Astronomy

The four Expedition 73 members on SpaceX's Crew-10 mission prepared to come home, while also got the International Space Station ready for its next residents.

Week in images: 28 July - 1 August 2025

Discover our week through the lens

High-speed winds on exoplanet WASP-17b may align quartz crystals in its atmosphere and create dazzling light effects like "sun dogs."

Federal officials seized 3,000 copies of Scientific American in 1950 in a “red scare” era of attacks on science. The move backfired and offers lessons for today

SpaceX performed a single-engine "static fire" trial with its newest Starship spacecraft on Thursday (July 31), to help prep the vehicle for an upcoming test flight.

We’ve been talking about sending a radio telescope to the far side of the Moon for awhile now. Now that reality is one step closer with the completion of the design and construction phase of the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) radio telescope project. This milestone marks a major step in the development of the system, which is planned to launch on a lunar lander in 2026.

What can carbon dioxide (CO₂) on Saturn’s moons teach scientists about their formation and evolution? This is what a recent study submitted to The Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the different types of CO₂ that exist on several of Saturn’s mid-sized moons. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the existence of CO₂ on planetary bodies and what this could mean for their formation and evolution, and potentially whether they could possess life as we know it.

Plenty of groups have been theorizing about Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) recently. That is in part because of their candidacy as a potential source of dark matter. But, if they existed, they also had other roles to play in the early universe. According to a recent draft paper released on arXiv by Jeremy Mould and Adam Batten of Swinburne University, one of those roles could be as the seeds that eventually form both quasars and radio galaxies.

Neuromorphic cameras, which only record data when a pixel's brightness changes, may be advantageous for capturing extremely bright and dim objects in the same image and tracking fast-moving objects

Neuromorphic cameras, which only record data when a pixel's brightness changes, may be advantageous for capturing extremely bright and dim objects in the same image and tracking fast-moving objects

Scientists are uncovering how spinning black holes launch jets, warp spacetime and shape the cosmos

A conversation with Anthropic’s chatbot raises questions about how AI talks about awareness.

New research suggests that primordial black holes could have played an important role in the formation of the universe's first stars, but did they help or hinder?

The New Scientist Book Club has just finished reading Adam Roberts's novel Lake of Darkness. Some of us loved it – but some of us weren't so sure about this far-future set slice of hard science fiction

The New Scientist Book Club has just finished reading Adam Roberts's novel Lake of Darkness. Some of us loved it – but some of us weren't so sure about this far-future set slice of hard science fiction

Alex Foster, the author of the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club, Circular Motion, on imagining a world that is spinning ever faster

Alex Foster, the author of the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club, Circular Motion, on imagining a world that is spinning ever faster

In this passage from the opening of Circular Motion, the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club, our protagonist boards a vessel which can circle the world in a matter of hours – with dangerous consequences for the Earth’s rotation

In this passage from the opening of Circular Motion, the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club, our protagonist boards a vessel which can circle the world in a matter of hours – with dangerous consequences for the Earth’s rotation

Data from ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission can be used to estimate how much carbon is stored in forests – and a study has improved our understanding of how reliable this proxy is and how long-term datasets from SMOS can help us to monitor this valuable resource.