Phys.org Astronomy and Space

• New distant warm Jupiter discovered with TESS

  Using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected a new warm Jupiter exoplanet located more than 1,000 light years away. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-2005 b, is about the size of Jupiter and orbits its host star on a highly eccentric orbit. The discovery was reported March 25 on the arXiv pre-print server.

• KiDS dataset doesn't shake up cold dark matter model after all, say researchers

  Data from 41 million galaxies does not shake up the standard cosmological model after all. To that conclusion, to their own surprise, comes an international team of researchers including Koen Kuijken, professor at the Leiden Observatory.

• Lunar polar regions could have microbes, modeling study suggests

  Could microbes survive in the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the moon? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) hopes to address as a team of researchers from the United States and Canada investigated the likelihood of long-term survival for microbes in the PSR areas of the moon, which are craters located at the poles that don't see sunlight due to the moon's small axial tilt.

• Sampling the plumes of Jupiter's volcano moon, Io

  What can a sample return mission from Jupiter's volcanic moon, Io, teach scientists about planetary and satellite (moon) formation and evolution? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) hopes to address as an international team of more than two dozen scientists discussed the benefits and challenges of a mission to Io with the goal of sampling its volcanic plumes that eject from its surface on a regular basis.

• How can we find cryovolcanoes on Europa?

  In the 1970s, NASA's Voyager probes passed through Jupiter's system and snapped pictures of its largest moons, also known as the Galilean moons. These pictures and the data they gathered offered the first hints that a global ocean may be beneath Europa's icy crust. Moreover, planetary models indicated that Europa's interactions with Jupiter's powerful gravity could lead to tidal flexing in the moon's interior. In short, scientists learned that Europa could have all the necessary ingredients for life in its interior.

• A dramatic Einstein ring seen by Webb

  One of the first verified predictions of general relativity is the gravitational deflection of starlight. The effect was first observed in 1919 during a total solar eclipse. Since stars appear as points of light, the effect is seen as an apparent shift in the position of stars near the eclipse. But the effect happens more generally.

• Modeling lunar in-situ resource utilization can help plan future prototypes

  In-situ resource utilization will likely play a major role in any future long-term settlement of the moon. However, designing such a system in advance with our current level of knowledge will prove difficult, mainly because there's so much uncertainty around both the availability of those resources and the efficacy of the processes used to extract them.

• NASA's SPHEREx takes first images, preps to study millions of galaxies

  NASA's SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) has turned on its detectors for the first time in space. Initial images from the observatory, which launched March 11, confirm that all systems are working as expected.

• How to engineer microbes to enable us to live on Mars

  A field known as synthetic biology has become one of the most highly anticipated in science. Its outputs range from golden rice, which is genetically engineered to provide vitamin A, to advances stemming from the Human Genome Project, which successfully mapped the entire human genome. Prominent voices in biotechnology have heralded it as the next wave of the future of innovation.

• A step towards life on Mars? Lichens survive Martian simulation in new study

  For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that certain lichen species can survive Mars-like conditions, including exposure to ionizing radiation, while maintaining a metabolically active state.

• Fixing cracks in space bricks with bacteria

  Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a bacteria-based technique to repair bricks that can be used to build lunar habitats if they get damaged in the moon's harsh environment.

• FAA closes investigation into Blue Origin New Glenn booster failure

  The Federal Aviation Administration has said that it will allow Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket to fly again, following a review of the January mishap in which the rocket made a successful debut launch but crashed during landing.

• Video: Is space debris a crisis?

  The European Space Agency's short documentary film "Space Debris: Is it a Crisis?" on the state of space debris premiered at the 9th European Conference on Space Debris on 1 April 2025.

• Multifrequency observations explore radio galaxy 3C 111 and its jet

  Using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), European astronomers have carried out multi-wavelength radio observations of a radio galaxy designated 3C 111. Results of the observational campaign, published March 24 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the properties of this galaxy and its relativistic jet.

• Bitcoin investor buys an entire SpaceX flight for the ultimate polar adventure

  A bitcoin investor who bought a SpaceX flight for himself and three polar explorers blasted off Monday night on the first rocket ride to carry people over the North and South poles.

• NASA's newly returned astronauts say they would fly on Boeing's Starliner capsule again

  NASA's celebrity astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams said Monday that they hold themselves partly responsible for what went wrong on their space sprint-turned-marathon and would fly on Boeing's Starliner again.

• Hubble's 20-year study of Uranus yields new atmospheric insights

  The ice-giant planet Uranus, which travels around the sun tipped on its side, is a weird and mysterious world. Now, in an unprecedented study spanning two decades, researchers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered new insights into the planet's atmospheric composition and dynamics. This was possible only because of Hubble's sharp resolution, spectral capabilities, and longevity.

• Costa Rica's mudball meteorite: A cosmic survivor that avoided collisions in the pinball world of asteroids

  In April 2019, rare primitive meteorites fell near the town of Aguas Zarcas in northern Costa Rica. In an article published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, an international team of researchers describes the circumstances of the fall and show that mudball meteorites are not necessarily weak.

• NASA's dust shield successfully repels lunar regolith on moon

  NASA's Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS) successfully demonstrated its ability to remove regolith, or lunar dust and dirt, from its various surfaces on the moon during Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1, which concluded on March 16.

• NASA's Curiosity rover has found the longest chain carbon molecules yet on Mars

  NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has detected the largest organic (carbon-containing) molecules ever found on the red planet. The discovery is one of the most significant findings in the search for evidence of past life on Mars. This is because, on Earth at least, relatively complex, long-chain of carbon molecules are involved in biology. These molecules could actually be fragments of fatty acids, which are found in, for example, the membranes surrounding biological cells.

• Femur bone density loss in mice aboard the ISS sheds light on space travel challenges

  A team of biomedical engineers at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science working with a team of bio-scientist colleagues from NASA Ames Research Center, both in the U.S., has found that test mice living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) experience a significant amount of bone loss in their femurs compared to control mice on Earth.

• Jets from powerful black holes can point astronomers toward where to look for life in the universe

  One of the most powerful objects in the universe is a radio quasar—a spinning black hole spraying out highly energetic particles. Come too close to one, and you'd get sucked in by its gravitational pull, or burn up from the intense heat surrounding it. But ironically, studying black holes and their jets can give researchers insight into where potentially habitable worlds might be in the universe.

• Dark matter could make planets spin faster

  Dark matter is a confounding concept that teeters on the leading edges of cosmology and physics. We don't know what it is or how exactly it fits into our understanding of the universe. We only know that its unseen mass is a critical part of the cosmos.

• Could convection in the crust explain Venus's many volcanoes?

  Venus—a hot planet pocked with tens of thousands of volcanoes—may be even more geologically active near its surface than previously thought. New calculations by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis suggest that the planet's outer crust may be constantly churning, an unexpected phenomenon called convection that could help explain many of the volcanoes and other features of the Venusian landscape.

• Melnick 39 is a colliding-wind binary system, observations find

  Astronomers from the University of Sheffield and Pennsylvania State University have performed X-ray and optical observations of a massive star known as Melnick 39. As a result, they found that Melnick 39 is a colliding-wind binary system composed of two O-type supergiant stars. The finding was detailed on March 21 on the pre-print server arXiv.

• SpaceX to launch private astronauts on first crewed polar orbit

  SpaceX is set to launch the first human spaceflight directly over Earth's polar regions on Monday—a days-long, privately funded orbital mission involving four astronauts.

• Farewell, Gaia! Spacecraft operations come to an end

  The European Space Agency (ESA) has powered down its Gaia spacecraft after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.

• European orbital rocket crashes after launch

  The first orbital rocket launched from continental Europe crashed seconds after blast-off Sunday, in a closely watched test for the continent's bid to build a new space economy.

• When glaciers roamed Mars

  The surface of Mars is known for being an extremely cold, desiccated, and irradiated place. But as its many surface features attest, the red planet was once a warmer, wetter place with flowing water and glaciers. Today, most of the remaining water on the surface is largely confined to its polar regions in the form of ice caps, permafrost, and subsurface glaciers. Nevertheless, the seasonal melting and freezing of this ice still impacts the Martian environment and offers clues about glacial activity in the past.

• Supernova archaeology: Finding clues in the ruins of an ancient dead star with Chandra

  People often think about archaeology happening deep in jungles or inside ancient pyramids. However, a team of astronomers has shown that they can use stars and the remains they leave behind to conduct a special kind of archaeology in space.