The outer planets remain somewhat of a mystery and Neptune is no exception. Voyager 2 has been the only probe that has visited the outermost planet but thankfully the James Webb Space Telescope is powerful enough to reveal it in all its glory. With its cameras regularly fixed on Neptune it has even picked up auroral activity in some of its latest images. The data was gathered back in 2023 using Webb's Near-Infrared spectrograph which detected the tell tale sign of auroral activity, an emission line of trihydrogen cation. The element appears on other giant planets too when aurora are present.

Can the cosmic rays bombarding the lunar surface be used to identify subsurface water ice deposits? This is what a recent study and iposter presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a team of researchers developed a novel method called the Cosmic Ray Lunar Sounder (CoRaLS) capable of detecting subsurface lunar water ice deposits that are elusive to current radar systems. This study has the potential to help expand the human presence on the Moon since water ice deposits are currently being focused on the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the Moon for the upcoming Artemis missions.

What can Venus-like exoplanets, also known as exoVenuses, teach us about our own solar system and potentially finding life beyond Earth, and how can the planned Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) provide these insights? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as a team of scientists discussed the difficulties of studying exoVenuses and how HWO can help alleviate these challenges by directly imaging them. This study has the potential to help astronomers develop advanced methods for better identifying and understanding potentially life-harboring exoplanets throughout the cosmos.

Way back in 2006, the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) took an infrared look at a strange object called Herbig-Haro 49/50. It's a jet flowing away from a hot young star. The Spitzer image showed a fuzzy blob at the end of the jet. Was it part of the jet, or something more distant? Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) focused its infrared eye on the same object and sent home a fantastic snapshot of this cosmic tornado. It also answered the question about the blob: it turns out to be a distant galaxy, itself bursting with hot young stars.

Mars is cold and dry, but long ago, it was warmer and wetter. Today, its geology is driven by wind and sand, but it was also shaped by water and maybe even glaciers. Glacial activity on Mars was long assumed to be dry, with glaciers frozen right to their beds, scouring the landscape of the Red Planet. But now, researchers think they've found evidence of subglacial melting, where a layer of water forms under the glacier, helping to form various features on Mars.

Dark matter is a confounding concept that teeters on the leading edges of cosmology and physics. We don't know what it is or how exactly it fits into the Standard Cosmological Model. We only know that its unseen mass is a critical part of the Universe.

The search for evidence of life on Mars just got a little more interesting with the discovery of large organic molecules in a rock sample. The Mars Curiosity Rover, which is digging in the Martian rock beds as it goes along, tested pieces of its haul and found interesting organic compounds inside them.

Suppose humanity was faced with an extinction-level event. Not just high odds, but certain-sure. A nearby supernova will explode and irradiate all life, a black hole will engulf the Earth, a Mars-sized interstellar asteroid with our name on it. A cataclysm that will end all life on Earth. We could accept our fate and face our ultimate extinction together. We could gather the archives from libraries across the world and launch them into space in the hopes that another civilization will find them. Or we could build a fleet of arks containing life from Earth. Not people, but bacteria, fungi and other simple organisms. Seed the Universe with our genetic heritage. Of all of these, the last option has the greatest chance of continuing our story. It's an idea known as directed panspermia, and we will soon have the ability to undertake it. But should we?

What drives us to send probes throughout the Solar System and rovers and landers to Mars? It's not cheap, and it's not easy. It's because we live inside a big, natural puzzle, and we want to understand it. That's one reason. But the main reason for space exploration is to search for life beyond Earth. That our planet could be the only planet to host life is a disquieting thought.

It's been almost 10 years since Breakthrough Starshot began funding research into interstellar missions. Back then, state of the art meant a tiny lightsail just 0.25mm across, skip forward to today and, following their funded research, a new prototype has been revealed measuring 60mm x 60mm and just 200 nanometres thick! We are not quite able to use it to hop to Proxima Centauri but the technology keeps advancing until that day arrives.

Got clear skies this weekend? If clouds cooperate, observers in the North Atlantic and surrounding regions may witness a rare spectacle: a partial solar eclipse. This is the second eclipse of 2025, and bookends the first eclipse season of the year. The season started with March 14th total lunar eclipse. Depending where you are observing from, this is a shallow to a deep partial, 'almost' total solar eclipse.

The focus is all on the Moon at the moment as we strive to establish a permanent lunar base. At the south polar region there are permanently shadowed craters protecting pockets of water ice. Korea's Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) has been capturing images of these craters using its ShadowCam instrument. Now, using that data, planetary scientists are using a machine learning algorithm to identify over a billion impact craters in the region, deep inside the shadowed craters and each is at least 16 metres in diameter.

What happens when you mix clouds of gas and dust, strong outflows, and energetic shock waves at the core of the Milky Way Galaxy? Space tornadoes. At least, that's how researchers using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile to study the galaxy's heart described what they found.

There's a well-established paradigm in planetary body exploration. It begins with a flyby, then later an orbiter, and then, if possible, a lander. Previous spacecraft have performed single flybys of Europa, and the Europa Clipper orbiter is on its way to Jupiter's moon Europa for a more detailed orbital study of the frozen moon. Hopefully, a lander will follow. A presentation at the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference showed how the Europa Clipper can help find the best landing sites on the icy ocean moon for a future Europa lander.

The James Webb Space Telescope has given us a view of the earliest moments of galaxy formation in the Universe. It's also revealed a few surprises. One of these is the appearance of small, highly redshifted objects nicknamed "little red dots (LRDs)." We aren't entirely sure what they are, but a new study points to an answer.

Compared to the other terrestrial planets, Mercury has always been a bit of a mysterious one. It's internal structure is very different from its planetary siblings with its core accounting for 70% of its overall mass and an unusually thin mantle composed of silicates. One theory suggests a head-on collision between a larger proto-Mercury and a smaller object while another suggests Mercury sideswiped an Earth-mass object. It may be something completely different and a new paper suggests that a grazing collision between two similarly sized bodies led to the formation of the planet we see today.

Shrouded in thick clouds, our erstwhile sister planet Venus is rife with mysteries. Among the Solar System's rocky planets, Venus is the one begging for more exploration. While potential habitability always catches people's attention, scientists crave more fundamental knowledge about Venus: its geology.

The Moon is a common sight in our night time (and sometimes daytime) skies but it hasn't always been there. The widely accepted theory of lunar formation involves a Mars-sized planet crashing into the Earth, creating a cloud of debris that eventually that eventually coalesced to form the Moon. Estimates of this cataclysmic event that gave us the Moon range from between 4.52 to 4.35 billion years ago however a new presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference have pushed that timeline back even further!

When it comes to safe places for life, supermassive black holes are probably the last place you'd consider safe for nearby planets, let alone life-bearing ones. There are good reasons for this: those monsters at the hearts of galaxies suck down everything that comes into contact with them. When they do that, they blast out killer radiation. Neither activity is necessarily good for life. Or is it? As it turns out, radiation from these active galactic nuclei (AGN) can nurture life under the right circumstances.

Scientists have detected a fascinating spiral galaxy located about one billion light-years away. At the heart of this cosmic goliath, powerful radio jets are blasting out of its centre, stretching six million light years into space. A team of researchers have suggested that a smaller dwarf galaxy plunged into its centre, passing close to its supermassive black hole triggering immense flares, intense radiation and driving the colossal radio jets. Surprisingly however, despite the tremendous amounts of energy, the galaxy has kept its spiral structure.

China's Chang'e-6 mission has been exploring the largest crater on the Moon. It's known as Aitken Basin and is found at the South Pole of the Moon where craters are permanently shadowed. The crater is a whopping 2,500 km across and measures 10km deep and Chang'e-6 data has revealed that a giant asteroid smashed into the Moon about 4.25 billion years ago.

We've learned that Interstellar Objects (ISOs) are not strangers to our Solar System. Many have visited, and many more will in the future. The Vera Rubin Observatory is expected to find hundreds each year. Scientists are keen to learn more about them, and a swarm of spacecraft on standby might be the way to do it.

Telescope optics can be made of mirrors or lenses, but in both cases, they're bulky and need to follow a strict mathematical curve to focus light. Researchers have shown that it's possible to make a completely flat lens that focuses light. Traditionally, this has been done with Fresnel lenses, but they distort colors. Their new technique carves tiny concentric rings into a substrate that matches the wavelengths of different colors, allowing a full-color, in-focus image.

One of the surprising discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is that galaxies formed very early in the Universe. JWST has discovered about two dozen galaxies at a redshift of around z = 14, meaning that we see them at a time when the cosmos was just 300-500 million years old. The most distant galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, is seen at an age of less than 300 million years. All of these galaxies are rich with stars and have a basic structure similar to what we see in more modern galaxies. This discovery challenged our understanding of galactic evolution. Now a new discovery challenges it even further.

What's on and in a star? What happens at an active galactic nucleus? Answering those question is the goal of a proposed giant interferometer on the Moon. It's called Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager (AeSI) and would deploy a series of 15-30 optical/ultraviolet-sensitive telescopes in a 1-km elliptical array across the lunar surface.

In the years since Miguel Alcubierre came up with a warp drive solution in 1994, you would occasionally see news headlines saying that warp drives can work. And then a few months later you'll see that they've been ruled out. And then after that you'll see that warp drives kind of work, but only in limited cases. It seems to constantly go around and around without a clear answer. What gives?

There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. There is also a lot of other stuff there as well. Young stars, gas, dust, and stellar-mass black holes. It's a happening place. It is also surrounded by a veil of interstellar gas and dust, which means we can't observe the region in visible light. We can observe stars in the region through infrared and radio, and some of the gas there emits radio light, but the stellar-mass black holes remain mostly a mystery.

Welcome back to our five-part examination of Webb's Cycle 4 General Observations program. In the first and second installments, we examined how some of Webb's 8,500 hours of prime observing time this cycle will be dedicated to exoplanet characterization, the study of galaxies at "Cosmic Dawn," the period known as "Cosmic Noon," and the study of star formation and evolution. In our final installment, we'll examine programs that leverage Webb's unique abilities to study objects in our cosmic backyard—the Solar System!

In 1994 Miguel Alcubierre was able to construct a valid solution to the equations of general relativity that enable a warp drive. But now we need to tackle the rest of relativity: How do we arrange matter and energy to make that particular configuration of spacetime possible?

There are three known types of black holes: supermassive black holes that lurk in the hearts of galaxies, stellar mass black holes formed from stars that die as supernovae, and intermediate mass black holes with masses between the two extremes. It's generally thought that the intermediate ones form from the mergers of stellar mass black holes. If that is true, there should be a forbidden range between stellar and intermediate masses. A range where the mass is too large to have formed from a star but too small to be the sum of mergers. But a new study of data from LIGO suggests that there are black holes in that forbidden range.

To make a warp drive you have to arrange spacetime so that you never locally travel faster than light but still arrive at your destination…faster than light. And in 1994 Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre figured out how.

The European Space Agency is considering a mission to a metal-rich asteroid. The target is Kleopatra, an M-type asteroid with two moons. These asteroids are relatively common, but they're difficult to observe because they're in the middle and outer regions of the main asteroid belt.

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 has completed its brief lunar mission. The lander spent two weeks conducting operations on the surface of the Moon before witnessing its final sunset as the Sun dipped below the horizon. This sunset marked the end of the mission, as Blue Ghost lacks the capability to maintain warmth during the freezing cold lunar night. Despite its short operational period, the lander accomplished its objectives, successfully testing all ten NASA payloads, gathering valuable data, and transmitting the findings back to Earth.

It's ok, Darth Vader hasn't got our humble planet in his sights! No this Death Star is a binary system where both stars are locked into an orbit which will lead to their collision, unleashing a powerful gamma-ray burst when they do. The object, WR104 is otherwise known as the 'Pinwheel Star' due to the presence of a spiral of dust engulfing the system. Recent observations have accurately measured the orientation of the stars and thankfully they're not pointed at the Earth. When they do eventually collide, it'll be someone else's problem.

It's looking more and more as if dark energy, the mysterious factor that scientists say is behind the accelerating expansion of the universe, isn't as constant as they once thought. The latest findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, don't quite yet come up to the level of a confirmed discovery, but they're leading scientists to rethink their views on the evolution of the universe — and how it might end.

Somehow, we all know how a warp drive works. You're in your spaceship and you need to get to another star. So you press a button or flip a switch or pull a lever and your ship just goes fast. Like really fast. Faster than the speed of light. Fast enough that you can get to your next destination by the end of the next commercial break.

Welcome back to our five-part examination of Webb's Cycle 4 General Observations program. In the first and second installments, we examined how some of Webb's 8,500 hours of prime observing time this cycle will be dedicated to exoplanet characterization, the study of galaxies at "Cosmic Dawn," and the period known as "Cosmic Noon." Today, we'll look at programs that will leverage Webb's unique abilities to study stellar populations and the interstellar medium in galaxies.

The surfaces of the Moon, Mercury, and Mars are easily visible and are littered with crater impacts. Earth has been subjected to the same bombardment, but geological activity and weathering have eliminated most of the craters. The ones that remain are mostly only faint outlines or remnants. However, researchers in Australia have succeeded in finding what they think is the oldest impact crater on Earth.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in northern Chile, will give us a better view of the Milky Way than any ground-based telescope before it. It's difficult to overstate how transformative it will be. The ELT's primary mirror array will have an effective diameter of 39 meters. It will gather more light than previous telescopes by an order of magnitude, and it will give us images 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. It's scheduled to come online in 2028, and the results could start flooding in literally overnight, as a recent study shows.

One of the Holy Grails in cosmology is a look back at the earliest epochs of cosmic history. Unfortunately, the Universe's first few hundred thousand years are shrouded in an impenetrable fog. So far, nobody's been able to see past it to the Big Bang. As it turns out, astronomers are chipping away at that cosmic fog by using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile.

One of the Holy Grails in cosmology is a look back at the earliest epochs of cosmic history. Unfortunately, the first few hundred thousand years are shrouded in an impenetrable fog and, so far, nobody's been able to see past it to the Big Bang. As it turns out, astronomers are chipping away at that cosmic fog by using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile.

As civilisations become more and more advanced, their power needs also increase. It's likely that an advanced civilisation might need so much power that they enclose their host star in solar energy collecting satellites. These Dyson Swarms will trap heat so any planets within the sphere are likely to experience a temperature increase. A new paper explores this and concludes that a complete Dyson swarm outside the orbit of the Earth would raise our temperature by 140 K!

We know that regular supernovae pose no existential threat to life on Earth in the near-term. But there are other varieties of supernova that are a little bit harder to predict, and little bit harder to spot.

Dark Energy is a mystery so daunting that it stretches and strains our most robust theories. The Universe is expanding, driven by the unknown force that we've named Dark Energy. Dark Energy is also accelerating the rate of expansion. If scientists could figure out why, it would open up a whole new avenue of understanding.

The ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has already wowed us with some fantastic images. After launching in July 2023, the telescope delivered some stunning first images of the Perseus Cluster, the Horsehead Nebula, and other astronomical objects. Now, the telescope has released its first images of its three Deep Fields.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has achieved groundbreaking discoveries in the field of exoplanet studies. In particular, it has made strides in the analysis of their atmospheres by studying light from the parent star as it travels through the gas surrounding the planets. JWST has recently bucked the trend and observed a some gas giant planets in the system HR 8799 and detected the presence of carbon dioxide in their atmospheres, suggesting there are similarities between the formation of this system and our own.

With luck and clear skies, you can spot Venus crossing between the Earth and the Sun this weekend. Up for a challenge? If skies are clear, you may be able to complete a rare feat of visual athletics this coming weekend, and follow Venus on its trek from the evening and into the morning sky.

After an unexpectedly long mission in orbit, astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore finally arrived home. Their SpaceX Dragon capsule detached from the International Space Station early Tuesday morning, beginning the de-orbiting process. Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov are also on board and, following a nail biting descent, finally at 7.58pm EDT today.

The most dangerous parts of a supernova explosion are the outputs like X-rays and gamma rays. Even though they only share a small fraction of a supernova's power, they are extremely dangerous.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) remains under construction with completion still a few years away. However, engineers recently provided an exciting preview having installed 1,024 of the planned 131,072 antennas and capturing a test image of the sky. The image covers about 25 square degrees and reveals 85 of the brightest known galaxies in the region. Once fully operational, the complete array is expected to detect more than 600,000 galaxies within this same area!