Astronomy

Physics has a reputation for being dominated by men, especially a century ago, as quantum physics was just being invented – but there have been so many women who helped shaped the field since its inception

Since comet 3I/ATLAS, the third known interstellar object, was discovered on 1 July 2025, astronomers worldwide have worked to predict its trajectory. ESA has now improved the comet’s predicted location by a factor of 10, thanks to the innovative use of observation data from our ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Image: This very high-resolution image captures the beautiful medieval core of the Czech capital, Prague.

A small but unique mission to Mars is taking an innovative path to reach the Red Planet in late 2027.

The post ESCAPADE Mission Launches for a Long Trip to Mars appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

A research team has conducted the first systematic search for optical counterparts to a neutrino "multiplet," a rare event in which multiple high-energy neutrinos are detected from the same direction within a short period. The event was observed by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a massive detector buried deep within the Antarctic ice.

After delays, Jeff Bezos’s rocket company successfully launched a NASA mission to study Mars on Thursday

The 57.7-foot-long Canadarm2 robotic arm extends from a data grapple fixture on the International Space Station’s Harmony module in this July 23, 2025, image.

Is Saturn's moon Enceladus habitable? There's ample evidence that the moon holds a warm ocean underneath its frozen surface, and that the building blocks of life are present in that ocean. But for life to arise and persist, the ocean needs to sustain itself for a long time, and new research shows that's exactly what's happening.

Nearly two million U.S. turkeys have died from bird flu in recent months. An agricultural economist explains what ongoing outbreaks could mean for Thanksgiving meals

A surprising diversity of dog shapes and sizes evolved long before the Victorians began making modern breeds

A trove of e-mails from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was released by a congressional committee on Wednesday

New evidence suggests the standard model of cosmology is wrong, but the results could resolve the long-standing Hubble Tension problem in modern cosmology.

The milestone makes machine-learning trailblazer Yoshua Bengio the most cited researcher on Google Scholar

After studying mice in the 1910s, Maude Slye concluded that vulnerability to cancer was hereditary. She thought she had a solution to eliminate it, but she made some crucial mistakes

Oceanographers hope to find otherworldly ecosystems at hydrothermal vents on the Arctic seafloor

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 have deployed a survey with the most memorable and tasty acronym in astrophysics - SPAM, The Search for Protoplanets with Aperture Masking - to catch planets in the act of being born. Using Keck Observatory's most powerful instruments, researchers have just captured the closest ever view of a protoplanetary disk 400 light years away, revealing a telltale gap and clumpy structures that hint at a world coalescing from interstellar dust.

A new study argues that the Universe is decelerating, based on a correlation between the brightness of Type-Ia supernovae and the age of their host galaxies.

As the COP30 climate conference gets underway in Brazil, the world’s attention is once again drawn to the plight of the Amazon – the planet’s largest and most vital rainforest. With the European Space Agency’s Earth Explorer Biomass satellite now in orbit, ESA is helping Brazil prepare to transform this new mission’s groundbreaking data into actionable knowledge for protecting the rainforest and confronting climate change.

Tracking time is one of those things that seems easy, until you really start to get into the details of what time actually is. We define a second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom. However, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, mass slows down these oscillations, making time appear to move more slowly for objects in large gravity wells. This distinction becomes critical as we start considering how to keep track of time between two separate gravity wells of varying strengths, such as on the Earth and the Moon. A new paper by Pascale Defraigne at the Royal Observatory of Belgium and her co-authors discusses some potential frameworks for solving that problem and settles on using the new Lunar Coordinate Time (TCL) suggested by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).