Astronomy

The European Space Agency's Ministerial Council – more formally Council at Ministerial level – takes place in Bremen, Germany on 26 and 27 November 2025. 

The distant universe might be littered with supermassive stars between 1000 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, which could solve a cosmic mystery about the origins of extremely large black holes

Spinning vortices of water trapped under the Thwaites glacier ice shelf account for 20 per cent of the ice melt. They’re expected to get worse as the world warms

Around 1000 markings on a slab of rock that was once a seafloor during the Cretaceous period may have been made by sea turtle flippers and swiftly buried by an earthquake

Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka

Sometimes the dark dust of interstellar space has an angular elegance.

What does the Milky Way look like in radio waves?

What has happened to Comet Lemmon's tail?

If this is Saturn, where are the rings?

Andromeda and Friends

Now outbound after its perihelion or closest approach to the Sun

Conventional computing devices will play a crucial role in turning quantum computers into tools with real-world application

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? 

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.