Discovering liquid water oceans inside the moons of Uranus would transform our thinking about the range of possibilities for where life could exist.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have made significant discoveries within the Spiderweb protocluster, revealing the formation of new galaxies and challenging previous theories about gravitational interactions.

The infrared capabilities of Webb allowed for the observation of previously obscured galaxies, enhancing our understanding of galaxy assembly in one of the largest structures of the universe during its adolescent phase.

Understanding galaxy formation in early universe.

Since 2018 the Zwicky Transient Facility, an international astronomical collaboration based at the Palomar Observatory in California, has scanned the entire sky every two to three nights. As part of this mission, the ZTF’s Bright Transient Survey has been counting and cataloging supernovae—flashes of light in the sky that are the telltale signs of stars dying in spectacular explosions.

On Dec. 4, ZTF researchers—including astronomers at the University of Washington—announced that they have identified more than 10,000 of these stellar events, the largest number ever identified by an astronomical survey.

“There are trillions of stars in the universe, and about every second, one of them explodes,” said Christoffer Fremling, an astronomer at Caltech who leads the Bright Transient Survey. “ZTF detects hundreds of these explosions per night and a handful are then confirmed as supernovae. Systematically doing this for seven years has led to the most complete record of confirmed supernovae to date.”

NEOWISE contributed to planetary defense efforts with its research to catalog near-Earth objects. Over the past decade, it helped planetary defenders like us and our colleagues study near-Earth objects.

NEOWISE was a game-changing mission, as it revolutionized how to survey near-Earth objects.

The NEOWISE mission continued to use the spacecraft from NASA’s WISE mission, which ran from late 2009 to 2011 and conducted an all-sky infrared survey to detect not only near-Earth objects but also distant objects such as galaxies.

Perched in the constellation Orion, 1,300 light-years from Earth, lies GW Orionis, a unique triple-star solar system. Unlike most known systems, GW Orionis features two stars orbiting each other closely, while a third star circles at a much greater distance. Surrounding these stars are three enormous, misaligned rings of planet-forming dust, creating a striking bullseye pattern in the sky.

Recent studies, published in Science and The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest that these rings may harbor a young planet—or the makings of one. This celestial body could explain the dramatic misalignment of the system’s inner ring, which appears to wobble like a broken gyroscope. If confirmed, this would be the first known planet orbiting three stars simultaneously.

Nienke van der Marel, astrophysicist and co-author of the May 21 study, noted that the combined gravitational pull of the three stars alone cannot account for the rings’ behavior. Instead, the presence of a planet carving a gap in the disk could be disrupting the system’s balance.