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Gigantic star has gone through a rapid transformation and may explode

20 February 2025

A red supergiant star appears to have changed in just a few years – an astronomical blink of an eye – which suggests it may be getting ready to explode in a supernova

Most newborn black holes spew gas so hard they almost stop spinning

12 February 2024

When black holes are born from collapsing stars, they emit a short-lived jet that may slow down the black hole’s rotation to nearly a standstill

This Hubble Space Telescope image of the asteroid Dimorphos was taken on December 19, 2022, nearly four months after the asteroid was impacted by NASA?s DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test). Hubble?s sensitivity reveals a few dozen boulders knocked off the asteroid by the force of the collision. These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the solar system. The free-flung boulders range in size from three feet to 22 feet across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at a little more than a half-mile per hour. The discovery yields invaluable insights into the behavior of a small asteroid when it is hit by a projectile for the purpose of altering its trajectory.

NASA's asteroid-smashing space debris spotted by Hubble telescope

20 July 2023

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped the results of smashing a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphous

How to spot the 2023 Perseid meteor shower wherever you are

20 July 2023

The Perseids are a major meteor shower - here is your guide to spotting them in July and August 2023

Two-faced star seems to have one hydrogen side and one helium side

19 July 2023

A strange star more than 1300 light years away appears to have two sides with completely different compositions, and astronomers aren’t sure how it ended up that way

Distant planet may be the first known to share its orbit with another

19 July 2023

Exoplanet PDS 70b, a gas giant seven times the mass of Jupiter, appears to share an orbit with a ball of dust around the mass of Earth's moon, which could be forming a new planet

Space Week: A seven-day tour of the cosmos

18 July 2023

To celebrate the launch of our new podcast, Dead Planets Society, New Scientist editors have selected some of our most delightful premium articles about the solar system and beyond

Could we put out the sun with a sun-sized orb of water?

18 July 2023

What would happen if we pushed a sun-sized ball of water into our star? The Dead Planets Society podcast dives into the possibilities

These three objects were originally identified as galaxies but they may actually be “dark stars”

JWST may have spotted enormous stars powered by dark matter

17 July 2023

The early universe could be home to huge stars powered by dark matter annihilation instead of fusion – and the James Webb Space Telescope may have already found some

India's Chandrayaan-3 launches to explore moon's water-rich south pole

14 July 2023

India has launched its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which aims to explore the south pole of the moon by rover, completing a scientific mission that was first attempted in 2019 but ended in catastrophic failure due to a software glitch