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About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the first atoms formed. The first light of what we now see as the cosmic microwave background was released, and the primordial hydrogen and helium grew cold and dark. The cosmos entered a dark age for about 100 million years until the first stars and galaxies started to form. You could say the rise of galaxies marked cosmic morning. But star formation didn't really kick into gear for another 2-3 billion years, during what astronomers call cosmic noon. This period can be difficult to observe, but a new study gives us an unprecedented view of this epoch.

The Milky Way has more than 30 known satellite galaxies. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are the largest and most well-known; other lesser-known ones, like the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, are also on the list. Astronomers think there are many more small satellites that are difficult to detect but essential in understanding the Milky Way. The Vera Rubin Observatory should help astronomers find many more of them.

We associate complex chemistry with planets or other bodies, where energy and matter interact in dynamic associations. But as science advances, researchers are finding prebiotic chemistry in a wider variety of places, including in space itself. New research shows that some prebiotic chemicals, part of the recipe for life itself, can form in the cold vacuum of space.

I do love the names of the European Southern Observatory installations. You are familiar I’m sure with the Very Large Telescope but have you heard of the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope? It was intended to house a 100m mirror but never got commissioned due to its complexity. There is however, an Extremely Large Telescope with a 39 metre mirror and its due to be completed in a couple of years. This image was taken on 12 April 2025 by photographer Eduardo Garcés showing its progress.

Occasionally, the Universe seems to literally smile upon us. If skies are clear Friday morning on April 25th, early rising sky watchers may witness a rare scene, as brilliant Venus and fainter Saturn form the ‘eyes’ and a thin crescent Moon nearby completes the ‘grin’ low to the east at dawn.

In a recent paper, a team of commercial space engineers proposed a Human-Crewed Interplanetary Transport Architecture (HUCITAR) to explore Mars and Ceres in a single journey. Their ambitious plan envisions six astronauts spending 4 years and seven months exploring these bodies, which could be ready to launch by 2035.

If you happen to be enjoying a sunny day, thank the bright surface of the Sun, known as the photosphere. At a piping hot temperature of about 5,800 K, the photosphere provides nearly all the sunlight Earth receives. But for all its glorious radiance, the photosphere isn't the hottest part of the Sun. That award goes to the diffuse outer atmosphere of the Sun known as the corona, which has a temperature of more than a million Kelvin. Parts of the corona can be as hot as 20 million Kelvin, which is hotter than the Sun's core. Of course, the big mystery is why the corona is so hot.

This week brings the Hubble Space Telescope's 35th birthday — but instead of getting presents, the Hubble team is giving out presents in the form of four views of the cosmos, ranging from a glimpse of Mars to a glittering picture of a far-out galaxy.

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is coming in hot and heavy at this point, with various data streams from multiple instruments being reported in various papers. One exciting one will be released shortly in the Astrophysical Journal from researchers at the University of Kansas (KU), where researchers collected mid-infrared images of a part of the sky that holds galaxies from the time of the "cosmic noon" about 10 billion years ago. Their paper describes this survey and invites citizen scientists to help catalogue and classify some of their findings.

How can we turn the sun into a telescope?

If we need more evidence that our Solar System is not representative of other solar systems, take a look at BD+05 4868. It's a binary star consisting of a K-dwarf and an M-dwarf about 140 light-years away. It's not just the binary star sets the system apart from ours. A small rocky planet is so close to the primary star that it's being vaporized, leaving a trail of debris like a comet.

At some early point in Earth's history, a collection of increasingly complex chemicals performed a new trick. They transformed themselves somehow into an energy-producing and self-replicating cell. The timing of this critical moment in Earth's history is hidden behind the haze of billions of years.

It’s a cosmic shame, that we tend to only see flat-looking, 2-dimensional views of deep-sky objects. And while we can’t just zoom out past the Andromeda galaxy for another perspective, or see the Crab Nebula from another vantage point in space, we can use existing data to simulate objects in 3D. A recent collection released by Marshall Space Flight Center’s Chandra X-ray Center and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows us familiar objects in a new way.

When China's DRO-A and B satellites were launched, their rocket failed to deliver them to their planned orbit. Even worse, the satellites were spinning out of control, unable to properly charge their solar panels. Engineers realized that there was still a way to put them on course again. They executed a series of gravitational slingshots over 123 days, using the Sun, Earth, and the Moon to raise the spacecraft's orbits and put them into their proper trajectory.

The weather gets a little wild and weird on Jupiter. How wild? Spacecraft instruments have measured strong winds, tracked fierce lightning, and found huge methane plume storms rising from deep beneath the clouds. How weird? Think: mushballs raining down like hailstones. They're made of ammonia and water encased in a water ice shell. According to planetary scientists, these mushballs plunge through the Jovian atmosphere. What's more, they probably form on the other gas and ice giants, too.

The evidence is building that the surface of Mars was warm and wet for its early history. But what form did this water take? In a new study, geologists propose that Mars has very similar features to places like Utah on Earth, where precipitation from snow or rain formed the patterns of valleys and headwaters that have been mapped from space. Some of these features would require meters deep of flowing water to deposit large boulders.

Let’s turn the sun into a telescope. In fact, we don’t have to do any work – we just have to be in the right spot.

Studying the Sun is becoming increasingly important as more and more of our infrastructure moves off the surface and into the realm where coronal mass ejections and the solar wind can begin to affect them. Scientists recognize this problem and have started devoting more and more resources to studying the Sun, specifically the "space weather" that might affect us. Recently, one of the newest members of the group of satellites focused on studying the Sun hit a milestone when the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission took on its first light.

Planetary scientists have plenty of theories about Mars and its environmental past. Two of the most widely accepted are that there was a carbon dioxide atmosphere and, at one point, liquid water on Mars' surface. However, this theory has a glaring problem: Where should the rocks have formed from the interactions between carbon dioxide and water? According to a new paper by scientists at several NASA facilities using data collected by the rover Curiosity, the answer is right under the rover's metaphorical feet.

The exoplanet K2-18b is generating headlines because researchers announced what could be evidence of life on the planet. The JWST detected a pair of atmospheric chemicals that on Earth are produced by living organisms. The astronomers responsible for the results are quick to remind everyone that they have not found life, only chemicals that could indicate the presence of life. The results beg a larger question, though: Can the JWST really ever detect life?