from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed NGC 6537, the Red Spider Nebula in unprecedented detail, complete with sprawling legs, a glowing heart, and possibly a hidden companion lurking at its core.
Our Sun seems pretty calm these days with a largely stable regular solar cycle revealed by sunspots and flare activity but billions of years ago, it was quite simply a menace. Scientists have just captured evidence of what the Sun and early Solar System might have looked like, and it's more violent than we imagined.
The European Space Agency’s upcoming Henon mission will be the first ever CubeSat to independently venture into deep space, communicate with Earth and manoeuvre to its final destination without relying on a bigger spacecraft. Once in its orbit around the Sun, the carry-on luggage-sized CubeSat will observe the Sun’s emissions to demonstrate technologies capable of providing advanced warnings of solar storms hours before they reach Earth.
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is slated to be the next Great Observatory for the world. Its main focus has been searching for biosignatures in the atmospheres of at least 25 Earth-like exoplanets. However, to do that, it will require a significant amount of effort with only a coronagraph, the currently planned primary instrument, no matter how powerful that coronagraph is. As new paper from Fabien Malbet of the University of Grenoble Alpes and his co-authors suggest an improvement - add a second instrument to HWO’s payload that will be able to astrometrically track planets down to a precision of .5 micro-arcseconds (µas). That would allow HWO to detect Earth-size planets around hundreds of nearby stars - dramatically increasing the number of potential candidates for atmospheric analysis.
Can water-rich exoplanets survive orbiting white dwarf stars, the latter of which are remnants of Sun-like stars? This is what a recent study accepted to *The Astrophysical Journal* hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the likelihood of small, rocky worlds with close orbits to white dwarfs could harbor life. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life as we know it, or don’t know it, and where to find it.
A Falcon 9 stands ready for a Starlink mission at Cape Canaveral’s pad 40. File photo: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX is preparing for its penultimate Falcon 9 rocket launch of October, which is set to fly from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station around lunchtime on Wednesday.
An artist’s rendering of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander on the surface of the Moon. Graphic: Blue Origin
Blue Origin is still several years off from its currently contracted mission to bring astronauts to the Moon’s South Pole on the Artemis 5 mission. But it has a number of spacecraft in development with at least one set to fly to the lunar surface as soon as potentially later this year.
Two recent discoveries of black hole mergers add to the evidence that such mergers happen over and over again.
If you could zoom out from Earth far enough, our Milky Way would shrink to just one galaxy among roughly fifty neighbours clustered together by gravity. These galactic neighbourhoods vary dramatically in size, and the largest ones, containing hundreds or thousands of galaxies bound together, represent some of the most massive objects in the entire universe. Their immense scale makes them uniquely valuable laboratories for testing our understanding of fundamental physics.
For decades, astronomers have faced a frustrating puzzle when studying star formation in our Galaxy. They know that most stars are born inside clouds of cold molecular hydrogen gas, but this hydrogen is all but invisible to telescopes because it doesn't emit light that can easily be detected. To find these stellar nurseries, researchers have relied on carbon monoxide as a tracer molecule, find the marker and thats where molecular clouds exist. However, there's been a problem with this approach, substantial amounts of star forming gas simply don't light up in carbon monoxide observations, remaining hidden from view.
Everyone’s favorite interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS isn’t hiding near perihelion this week, as amateur astronomers reveal.
In the 1970’s Vera Rubin didn’t set out to upend modern cosmology. She was just always curious about the heavens. It started with building a homemade telescope out of cardboard and glass, and it progressed with her becoming the only astronomy undergraduate student at Vasser College, graduating in 1948. She was qualified enough to get into Princeton, except for the fact that she was a woman, and so they wouldn’t let her in. Despite years of discouragement and harassment, she made a name for herself in cosmology, joining the first generation of scientists to piece together the large-scale structure of the universe.
Hurricane Melissa could make a record-breaking landfall in Jamaica, and satellites are monitoring the situation.
Astrobotic staff examine a propulsion tank sitting in front of Griffin-1’s structure. Image: Astrobotic
Astrobotic is now eyeing the summer of 2026 for the launch of its second mission with the goal of landing on the surface of the Moon.
Image: The Red Spider Nebula (Webb)
The 4MOST instrument on the European Southern Observatory's VISTA telescope has captured its first light.
The European Space Agency has announced it is establishing a new presence in Tokyo, Japan, its first in Asia.
Turn your telescope on the moon at sunset on Oct. 28 to see a colossal "X" and "V" form on the lunar surface as sunlight picks out broken terrain along the terminator.
Asteroids spin. Most of them do so rather slowly, and up until now most theories of asteroid rotation have failed to explain exactly why. A new paper from Wen-Han Zhou at the University of Tokyo and his co-authors might finally be able to fully explain that mystery as well as a few others related to asteroid rotation. Their work was presented at the Joint Meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Science in late September and could impact our understanding of how best to defend against a potentially hazardous asteroid.
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