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Tiny Robots, Alien Caves: NASA's Plan for Titan

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has lakes and rivers of liquid methane, a thick hazy atmosphere, and — scientists suspect — a hidden network of caves and sinkholes carved not by water, but by liquid hydrocarbons eating through water ice. It's a landscape no wheeled rover and no simple flying drone is built to handle.

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Is Empty Space Really Empty? A 90-Year-Old Mystery Gets Its Answer

In 1936, physicists Werner Heisenberg and Hans Euler proposed something strange: that a vacuum isn't truly empty, but filled with a simmering sea of virtual particles flickering in and out of existence. One consequence of that idea, if true, is vacuum birefringence — an effect where an extraordinarily strong magnetic field should polarize light passing through empty space, the vacuum itself acting a little like a lens.

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The Colour of Empty Space

Ask a physicist to describe truly empty space and you will not get silence. You will get a story about a place that is anything but empty — a restless froth where pairs of particles and their antimatter twins blink into existence and vanish again before any instrument can catch them. It sounds like a metaphor. This week, thanks to a dead star and a radio dish in the New South Wales countryside, it started to look like a measurement.

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A Dead Rocket Hits the Moon — and Becomes an Experiment

Every so often, a piece of space junk stops being a nuisance and becomes a gift. This week gave us one of those moments, when a spent SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage — a four-tonne cylinder of dead metal — slammed into the Moon near Einstein Crater at around 5,400 miles per hour, and the world’s telescopes were pointed right at it.

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Voyager’s second wind: how NASA bought its oldest explorer another year

There is a spacecraft, older than most of the people reading this, drifting through the space between the stars more than twenty-one billion kilometres from Earth. It has no camera trained on anything anymore. It cannot see. But it can still feel ....

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The Crater Makers

Sometime early on Wednesday morning, Universal Time, a piece of a rocket that has been drifting through space for a year and a half is going to hit the Moon. It will arrive near Einstein Crater, on the Moon’s far western edge, at about five and a half thousand miles an hour....

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The Edge of Everything: how astronomers finally measured the universe's largest galaxy

There is a question children ask and physicists never quite stop asking: how big can one thing get? This week, astronomers came closer than ever to answering it for galaxies — by finally measuring the edge of the largest one we know.

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The Night a Telescope Started Driving Itself! | Astronomy Daily · Weekend Wrap · 1 August 2026

Ask any astronomer who has worked a night at a major observatory and they'll describe the same quiet, relentless pressure. You have the telescope for a set number of hours. The sky refuses to cooperate. Clouds drift in from nowhere; the Moon climbs and drowns your faint targets in silver; the air steadies and then turns to soup. Every few minutes you're making a call — point here now, hold that one for later, abandon this one entirely.....

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A World in Three Parts | Astronomy Daily · S05E155 · Friday 31 July 2026

Ask most people to picture an asteroid and they’ll describe a potato — a single grey lump tumbling through the dark. It’s a fair image. Most asteroids really are lonely, irregular rocks. Some are “contact binaries,” two lobes fused into a peanut shape, like the comet Rosetta visited or the little moonlet DART crashed into. But this week, one long-known asteroid broke the mould entirely.

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The Reach of a Giant

How a single black hole stirs an entire galaxy cluster — and why that keeps galaxies in check.

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Betelgeuse Was Never Alone

Look up at Orion on any clear night and you have already met the star at the centre of this week’s biggest astronomy story. Betelgeuse — the deep-orange point marking the hunter’s shoulder — is a red supergiant so vast that, dropped into our own solar system, it would engulf the orbit of Jupiter.

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“Reading the Heat: Juno Takes Io’s Temperature from the Inside”

Io is a place of superlatives. More than four hundred active volcanoes. Lava lakes. Plumes that climb hundreds of kilometres above the surface. Its garish yellows and sulphur reds come from being resurfaced, endlessly, by its own eruptions. All of that fury is driven by tidal heating:

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