The headline finding is stark enough to stop a cosmologist mid scroll. A new analysis of Type Ia supernova data, corrected for a subtle but powerful age bias, says the universe may already have shifted from accelerating to decelerating expansion. The work, led by researchers at Yonsei University and released with the Royal Astronomical Society, … Read more

High above the Atacama Desert, a crimson apparition stretches across the night sky. Just in time for Halloween, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have captured a vast cloud of gas and dust shaped like a flying bat, its wings outlined in starlight. The eerie figure, located about 10,000 light-years from Earth, offers both … Read more

A quiet dent in Earths invisible shield keeps spreading across the South Atlantic. New satellite maps show the weak spot has grown since 2014 and is evolving faster near southern Africa. Using 11 years of measurements from ESAs three Swarm satellites, researchers report that the South Atlantic Anomaly has expanded while a swath southwest of … Read more

Thirty million kilometers sounds like a vast distance, but in cosmic terms, it was practically a front-row seat. Last week, two European spacecraft orbiting Mars captured humanity’s closest view yet of an interstellar comet that may predate our entire solar system by three billion years. Between October 1 and 7, ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter … Read more

Astronomers have spent decades scratching their heads over a cosmic puzzle: massive red supergiant stars should explode all the time, yet we rarely see them do it. The answer, it turns out, was hiding in plain sight. Or rather, hiding behind a thick veil of dust. A Northwestern University-led team used NASA’s James Webb Space … Read more

Scientists combing through old spacecraft data have discovered something that makes Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus look increasingly like a place where life could exist. Fresh organic molecules, spewing from cracks in the moon’s icy surface, suggest that sophisticated chemical reactions are happening in the ocean beneath. The findings, published today in Nature Astronomy, come from … Read more

The Milky Way has been caught in the act of making waves. Using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, astronomers have discovered a massive ripple surging outward through our galaxy’s disc, stretching across tens of thousands of light-years and affecting the motion of countless stars. The finding adds another layer of complexity to … Read more

For the first time, astronomers have penetrated the cosmic dust veils shrouding stellar nurseries to create the most accurate three-dimensional map of star-forming regions within our galaxy. The breakthrough, using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, reveals how massive young stars carve cavities in space and illuminate the gas clouds that birth … Read more

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence just got a reality check. According to new research presented at the EPSC-DPS2025 Joint Meeting in Helsinki, the closest technological alien civilization to Earth is likely sitting about 33,000 light years away – roughly on the opposite side of our galaxy. Even more sobering: that alien society would need to … Read more

The brightest explosions in space are supposed to be one-time events. This one went off again and again. On July 2, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope picked up a puzzling signal, later confirmed by Europe’s Very Large Telescope in Chile: a gamma-ray burst (GRB) that lasted a full day and repeated in discrete flashes. Astronomers … Read more