For decades, scientists have been curious about how much water Mars once had and what led to its gradual transformation into the dry planet we see today. A new study published online on September 2, 2025, in the Geology journal, sheds light on this mystery by looking deep inside Martian craters, which act like "ice archives" that store a frozen record of the planet's past. These craters reveal that Mars went through repeated ice ages over hundreds of millions of years; however, with each cycle, the amount of remaining ice decreased steadily.
For the first time, astronomers have managed to capture a radio image showing two black holes orbiting each other. The observation confirmed the existence of black hole pairs. In the past, astronomers have only managed to image individual black holes.
The appearance of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere was a turning point in the history of our planet, forever transforming the environment and setting the stage for complex life. This event, known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), occurred roughly 2.1 to 2.4 billion years ago.
By fitting its sunshield and solar panels, engineers have completed the construction of Plato, the European Space Agency's mission to discover Earth-like exoplanets. Plato is on track for the final key tests to confirm that it is fit for launch.
A discovery of binary stars could be the first step in building a more complete picture of how our galaxy formed, according to astronomers from The Australian National University (ANU). The discovery is part of an ambitious 10-year program to scan the entire southern sky every few nights.
Smarter decisions about real-world problems start with better data—and Earth observation can provide just that, thanks to European efforts to open up access to massive amounts of satellite data collected every day.
What if our understanding of Uranus and Neptune's compositions have been wrong, specifically regarding their classifications as "ice giants?" This is what a recent study accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Zurich investigated the interior structures of Uranus and Neptune.
Dark matter is an enigmatic form of matter not expected to emit light, yet it is essential to understanding how the rich tapestry of stars and galaxies we see in the night sky evolved. As a fundamental building block of the universe, a key question for astronomers is whether dark matter is smooth or clumpy, as this could reveal what it is made of. Since dark matter cannot be observed directly, its properties can only be determined by observing the gravitational lensing effect, whereby the light from a more distant object is distorted and deflected by the gravity of the dark object.
SpaceX is set to finish up its third of three contracted launches of competitor Amazon's Project Kuiper satellites on Thursday night.
When Ann Walter looked outside her rural West Texas home, she didn't know what to make of the bulky object slowly drifting across the sky.
Europe must quickly get its own reusable rocket launcher to catch up to billionaire Elon Musk's dominant SpaceX, European Space Agency director Josef Aschbacher told AFP in an interview.
An international team of astronomers has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe a well-known quasar known as the Cloverleaf. As part of the observations, they serendipitously discovered a new ultra-luminous infrared galaxy. The finding was reported September 30 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Scientists at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) have uncovered the intricate magnetic heartbeat of a distant star remarkably similar to our own sun—but much younger and more active. This study, part of the "Far Beyond the Sun" campaign, follows nearly three years of ultra-precise observations and sheds new light on how stars like our sun generate their magnetic fields—and how these fields evolve over time.
According to a new Physical Review Letters study, black holes could help solve the dark matter mystery. The shadowy regions in black hole images captured by the Event Horizon Telescope can act as ultra-sensitive detectors for the invisible material that makes up most of the universe's matter.
One of the most notable properties of the giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—are the extreme winds observed around their equators. While some of these planets have eastward equatorial winds, others have a westward jet stream. For the first time, an international team of scientists led by Leiden Observatory and SRON, can explain the winds on all the giant planets using one model.
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