Astronomy

The same region on the sun that’s responsible for this week’s stunning auroral display just erupted in another powerful solar flare early on Friday morning

NASA’s presumptive next leader wants to outsource more of the space agency’s interplanetary science. The newly launched ESCAPADE mission to Mars offers a sanity check for those plans

RNA has been extracted from an ancient woolly mammoth, providing insight into its last moments on Earth

The Shenzhou 20 spacecraft was too damaged to bring its crew home from China’s Tiangong space station. Those astronauts have now returned via the Shenzhou 21 craft, leaving its crew without a return ride until the nation sends a new spacecraft to the station

With the help of an intervening galaxy cluster, astronomers have found what might be the first generation of stars — but the jury's still out.

The post Have Astronomers Discovered the First Generation of Stars? appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The Sun is always mesmerising to watch, but Solar Orbiter captured a special treat on camera: a dark ‘prominence’ sticking out from the side of the Sun.   

The dark-looking material is dense plasma (charged gas) trapped by the Sun's complex magnetic field. It looks dark because it is cooler than its surroundings, being around 10 000 °C compared to the surrounding million-degree plasma.  

When viewed against the background of space, the hovering plasma is referred to as a prominence. When viewed against the Sun's surface, it is called a filament. (In this image you can see examples of both.) 

Solar prominences and filaments extend for tens of thousands of kilometres, several times the diameter of Earth. They can last days or even months. This video shows one hour of footage, sped up to make movement more clearly visible.  

Solar Orbiter recorded this video with its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument on 17 March 2025. At the time, the spacecraft was around 63 million km from the Sun, similar to planet Mercury. 

Solar Orbiter is a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA. The EUI instrument is led by the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB). 

[Video description: Close-up video of the Sun, filling the left half of the view, its surface covered what looks like moving, glowing hairs accompanied by some short-lived bright arcs. Protruding to the right, in the centre of the video, is dark material that looks almost feathery, with thin streaks flowing both away from and towards the Sun.] 

A new discovery adds to the growing menagerie of exoplanets. These days, word of a new exoplanet discovery raises nary an eyebrow. To date, the current number of known exoplanets beyond our solar system stands at confirmed 6,148 worlds and counting. But a recent study out of the University of Liège in Belgium titled Two Warm Earth-sized Planets and an Earth-sized Candidate in the Binary System TOI-2267 shows just how strange these worlds can be.

Week in images: 10-14 November 2025

Discover our week through the lens

A Full Moon at Perigee

City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout—a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals

Getting time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the dream of many astronomers. The most powerful space telescope currently in our arsenal, the JWST has been in operation for almost four years at this point, after a long and tumultuous development time. Now, going into its fifth year of operation, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), the organization that operates the science and mission operations centers for the JWST has received its highest number ever of submission for observational programs. Now a team of volunteer judges and the institute's scientists just have to pick which ones will actually get telescope time.

Data from 11,587 cities show that, rain or shine, some places are just better for bikes and pedestrians

Centuries before other galaxies were known to exist, astronomers called them “spiral nebulas.” Today the defunct term still sparks confusion

From COVID shots to cancer therapy, mRNA is changing medicine.