Universe
In 1979, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and photographed an active volcano erupting on Io, the first time volcanic activity had ever been observed on a world other than Earth, spotted by a navigation engineer checking the probe’s position
NASA’s Curiosity rover has identified the most diverse set of organic molecules yet found on Mars, including seven never before detected there, from a sample drilled in 2020 and studied for years before the chemistry finally came into focus
In November, a spacecraft that has spent eight years falling toward the Sun will finally settle into orbit around Mercury, a planet we have seen up close fewer times than almost any other in the solar system.
A moon only 10 kilometres wide was hiding around Uranus for decades. Voyager 2 missed it. Hubble missed it. But in 2025, Webb finally caught the faint speck circling near the planet’s inner rings, raising Uranus’s known moon count to 29.
Stargazing Wonders: A Complete Guide to the Most Spectacular Astronomical Events Happening Throughout the Year
Titan is the only world besides Earth known to have rivers, lakes, seas, clouds and rain — except its “water” is methane and ethane, flowing across a surface frozen to minus 179 degrees Celsius. And in June 2026, scientists held the first Humans to Titan Summit, beginning to map what a crewed mission to Saturn’s largest moon would actually require.
NASA considers moon mission for Mars-type rover
Asteroid to come zooming past Earth – and it will be visible to stargazers!
We tend to imagine the Moon as a barren, resourceless rock, but the permanently shadowed craters near its south pole hold something future astronauts may prize more than gold: water ice, confirmed by NASA missions, that could one day be split into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen for rocket fuel.
In 2022 the Event Horizon Telescope revealed the first image of the monster at our galaxy’s center, Sagittarius A* — a black hole 4 million times the Sun’s mass, sitting quietly 27,000 light-years away the whole time
Five uncrewed Starship rockets are projected to launch toward Mars during the brief window in late 2026 when the two planets align for the closest possible journey — and depending on whether they arrive intact, the first crewed missions could follow within five to seven years, in what would be the first time human beings have traveled to another planet in the roughly 200,000-year history of our species
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 24 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit from California
We tend to think of Earth’s atmosphere as a vast protective shield, but astronauts looking back from the ISS see something far more fragile: a thin blue-green line, like the skin of an apple wrapped around a basketball, separating every living thing we know from the complete inhospitality of space.
Some climate models suggest Venus could once have had liquid water and habitable temperatures, until a dramatic transformation hundreds of millions of years ago. One leading idea is that widespread volcanic resurfacing helped push the planet into the runaway greenhouse state that left it hotter than Mercury today.
In the Martian sky, the sun appears roughly two-thirds the size it looks from Earth, and at sunset it glows blue rather than red — the same dust particles that make daytime skies pink on Mars scatter shorter wavelengths at dusk in exactly the opposite pattern to our atmosphere
Could the secret to black hole formation be locked away in this record-breaking ancient quasar?
NASA will have to find a way to service its new alien-hunting space telescope
Cancer Queen Energy: Famous Women Who Illuminate The World With Empathy And Grace
The popular claim that space tastes like raspberries and smells like rum, repeated in science articles for over fifteen years, is based on a single 2009 detection of one organic molecule in one specific dust cloud at the centre of the Milky Way, and the actual story behind the finding is more interesting than the version that has been circulating
Earth's future revisited as scientists find giant planet survived death of its sun
