Astronomy

Artist Michael Benson reveals the hidden beauty of snowflakes, radiolarians and lunar rocks through stunning electron microscope images in his new book, Nanocosmos.

Saturn's rings are now the closest to edge on that they'll get. The famous interstellar comet has become higher and easier for amateur telescopes before dawn.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, November 21 – 30 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Image: Finding star clusters in the Lost Galaxy

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over one of Earth’s most extreme environments: the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia.

The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has been cruising towards Mercury since October 2018. With just one year to go until it arrives at its destination, what has the mission achieved so far? And what can we expect from its two spacecraft after they enter orbit around the Solar System’s smallest and least-explored rocky planet? 

States and universities must step up to preserve data, and Congress must act to preserve our nation’s health

Let’s start out with something that we can say for certain: we live in an expanding universe.

Travelling up from Mars’s equator towards its north pole, we find Coloe Fossae: a set of intriguing scratches within a region marked by deep valleys, speckled craters, and signs of an ancient ice age.

The Moon gains new craters all the time, but catching one forming is surprisingly rare. Between 2009 and 2012, something struck our celestial companion just north of Römer crater, creating a bright 22 metre scar with distinctive rays of ejected material spreading outward. While the Moon's most dramatic bombardment ended billions of years ago, this fresh impact reminds us that our nearest neighbour continues to be peppered by space rocks, offering scientists a rare opportunity to study crater formation in real time and refine our understanding of impact rates across the Solar System.

When an interstellar comet tears through our Solar System at 250,000 kilometres per hour, pinning down its exact trajectory becomes a race against time. ESA astronomers achieved something unprecedented in October 2025, using observations from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter to improve predictions of comet 3I/ATLAS's path by a factor of ten. By triangulating data from Mars with Earth based observations, scientists demonstrated a powerful technique for tracking fast moving objects that could prove invaluable for planetary defence, even though this particular visitor poses no threat to our planet.

NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft lifts off for its first flight Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025, from U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. The aircraft’s first flight marks the start of flight testing for NASA’s Quesst mission, the result of years of design, integration, and ground testing and begins a new chapter in NASA’s aeronautics research legacy.

A new paper shows AI emerging as a tool that helps scientists test ideas, navigate literature and refine experiments

Exoplanets need not acquire their water from external sources like asteroids and comets. New experiments show that at least one common type of exoplanet can generate its own water. Interactions between hydrogen and silicates on sub-Neptunes can create water that could make some of the habitable.

The National Institutes of Health has canceled funding for at least 383 clinical trials in the last year, affecting some 74,000 participants

The discovery that a toxin made by bacteria found in dirty water might help trigger ulcerative colitis could lead to new treatments for this form of IBD

The discovery that a toxin made by bacteria found in dirty water might help trigger ulcerative colitis could lead to new treatments for this form of IBD

New work pinpoints origins for the planet Theia, whose ancient collision with Earth likely produced the moon

Now that Comet 3I/ATLAS has emerged from the Sun's glare, its behavior is being monitored by every available observatory.

The post Updates on Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS: NASA Images, Many Tails, and Non-gravitational Forces appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

A gaseous, dusty structure in the Cygnus X star formation region is reminiscent of a glowing diamond ring. There are others that are similar, but they're spherical and this one is flat. A team of researchers have figured out why.