Astrophysics

From crewed lunar voyages to flight tests of fully reusable rockets and launches of new orbital telescopes studying the outer limits of the cosmos, 2026 should be a banner year for space science and exploration

From an interstellar comet to breathtaking auroras and from brand-new rockets to iconic space telescopes, here are some of our favorite images from the cosmos in 2025

Depending on how you look at it, this catchphrase from a 1980s pop song is decently accurate: you can actually melt the planet if you stop its turning

Observations show the disk of our galaxy is not flat but warped and waving. Astronomers are still working out the reasons why

A “superflare” 10 trillion times brighter than the sun is confirmed as the record holder for luminosity

A cosmic explosion known as GRB 250702B is by far the longest gamma-ray burst astronomers have ever seen—if it’s even one at all

Voracious supermassive black holes light up the cores of “active” galaxies across the universe. How we see them, however, is a matter of perspective

The Habitable Worlds Observatory is poised to tell us whether Earth-like planets are common—if it can get off the ground

Gauging the mass of a black hole is tricky, but astronomers have devised multiple methods to measure the heft of these galactic gluttons

A swarm of galaxies called the Bullet Cluster is the biggest, best natural laboratory for studying dark matter that astronomers have ever seen

Our understanding of cosmology hinges on how well we know our own local universe, which remains poorly mapped and poorly understood

Superluminal velocities are common but illusory