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Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb showed how small, cheap drones can be smuggled into a country and used against expensive military hardware. Now, there are concerns that nations like the US and UK aren't ready to defend against a similar attack

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the smallest brown dwarfs ever seen with the potential to form planets and surrounded by mysterious molecules.

"These first images are astonishing, but the best is still yet to come."

Astronomers have discovered the site of a newly forming exoplanet, probably with several times the mass of Jupiter. The image was captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope, seeing the young star system 2MASS 1612 in infrared light. The disk extends about 130 astronomical units from the star, but you can see a bright ring followed by a gap at about 50 AU. It's believed there's a new planet forming in that gap, pulling in material from the disk of gas and dust around it.

As worldwide temperatures continue to rise and conventional solutions aren't working fast enough, governments may turn to geoengineering solutions. One idea is to place a giant sunshade somewhat like an umbrella between the Earth and the Sun to block some of the sunlight that reaches our planet. A new mission proposes sending an 81 m² sail to Earth-Sun L1 to measure the effect of blocking a tiny fraction of solar energy.

When the Sun rages and storms in Earth's direction, it changes our planet's atmosphere. The atmosphere puffs up, meaning satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) meet more resistance. This resistance creates orbital decay, dragging satellites to lower altitudes. One researcher says we can change the design of satellites to decrease their susceptibility.

Gas clouds in the Milky Way's Galactic Center contain copious amounts of star-forming gas. But for some reason, few massive stars form there, even though similar gas clouds elsewhere in the galaxy easily form massive stars. The clouds also form fewer stars overall. Are they a new type of molecular cloud?

About 3 billion years after the Big Bang, star formation exploded across the cosmos. During the era dubbed "cosmic noon.” It was also when galaxies and supermassive black holes were growing faster than at any other time in the history of the universe. Now astronomers have discovered a monster from this frenzied period: a supermassive black hole unleashing jets that stretch over 300,000 light-years into space, revealing the sheer violence of its feeding frenzy.

How can radio astronomers successfully identify extraterrestrial radio signals while discerning them from Earth-based radio signals? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how machine learning could be used to search for extraterrestrial technosignatures while simultaneously identifying radio contamination from human radio signals. This study has the potential to help radio astronomers develop more efficient methods in searching for and identifying radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.

Most exoplanets have been detected indirectly through the transit or radial velocity method. But here's an image of the exoplanet 14 Herculis c captured by Webb. It has been described as a "chaotic" and "abnormal" planetary system and is about 7 Jupiter masses, but with a surface temperature of only -3°C. The discovery offers new insights into how planetary systems can develop in dramatically different ways from our own Solar System.

Astronomers recently used a pair of powerful telescopes to zero in on a cosmic battle going on some 11 billion light-years away from us. The combatants are a pair of galaxies charging at each other over and over again, at velocities upwards of 500 kilometers per second. According to one of the scientists studying the scene, one galaxy is cutting into the heart of the other with a blast of radiation.

NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter captured this incredible image of the giant shield volcano Arsia Mons, poking through the cloud tops at Martian dawn. Arsia and the other megavolcanoes on Mars are so tall they're often surrounded by water ice clouds in the early morning. Odyssey is normally staring straight down, so to capture this unique angle, it had to rotate 90 degrees while in orbit so that it could capture a side perspective view of the volcano.

As astronomers found more and more exoplanets in recent years, they've discovered an unusual gap in the population. It's called the Neptunian Desert, a curious scarcity of Neptune-sized exoplanets orbiting close to their stars. Researchers just discovered an exoplanet in the Neptunian Desert around a Sun-like star. Can it help explain the Desert?

Now I know this sounds like a low-budget knockoff of Five Nights at Freddy's, but it's the real deal

The Earth's atmosphere is protected by a magnetosphere, but Mars lacks this protective shield and lost its atmosphere to space long ago through interactions with the solar wind. In a new paper, scientists report that they have directly observed this process of "atmospheric sputtering," watching how incoming ions from the solar wind directly cause neutral atmospheric particles to escape. They found the process is stronger than anticipated, especially in solar storms.

The Sun's surface has unveiled a new secret: ultra fine magnetic "curtains" that create striking patterns of bright and dark stripes across the solar photosphere. Thanks to groundbreaking observations from the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii, scientists have captured the sharpest ever images of these previously unseen structures, revealing magnetic field variations at scales as small as 20 kilometres.

Whilst NASA funding has been slashed by the Trump administration with no allocation for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion or and Nuclear Electric Propulsion, scientists at the European Space Agency (ESA) have been studying nuclear propulsion.

The COSMOS scientific collaboration has released the largest map of the Universe ever created. It contains almost 800,000 galaxies, some from the Universe's earliest times. The map challenges some of our ideas about the early Universe.

What we have now just…isn't going to cut it. Right now if you want power in space you essentially have two options: solar panels, and a kind of nuclear power called radioisotope thermoelectric generators.

Computers have been involved in spaceflight since almost the very beginning. Just like on the Earth, computers aid in a variety of tasks, like navigation and communication. But unfortunately, space is really, really unkind to electronics.