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Imagine trying to reconstruct the history of a city by studying only its oldest surviving buildings. By tracking ancient, pulsating stars, astronomers are doing exactly that for our galaxy. When astronomers study the formation of our galaxy, they can't watch it being built. All they have are the structures themselves, their materials, their arrangement, and the subtle clues locked into their very fabric.

An international team has uncovered SN 2024abvb—a violently stripped, carbon-rich supernova exploding deep in intergalactic space. When a massive star dies, its explosive finale provides essential clues to the evolution of the universe. Most supernovae (SNe) fall into neat categories based on what elements they vomit into space: Type II explosions are rich in hydrogen, while Type I explosions lack it entirely.

SpaceX's Starship is rewriting the rules of spaceflight. But a rigorous new analysis from the German Aerospace Center proposes a European alternative that trades brute force for pure efficiency. In the summer of 2023, SpaceX's Starship—a stainless steel tower taller than a 30-story building—lit its 33 engines simultaneously and lifted off. By flight test five, the Super Heavy booster was caught midair by the enormous mechanical arms of its own launch tower.

The Vera Rubin Observatory has begun scanning the night sky, unleashing a torrential stream of data that will transform our view of the cosmos from a static painting into a dynamic, living movie. To us, the night sky seems static. But the cosmos is actually alive with objects that change, move, and explode.

For decades, we wondered if lightning strikes the Red Planet. A rare electromagnetic "whistle" caught by NASA's MAVEN orbiter finally breaks the silence. While sifting through a decade of data from NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, scientists stumbled upon a ghost in the machine: a Whistler Wave.

Before we can deflect a killer asteroid, we must know its mass. For small objects, traditional tracking fails. A daring new dual-spacecraft maneuver aims to solve the problem. Estimating the mass of a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) is the single most important metric after determining its trajectory. If we need to send a kinetic impactor to knock it off course, we need to know exactly how heavy it is to calculate the necessary force.

For two decades, the bright, striped "zebra pattern" of the Crab Pulsar baffled scientists. Now, the mystery has been solved by an invisible battle between plasma and gravity. In the year 1054, Chinese and Japanese astronomers witnessed a new star appear in the sky. Today, we know it as the Crab Nebula—the remnants of a violent supernova. At its very center sits the Crab Pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star emitting beams of radiation.

Searching for life on Mars means making sure we don't accidentally bring our own. A new model reveals exactly how long Earth microbes can survive the brutal journey. Searching for past or present life on Mars is the sole driving force behind every mission we send to the red planet, from orbiters to landers to rovers. However, there remains a persistent concern: forward contamination.

Growing potatoes in Martian dirt is the easy part. To survive years in deep space, astronauts need a perfectly balanced, multi-stage ecosystem—and if one piece breaks, everyone starves. When we imagine deep space farming, we picture Matt Damon in The Martian scratching a living out of regolith, or glowing hydroponic bays on a starship. But a new paper in Acta Astronautica by Tor Blomqvist and Ralph Fritsche reveals that producing food is just one fraction of the battle.

Dining on the Moon or Mars sounds like science fiction. But a new process recycling human waste into fertilizer is turning barren alien dust into fertile fields. To build a sustainable colony on the Moon or Mars, we must grow our own food. But the surfaces of these worlds are covered in regolith—a dusty, rocky material that is incredibly sharp, abrasive, and completely devoid of organic matter.

Did the early Moon have a strong magnetic field or a weak one? A new analysis of Apollo samples reveals that both sides of the fierce scientific debate are correct.

Why do so many icy objects at the edge of the solar system look like two spheres stuck together? A new supercomputer simulation has finally solved the mystery. In January 2019, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Arrokoth, an ancient, icy rock in the Kuiper Belt. To everyone's surprise, it looked exactly like a snowman. Even more surprising? It turns out about 10% of all planetesimals in the Kuiper Belt share this exact same "contact binary" shape.