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On the evening of November 28, 2025, a new era in space science began as Mauve—the first privately funded satellite dedicated to studying stellar flares—launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from California. Developed by London-based Blue Skies Space, the compact, microwave-sized observatory will peer into the ultraviolet universe to reveal how stars erupt and how those explosions affect nearby exoplanets.

For decades, astronomers have searched for moons beyond our solar system—exomoons—but none have been definitively confirmed. Now, a new study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics and posted on arXiv presents the strongest evidence yet: a candidate exomoon orbiting the massive exoplanet HD 206893 B, located 133 light-years away.

For nearly a century, dark matter has remained invisible—yet its gravitational pull shapes galaxies, clusters, and the cosmic web. But what if dark matter isn’t just a passive scaffold? What if its particles “dance” with one another, colliding and exchanging energy?

On Earth, time is precise: atomic clocks, GPS satellites, and fiber-optic networks keep us synchronized to within billionths of a second. But venture beyond our planet, and Einstein’s relativity shatters this illusion of universal time. Clocks tick at different rates depending on gravity and motion.

In a landmark discovery published in Nature, astronomers have detected the first definitive coronal mass ejection (CME) from a small, active red dwarf star. Using the LOFAR radio telescope, they observed a powerful Type II radio burst from the M-dwarf StKM-1262—130 light-years away—marking a turning point in our understanding of space weather beyond the Sun.

In a breakthrough published in Physical Review Letters, physicists have demonstrated that black holes satisfy the third law of thermodynamics: as temperature approaches absolute zero, entropy vanishes—implying black holes possess an isolated ground state, a defining feature of quantum systems. The result resolves a long-standing paradox and strengthens the case that gravity is fundamentally quantum.

As humanity races toward the Moon, Mars, and beyond, a quiet revolution is unfolding in spacecraft propulsion—not in the engines themselves, but in the intelligence that designs and controls them. Artificial intelligence, particularly reinforcement learning, is transforming how we develop and operate advanced propulsion systems, from nuclear thermal rockets to compact fusion reactors.

Since the 1950s, humanity has scanned the skies, analyzed space rocks, and sent robots across the solar system in search of extraterrestrial life. Now, a comprehensive review by Seyed Sina Seyedpour Layalestani and colleagues—published in the International Journal of Astrobiology—synthesizes the most compelling evidence to date.

For decades, the search for life beyond Earth has centered on the “Goldilocks Zone”—the orbital region around a star where liquid water could exist. But a groundbreaking preprint by Dr. Benjamin Farcy (University of Maryland) and colleagues argues that a planet’s true potential for life is determined not by where it orbits, but by how it formed.

One of the most compelling ideas about the origin of life on Earth is that its essential ingredients were delivered from space. Now, pristine samples from asteroid Bennu—untouched by Earth’s environment—have provided the strongest evidence yet: both the building blocks of proteins and genetic material were present on a cosmic body billions of years ago.

The aurora borealis and australis—Earth’s dazzling polar light shows—are more than just natural beauty. At their most intense, they erupt in a phenomenon called a magnetospheric substorm, flooding the sky with waves of green, purple, and red. For decades, scientists have known these storms almost always begin with a subtle precursor: auroral beads—a string of luminous points resembling a glowing necklace across the sky.

Stars rarely form alone. Instead, they emerge in clusters—dense groups born from the same stellar nursery. Even more remarkably, these clusters themselves can form in pairs, known as binary clusters (BCs). Now, using ultra-precise data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, Chinese astronomers have identified 400 such systems in our galaxy, offering unprecedented insight into the hierarchical nature of star formation.