Space news stories

New data from the James Webb telescope suggests that Bennu and Ryugu — two asteroids recently visited by sample-return missions — are both fragments of a single massive “parent”. See the findings in a new study, published Aug. 18 in The Planetary Science Journal.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has snapped black and white images of a rock on the Martian surface that looks remarkably like a piece of coral.

The team says the result marks a milestone in our ability to determine the ages of old stars and use them as living fossils to study the Milky Way’s distant past. This investigative technique makes it possible to analyze thousands of ancient stars in our galaxy, reconstructing the Milky Way’s evolution over billions of years. The findings are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A University of Maryland-led team of astronomers found that while the mission successfully proved that kinetic impactors like the DART spacecraft can alter an asteroid’s path, the resulting ejected boulders created forces in unexpected directions that could complicate future deflection efforts. According to the team’s new paper published in the Planetary Science Journal on July 4, 2025, using asteroid deflection for planetary defense is likely far more complex than researchers initially understood.

A 2.35-billion-year-old meteorite with a unique chemical signature, found in Africa in 2023, plugs a major gap in our understanding of the moon’s volcanic history. The researchers plan to publish their findings in full in a peer-reviewed journal later this year.

One of the latest developments is a recent study from the University of Michigan, published in the journal Science Advances. It proposes that Neanderthals went extinct for astrophysical reasons.

An asteroid that burst onto the scene with an unusually high risk of striking Earth has just had its collision risk upgraded…Now its collision risk has risen to 4.3 percent – not with Earth, but the Moon.

New research uncovers the strongest solar event ever detected — rewriting our understanding of space weather and radiocarbon dating.

A new study of Venus suggests that the deeply inhospitable world may be more like Earth than we thought. The research has been published in Science Advances.

A study published in the Astrophysical Journal opens a new window into investigations of stars through this stellar music.

Three scientists in the United Kingdom have modeled the impacts of an icy cometary collision with an Earth-like, tidally locked terrestrial planet…They found even relatively small cometary impacts can significantly disrupt the climate of a terrestrial (Earth-like) tidally locked planet, as well as deliver oxygen to the atmosphere and be a source of an exoplanet’s oceans. Their first of two papers on the topic was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The universe has been growing since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. But cosmologists can’t agree on how fast it is expanding. A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests a radical new idea that might resolve this astronomical problem – perhaps the universe is spinning very slowly.

Extraterrestrial rocks, recently delivered by a space probe, could answer the big questions about alien lifeforms and human existence

A surprise discovery in Gale Crater is the component that was missing in the puzzle of Mars’s climate history. The findings have been published in Science Advances.

According to a report led by planetary astronomer Andrew Rivkin of Johns Hopkins University, 2024 YR4 has a small chance of smacking into the Moon when the asteroid next flies close to Earth in December 2032.

Chains of up to a dozen carbon atoms have been detected in what appears to have been an ancient lakebed on Mars, contributing to a growing library of compounds that could be a vital clue about the history of life on the red planet. This research was published in PNAS.