This observation from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, released on March 23, 2026, gives an unparalleled, detailed look at the aftermath of a supernova and how it has evolved over the telescope’s long lifetime.
How far the Milky Way’s disk extends has long been difficult to define—it doesn’t end sharply, but fades away gradually at its outer edges. Now, for the first time, an international team of astronomers has identified the edge of the Milky Way’s star-forming disk by studying the ages of stars, revealing that the bulk of our galaxy’s star formation occurs within 40,000 light-years of the Galactic Center.
Following the recent successful test flight of NASA’s Artemis II mission around the moon, NASA rolled out the core stage, or the largest section, of the agency’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that will launch the crewed Artemis III mission in 2027. The stage departed from the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans on Monday for shipment to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking key progress on the path to the agency’s first crewed lunar landing mission to the moon under the Artemis program in two years.
Invisible “dark matter”—what cosmologists call the mysterious glue that holds everything together—is estimated to make up more than a quarter of the universe. In chemistry, dark matter refers to the thousands of small molecules in bone and tissue that can’t be identified using mass spectrometry. They make up the vast majority of what’s known as metabolites.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has uncovered a diverse mix of organic molecules on Mars, including chemicals widely considered building blocks for the origin of life on Earth.
The Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission, run by the Institute of Ancient Near East Studies (IPOA) at the University of Barcelona and led by Maite Mascort and Esther Pons, has identified a papyrus containing a fragment of Homer’s “Iliad” inside a Roman-era tomb dating to approximately 1,600 years ago, in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa, ancient Oxyrhynchus. The discovery is exceptional: it is the first time in the history of archaeology that a Greek literary text has been found deliberately incorporated into the mummification process.
The sun continuously blasts charged, magnetic field-carrying particles, or plasma, in all directions. This solar wind interacts with the magnetic fields and atmospheres of several of our solar system’s planets and other bodies, sculpting long magnetic tails of charged particles—magnetotails—that stretch into space behind them.
The cosmological constant is the mathematical description of the energy that drives the ever-accelerating expansion of the cosmos. It’s also the source of one of the most enduring and confounding problems in modern physics.
If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math and Astronomy building at the University of Texas at Austin, you’ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped building. What you won’t see is what’s underneath you. Two floors below ground, behind heavy double doors stamped with a logo that most students have never noticed, sits one of the most powerful lasers in the United States.
This shimmering region of star-formation, a close-up of the Trifid Nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth, was captured in intricate detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The colors in Hubble’s visible light image, which marks the 36th anniversary of the mission’s launch on April 24, are reminiscent of an underwater scene filled with fine-grained sediments fluttering through the ocean’s depths.
On Earth, people grip objects to ensure they don’t fall. In space, this process changes: When astronauts hold an object without moving it and then let go, the object doesn’t fall because there is no gravity. But when astronauts move the object any which way, inertia takes the object up, down, left, or right if the hand grip is not steady.
Few concepts in physics are as familiar, yet as enigmatic, as time. In Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is not absolute: its passage depends on motion and gravity. But when combined with quantum physics, this relativistic form of time becomes even more counterintuitive.
On April 17, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California sent commands to shut down an instrument aboard Voyager 1 called the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP. The nuclear-powered spacecraft is running low on power, and turning off the LECP is considered the best way to keep humanity’s first interstellar explorer going.
Between the Artemis Program, the ESA’s Moon Village, and the Sino-Russian International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), the next step in space exploration is clear: we’re going back to the moon, and this time, to stay! This plan requires significant investment, research, development, and strategies adapted to lunar conditions. In particular, mission planners are concerned about the hazard posed by lunar regolith (aka “moon dust”). In addition to being electrostatically charged, causing it to stick to literally any surface, it is incredibly fine and easily kicked up by rovers and spacecraft as they land and take off.
Scientists have long known that fungi are resilient, but a new study suggests that some strains might survive every step of the long, brutal trip to Mars. In a paper published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, researchers isolated fungal microbes from NASA cleanrooms—facilities used in the assembly, testing, and launch of spacecraft—that had persisted after decontamination.
Mercury is a small, rocky planet about which researchers know relatively little. Two missions, taking readings as they passed over the planet, have revealed that Mercury is covered by an iron-poor and sulfur-rich crust. It is also reduced, a chemical state in which the substances have gained electrons. In fact, it’s the most reduced planet in the solar system.
Luminous fast blue optical transients (LFBOTs) are among the universe’s brightest and fastest explosions but their origin is not completely understood. A new study takes a closer look at the galaxies they occur in, offering two important clues about their nature. A paper outlining these results was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on March 24.
The Perseus Cluster is a massive galaxy cluster located in the constellation Perseus. It is one of the largest structures in the observable universe, comprising more than a thousand galaxies—equivalent to roughly a thousand trillion times the mass of the sun. Hot gases within the cluster, known as the intracluster medium (ICM), emit powerful X-rays detectable by telescopes. These gases are produced by billions of supernova explosions, and their chemical composition reveals how typical supernovae have exploded throughout cosmic history.
Blue Origin, the U.S. space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, successfully reused and recovered a booster for its New Glenn rocket on Sunday, confirming its mastery of a technical feat that could boost its launch cadence and expand its rivalry with SpaceX.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has successfully completed the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe ever made, a major milestone in understanding the force driving cosmic expansion. The milestone was reached when DESI’s 5,000 fiber-optic sensors captured their final scheduled observations, targeting a region of sky near the Little Dipper.
