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Supermassive Black Holes reside at the center of large galaxies, where they dominate their surroundings and sometimes eat stars. When they gobble up a star, they emit a distinctive light flare. This makes it easier for astronomers to pinpoint their location. Astronomers have detected one of these flares offset from a galactic center. Is the black hole shifting its location?

The Fermi Paradox presents us with a striking contradiction: despite the high probability of numerous civilizations existing throughout the Universe, we've encountered no evidence or communication from any alien intelligence. A new paper just published calculates that we should have a 99% chance of detecting at least one signal from another civilisation—assuming they survive for several hundred years and could be distributed anywhere across the Milky Way galaxy. This calculation further deepens the mystery of our apparent cosmic solitude.

On May 7th, the Japanese space exploration company ispace announced that its HAKUTO-R RESILIENCE lander entered lunar orbit after completing a 9-minute thruster burn. It's now in a stable lunar orbit, and operators will spend the next month testing and preparing for its landing attempt on June 5. This is the company's second attempt at landing on the Moon, after the first attempt crashed in 2023. It's carrying a micro-rover and several science experiments.

NASA’s Psyche mission is on its way to explore a metal-rich asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. All was going well since its launch in October 2023 until nasa announced a decrease in fuel pressure for the propulsion system. It uses a solar electric propulsion system, generating thrust with four electric ion engines that expel xenon ions, giving the spacecraft a gentle nudge in the opposite direction. It has been firing its thrusters continuously since May 2024, but in April 2025, engineers detected the pressure drop. Thankfully they have redundancy built in but are still troubleshooting the issue.

The most massive stars in the Milky Way contain one hundred times more mass than the Sun, even more in some cases. These O-type stars are extremely hot, luminous, and blue, and often die in supernova explosions. Astrophysicists want to know how they get so big, and a simple household chemical might hold the answer.

When ISS astronauts return home, they have a hot ride back to Earth's surface. It's been that way since the beginning of human spaceflight to orbital space and beyond. The incoming vehicle uses friction with Earth's atmosphere to slow down to a safe landing speed. The "hot ride" part comes because that friction builds up high temperatures on the spacecraft's "skin". Without protection, the searing heat of atmospheric re-entry could destroy it. This same heating happens to incoming meteoroids as they whip through Earth's atmosphere.

If astronomy has a Holy Grail, it's another habitable world. To find one, NASA is working with partners to develop the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). The HWO would be the first telescope built to detect Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. China is building the Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey (CHES), and new research shows that by working together, HWO and CHES would amplify their results.

There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, and it's not alone. There is also likely a forest of binary black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs. All of these emit gravitational waves as they gradually spiral ever closer together. These gravitational waves are too faint for us to detect at the moment, but future observatories will be able to observe them. This poses an interesting astronomical challenge.

Researchers have identified several features on Mars that look surprisingly similar to conditions on Earth. One notable feature is giant wave-like landforms called solifluction lobes, which are in cold, mountainous regions of Earth, like the Arctic or Rocky Mountains. These are slow-moving patterns similar to fluids running downhill, but on Mars, they're 2.6 times larger because of its lower gravity. They can grow much taller before collapsing on Mars.

What new technologies or methods can be developed for more efficient in-situ planetary subsurface analyses? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how a novel instrument called OptiDrill could fill existing technological voids regarding the sampling and collection of regolith (top dust layer) and subsurface samples on a myriad of planetary bodies throughout the solar system.

To understand how chaotic the early Solar System was, we need only gaze at the Moon. Its cratered surface bears the scars from multitudes of collisions. The early Solar System was like a debris field where objects smashed into each other in cascades of collisions. The same must be true in all young solar systems, and in a new paper, researchers simulated a collision between two massive planets to see what would happen.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Could Study Dying Planets

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Could Study Dying Planets

When astronomers want to understand brown dwarfs, they often turn to WISE 1049AB. It's a benchmark brown dwarf in astronomy, and the closest and brightest brown dwarf we know of. The binary pair, which is also known as Luhman 16, is about 6.5 light-years away. Brown dwarfs are a crucial bridge between planets and stars, and understanding them helps astronomers understand the dynamics of both exoplanets and stars.

The JWST continues to live up to its promise by revealing things hidden from other telescopes. One of its lesser-known observations concerns Free-Floating Planets (FFP). FFPs have no gravitational tether to any star and are difficult to detect because they emit so little light. When the JWST detected 42 of a particular type of FFP in the Orion Nebula Cluster, it gave astronomers an opportunity to study them more closely.

A new space mission is open for business. Last week, we got a look at science images from NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer) mission. The mission will now begin science operations, taking 3,600 unique images a day in an effort to create a 3D map of the sky.

New Horizons' primary mission is complete. It's already completed its pass through the Pluto system and even stopped by 486958 Arrokoth, a Kuiper belt object on its way out of the solar system. But that doesn't mean it's done providing new scientific insights. A new paper looks at data collected by its ultraviolet spectrograph, which looked at one particular wavelength and helped provide context to a few different questions about the solar system.

How do you distinguish a galaxy from a mere cluster of stars? That's easy, right? A galaxy is a large collection of millions or billion of stars, while a star cluster only has a thousand or so. Well, that kind of thinking won't get you a Ph.D. in astronomy! Seriously, though, the line between galaxy and star cluster isn't always clear. Case in point, UMa3/U1.

The idea that our Solar System is representative of other solar systems hasn't survived the age of exoplanet discovery. Kepler and TESS have shown us that our system doesn't even contain the most common type of planet: sub-Neptunes. These planets pose a mystery to planetary scientists, and the JWST is helping unravel the mystery.

The solar gravitation lens (SGL) has much potential as a telescope. This point in space, located about 650 AU away from the Sun, uses fundamental properties of physics to amplify the light from extremely far-away objects, allowing us to see them at a level of detail unachievable anywhere else. However, any SGL mission would face plenty of technical and physical challenges. A new paper by independent researcher Viktor Toth is the latest in a series that discusses those challenges when imaging a far-away exoplanet, and in particular, looks at the difficulties in dealing with potential moving cloud cover. He concludes that using the SGL might not be the most effective way of capturing high-resolution images of an exoplanet, after all.