Astronomy

Drugs and explosive chemicals are difficult to detect, but a device more sensitive than a dog’s nose can pick up their traces in seconds

How do we know 3I/ATLAS, also called comet C/2025 N1 (ATLAS), is interstellar? Will it strike Earth? Can we visit it? Here are all of your questions answered.

Computers can help ensure that mathematical proofs are correct, but translating traditional maths into a machine-readable format is an arduous task. Now, the latest generation of artificial intelligence models is taking on the job, and could change the face of maths research

Tissue samples sent to the International Space Station reveal what can happen to astronauts on long-term missions.

The skull of a 5-year-old girl who lived 140,000 years ago has similarities with modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, suggesting her parents might have belonged to different species

Face-on spiral galaxy NGC 6946 and open star cluster NGC 6939 share

If you know where to look, you can see a thermonuclear explosion from a white dwarf star.

Does the Milky Way always rise between these two rocks?

What do you see when you look into this sky?

It's raining stars.

Why is there a spiral around the North Pole of Mars?

A collection of more than 50 pieces of memorabilia previously owned by Sally Ride, the first American woman to reach space, sold at auction last week for more than $145,000.

Surprising colors and stunning features are captured in a new image of Mars' surface.

In the latest attack on science by the Trump administration, researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center will no longer receive data from a fleet of military satellites.

Proxima Centauri b is the closest known exoplanet that could be in the habitable zone of its star. Therefore, it has garnered a lot of attention, including several missions designed to visit it and send back information. Unfortunately, due to technological constraints and the gigantic distances involved, most of those missions only weigh a few grams and require massive solar scales or pushing lasers to get anywhere near their target. But why let modern technological levels limit your imagination when there are so many other options, if still theoretical, options to send a larger mission to our nearest potentially habitable neighbor? That was the thought behind the Master’s Thesis of Amelie Lutz at Virginia Tech - she looked at the possibility of using fusion propulsion systems to send a few hundred kilogram probe to the system, and potentially even orbit it.

What new methods can be developed in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? This is what a recent white paper submitted to the 2025 NASA Decadal Astrobiology Research and Exploration Strategy (DARES) Request for Information (RFI) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from the Breakthrough Listen project and Michigan State University discussed how high-energy astronomy could be used for identifying radio signals from an extraterrestrial technological civilization, also called technosignatures. This study has the potential to help SETI and other organizations develop novel techniques for finding intelligent life beyond Earth.

One of the most iconic cosmic scenes in the Universe lies nearly 3.8 billion light-years away from us in the direction of the constellation Carina. This is where two massive clusters of galaxies have collided. The resulting combined galaxies and other material is now called the Bullet Cluster, after one of the two members that interacted over several billion years. It's one of the hottest-known galaxy clusters, thanks to clouds of gas that were heated by shockwaves during the event. Astronomers have observed this scene with several different telescopes in multiple wavelengths of light, including X-ray and infrared. Those observations and others show that the dark matter makes up the majority of the cluster's mass. Its gravitational effect distorts light from more distant objects and makes it an ideal gravitational lens.

Earlier this year, asteroid 2024 YR4 was discovered and found to have a trajectory through the Earth/Moon system in 2032. The world's telescopes focused on the potential threat and downgraded the chance to negligible for the Earth...but it still has a non-zero chance of hitting the Moon. As the asteroid became too dim to continue observing, its Moon impact chance stood at 4%. When will we update this number? Not until it does another close flyby in 2028.