Astronomy

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have made the shock discovery that giant rogue exoplanets can grow their own planetary systems without needing a parent star.

A new five year study of 13 NASA astronauts shows that their arteries remain healthy and disease free long after returning from the International Space Station, offering reassuring news for future long duration space missions and suggesting the human cardiovascular system is more resilient to spaceflight than previously thought.

Next time you're drinking a frosty iced beverage, think about the structure of the frozen chunks chilling it down. Here on Earth, we generally see it in many forms: cubes form, sleet, snow, icicles, slabs covering lakes and rivers, and glaciers. Water ice takes all these fascinating forms, thanks to its hexagonal crystal lattice. That makes it less dense than nonfrozen water, which allows it to float in a drink, in a lake, and on the ocean.

NASA'S Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected evidence of what could be an Intermediate Mass Black Hole eating a star. It's in a galaxy 450 million light-years away, and unusual x-ray emissions highlight its location.

Every time a spacecraft touches down on the moon, it creates a spectacular but dangerous light show of dust and debris that could threaten future lunar bases. Now, after decades of mystery, scientists have finally figured out why these dust clouds form such distinctive patterns and the answer could be crucial for humanity's return to the Moon.

Scientists have created the largest catalogue of exploding stars ever assembled, and it's telling us something surprising about the mysterious force driving our universe apart. After analyzing over 2,000 stellar explosions spanning billions of years, researchers have found hints that dark energy, the force making up 70% of our universe, may not be the constant we once thought. Instead, it appears to be changing over time, potentially even weakening!

Recreating the environment that most spacecraft experience on their missions is difficult on Earth. Many times it involves large vacuum chambers or wind tunnels that are specially designed for certain kinds of tests. But sometimes, engineers get to just do larger scale versions of the things they got to do in high school. That is the case for a recent test of ExoMars’s parachute system. A team of ESA engineers and their contractors performed a scaled up egg-drop test common in physics classes across the world. Except this one involved a stratospheric balloon the size of a football field and a helicopter.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) detected three rocky planets around the M-dwarf L 98-59 in 2019. While two are expected to be hot, rocky worlds, the third could be covered by a global ocean. A fourth planet was discovered in 2021, and now, additional study has revealed a fifth planet, a super-Earth in the star's habitable zone.

A vector ecologist explains the complexities of tracking tick-borne diseases like Lyme in a climate-changed world

Satellite images reveal how a subglacial lake erupted through the Greenland ice sheet – a phenomenon never witnessed before which could be driven by rising temperatures

Satellite images reveal how a subglacial lake erupted through the Greenland ice sheet – a phenomenon never witnessed before which could be driven by rising temperatures

Extreme weather is front-page news. But what are the phenomena behind the headlines?

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered a new rogue planet that was orphaned from its home planetary system. The discovery was possible with a little luck and some help from Einstein.

Using data from several Earth-observing satellites, including ESA’s CryoSat and the Copernicus Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 missions, scientists have discovered that a huge flood beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet surged upwards with such force that it fractured the ice sheet, resulting in a vast quantity of meltwater bursting through the ice surface.

An iron-air battery in the Netherlands, which can store energy for 100 hours or more to make renewable power sources more consistent, has become the world’s first “rust” battery to connect with an electricity grid

An iron-air battery in the Netherlands, which can store energy for 100 hours or more to make renewable power sources more consistent, has become the world’s first “rust” battery to connect with an electricity grid

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 28 Starlink satellites was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Tuesday, July 29, 2025.

Tsunami warnings and advisories were issued around the Pacific Ocean after a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck off the coast of Russia, the largest earthquake since the 2011 earthquake and resulting tsunami in Japan

Gilmour Space made history today (July 29), conducting the first-ever orbital launch attempt with an Australian-built rocket. That vehicle, named Eris, didn't get very far.

Have you ever seen a fireball?