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The United States is accelerating its plan to deploy nuclear reactors on the Moon and Mars. A new NASA directive, signed July 31 by acting chief Sean Duffy, calls for appointing a "nuclear power czar" to select two commercial proposals within six months. The memo frames the push as a critical race against a joint Chinese-Russian effort, warning that the first country to place a reactor on the Moon "could potentially declare a keep-out zone," inhibiting U.S. Artemis plans.

As NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft soared past Mars in March, it conducted a critical test that was impossible on Earth. Mission scientists have now declared a complete success: the REASON radar instrument performed just as expected, perfectly bouncing and receiving signals off the Red Planet's equator. This "dry run" confirms the instrument is ready for its ultimate goal: to peer beneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa and find the ocean hidden within.

Researchers have discovered an ultramassive black hole by pioneering a new method. The cosmic behemoth was found in the "Cosmic Horseshoe," a massive galaxy 5 billion light-years away that is so large it warps spacetime, bending the light of a more distant galaxy into a perfect "Einstein ring." This discovery provides new clues for understanding how the most massive galaxies and their central black holes grow together.

At just 4 light-years away, the Alpha Centauri system has long been a prime target for exoplanet hunters. While planets have been found around its faint red dwarf (Proxima Centauri), finding worlds around the two *sun-like* stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, has been incredibly difficult. Now, using the James Webb Space Telescope's MIRI instrument, astronomers have the strongest evidence to date of a gas giant planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A.

Astronomers have discovered a galaxy nicknamed the "Cosmic Grapes," a rotating disk teeming with at least 15 massive star-forming clumps. Seen as it was just 900 million years after the Big Bang, this galaxy has far more clumps than any theoretical model predicts could exist at this early time, raising new questions about how the first galaxies formed.

For centuries, we've assumed that solar systems form in an orderly way, with the star's equator and the planet-forming disk spinning on the same plane—just like our own. But a new study led by researchers at UC Santa Barbara and UT Austin has found this isn't the case. By surveying 49 young stars, they discovered that a "fair number" emerge already tilted, suggesting misalignment is a natural part of formation, not just a later-life accident.

By combining data from virtually every major space telescope and ground-based observatory, astronomers searching the GOODS-South deep field have found a pair of interacting galaxies, UDF3 and UDF3-2, at a redshift of 2.54. The discovery, led by Sijia Cai of Tsinghua University, reveals that both galaxies are shining in X-rays, but *not* from the cause astronomers usually expect.

The rover's Mastcam-Z instrument captured the 96-image mosaic on May 26, 2025, its 1,516th Martian day. After reaching the top of Jezero Crater's rim late last year, Perseverance has been exploring what may be some of the oldest terrain of its entire mission. Thanks to clear Martian skies, NASA's Perseverance rover has captured one of its sharpest panoramas yet, revealing distant hills and fascinating geology.

An international team led by UT Austin's Cosmic Frontier Center has used JWST to find the unmistakable signature of a supermassive black hole at a record-breaking distance. The discovery, part of the CAPERS survey, provides a unique opportunity to study how these giants grew so massive, so quickly, in the infant universe.

Astronomers have discovered a fascinating object that forces us to rethink how dead stars behave. A white dwarf, J1634+44, located over 3,500 light-years away, is doing something completely unexpected: sending out bright radio pulses. What's truly bizarre is *how* it's pulsing, in a strange rhythm with a weird twist in its waves, a behavior never seen before from a white dwarf.

Before they die as supernovae, the universe's most massive stars (called Wolf-Rayet stars) shed their outer layers in violent gales. When these stars are in a binary pair, their winds collide, creating a cool, dense zone where carbon-rich winds condense into dust—the raw material of our bodies. As the stars orbit, this dust stream is wrapped into a perfect spiral, like water from a sprinkler. We expected Apep to be one of these elegant pinwheels. It was not.

On the slopes of Martian mountains lie features that look like frozen, dust-covered honey. For years, scientists thought they were mostly rock with a little ice. Now, a new paper in *Icarus* confirms these slow-moving glaciers are the opposite: they contain more than 80% pure water ice, hidden under just a thin veil of rock and dust. This finding provides a clearer picture of Mars's climate history and identifies a critical resource for human exploration.