Astronomy

It’s a disappointing star projector, but the Discovery Space Projector has some nice scientific images of moons and planets.

The LaView Galaxy Star Projector posits itself as a premium option, but doesn’t quite live up to the competition.

New Hubble Telescope imagery of the interstellar interloper comet 3I/ATLAS reveals a dusty coma and the beginning of a tail.

Scientists have spotted a mysterious mineral on Mars that may be new to science — and could help reveal some Red Planet mysteries.

Week in images: 04-08 August 2025

Discover our week through the lens

The MetOp-SG-A1 weather satellite is loaded onto the Ariane 6 launch adapter as part of a mission for the European Space Agency.

Representative Eric Sorensen of Illinois shares how his meteorology roots drive his fight to protect climate science and push back against political interference.

The full moon rises on Aug. 9; here are the best times to view the Sturgeon Moon.

Set an alarm and take a peek east in early dawn to follow Venus and Jupiter through their spectacular conjunction this week.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, August 8 – 17 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Taken on July 29 and July 30,

Video: 00:05:33

Last July, a team of robots explored a simulated martian landscape in Germany, guided by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. This was the final session of the Surface Avatar experiment, a joint initiative between ESA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to investigate how astronauts can remotely control robotic teams.

This latest session took place at the DLR site in Oberpfaffenhofen and introduced new levels of autonomy, decision-making and realism, bringing Europe one step closer to seamless human-robot collaboration in space exploration.

Astronauts exploring the Moon will need all the help they can get, and scientists have spent lots of time and plenty of money coming up with different systems to do so. Two of the critical needs of any long-term lunar mission are food and oxygen, both of which are expensive to ship to the Moon from Earth. So, a research team from the Technical University of Munich spent some of their time analyzing the effectiveness of using local lunar resources to build a photobioreactor (PBR), the results of which were recently published in a paper in Acta Astronautica.

Many objects in the outer Solar System contain large amounts of water ice, leading to a thick icy shell surrounding an ocean of liquid water. This water behaves like lava on Earth, reshaping their surfaces through a process called cryovolcanism. To better understand this process, researchers have created a low-pressure chamber that simulates the near-vacuum conditions on the surfaces of worlds like Europa and Enceladus. They could watch water create features we see across the Solar System.

Sometimes the easiest way to understand the physics of a phenomenon is to make a physical model of it. But how do you make a model of a system as large as, say, a protoplanetary disc? One technique, suggested in a recent paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and the University of Griefswald, would be familiar to any grade schooler who took a science class - spin water around in a circle really fast.

This image from the James Webb Space Telescope revisits one of the most iconic regions of the sky, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The result is a detailed view of thousands of distant galaxies, some dating back to the earliest periods of cosmic history.

Scientists have tapped into gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics to confirm the existence of a black hole with 36 billion solar masses.

A bold new proposal envisions launching laser-propelled nanocraft to a nearby black hole to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity.

China conducted takeoff and touchdown tests with its "Lanyue" moon lander on Aug. 6, 2025, as it prepares to launch a crewed lunar mission by 2030.

By measuring an 11-atom molecule with a stunningly powerful X-ray laser, researchers have seen the way its atoms make slight, synchronised movements, even when they should be standing still

By measuring an 11-atom molecule with a stunningly powerful X-ray laser, researchers have seen the way its atoms make slight, synchronised movements, even when they should be standing still