Feed aggregator

Video: 00:07:47

What a difference a year makes! Today Hera’s asteroid mission for planetary defence is cruising through deep space on the far side of the Sun, headed to its final destination: the Didymos binary asteroid system. But a year ago, on 7 October 2024, it was unsure if the mission was ever going to take off at all.

Its launcher was grounded due to a launch anomaly and Hurricane Milton was closing on Cape Canaveral! The mission needed to lift off then and there because it had to perform a flyby of Mars to speed it on its way to Didymos. Any delay would add years to its travel time. But Hera received permission for launch and the heavens cleared just half an hour before launch. Liftoff happened to plan – the team had their mission in space!

Since then Hera has been testing out the ‘self-driving’ technology it will use around the asteroids on Earth and the Moon, performed its flyby of Mars and imaged its very first asteroid from three million kilometres, proving the capability of its main Asteroid Framing Camera. Next Hera is heading for aphelion, its furthest distance from the Sun. It will reach Didymos in autumn 2026, after which it will begin its mission to find out what happened to the smaller asteroid after NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted it in September 2022.

Read more

October 2025 may provide a memorable sky scene, as Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon puts on an encore appearance at dusk. The comet joins Comet R2 SWAN, which slides 0.26 Astronomical Units (AU) past Earth on October 20th. Both are currently fine objects for binoculars or a small telescope, vying for top spot at magnitude +6.

Peering back into the early years of the universe requires scientists to make a lot of assumptions. But sometimes, we get better instruments that then allow them to either confirm or replace those assumptions. That happened recently when it came to our study of J0529, a supermassive black hole that is currently the brightest known quasar in the universe. A new paper from a massive team of researchers used the GRAVITY+ instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Very Large Telescope (VLT) Interferometer to map this unique object’s Broad Line Region (BLR), and thereby calculated a new, updated mass that is 10 times smaller than previous estimates.

A man diagnosed with brain death received a kidney that was modified to be type O, which is compatible with all blood types

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work showing how bizarre microscopic quantum effects can infiltrate our large-scale, everyday world

The 2025 Nobel prize in physics has gone to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis, whose work has led to the development of today's quantum computers

The 2025 Nobel prize in physics has gone to John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis, whose work has led to the development of today's quantum computers

Human water management contributes to sinking land across the globe, and it may also be responsible for an unexpected rise

I remember the first time I pointed my 25cm telescope at the Ring Nebula in Lyra. Even through modest amateur optics, that surreal view of the ring hanging in space was breathtaking, the glowing embers of a dying star. Planetary nebulae like the Ring have long been favourites among amateur astronomers, not just for their visual beauty but because they represent the end of a star's life. However, new research is revealing equally fascinating structures at the opposite end of stellar evolution, the discs where planets are born, and they're not quite what we expected.

This ESA/Webb Picture of the Month shows eight stunning examples of gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing, which was first predicted by Einstein, occurs because massive objects like galaxies and clusters of galaxies dramatically warp the fabric of spacetime. When a massive foreground object lines up just so with a background galaxy, the light from the background galaxy bends as it navigates the warped spacetime on its way to our telescopes.

An analysis of the afterglow of the big bang sheds light on how black holes distribute mass in the universe, and why some matter previously seemed to have been missing

An analysis of the afterglow of the big bang sheds light on how black holes distribute mass in the universe, and why some matter previously seemed to have been missing

Black have no hair, but the material surrounding them does, and the two can interact in unusual ways. As observations from the Event Horizon Telescope show, the magnetic fields surrounding a black hole can change extremely fast.

Some habitable worlds orbiting dead stars could be kept alive for aeons thanks to a quirk of Einstein’s theory of gravity

Some habitable worlds orbiting dead stars could be kept alive for aeons thanks to a quirk of Einstein’s theory of gravity

Can you escape your genetic inheritance, and do lifestyle changes actually make a difference? Daniel Cossins set out to understand what the evidence on Alzheimer’s really means for him

Can you escape your genetic inheritance, and do lifestyle changes actually make a difference? Daniel Cossins set out to understand what the evidence on Alzheimer’s really means for him

Interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS has been constantly changing as it makes its way through our solar system. That’s to be expected, as, for the first time in potentially billions of years, it's getting close to the energy put out by a star. Scientists have been keeping a close watch on those changes, both to ensure there’s nothing unexplainable by our current understanding, but also to compare 3I/ATLAS to both previous interstellar visitors as well as comets in our own solar system. A recent paper from European researchers describes how the changes in a particular material ratio in 3I/ATLAS’ coma fit with our current understanding of cometary geology.