Astronomy News

March 21, 2026

Top Headlines

Scientists Solve 12,800-year-old Climate Mystery Hidden in Greenland Ice

Mar. 20, 2026 A mysterious spike of platinum buried deep in Greenland’s ice has long fueled theories of a catastrophic comet or asteroid strike 12,800 years ago—possibly triggering a sudden return to icy conditions known as the Younger Dryas. But new research ...

NASA Launches Twin Spacecraft to Solve the Mystery of Mars’ Lost Atmosphere

Mar. 14, 2026 Mars didn’t always look like the barren world we see today. Over billions of years, the Sun’s solar wind stripped away much of its atmosphere, helping transform it from a warmer, wetter planet ...

Can Solar Storms Trigger Earthquakes? Scientists Propose Surprising Link

Feb. 24, 2026 Scientists have proposed a surprising connection between solar flares and earthquakes. When solar activity disturbs the ionosphere, it may generate electric fields that penetrate fragile fracture zones in Earth’s crust. If a fault is already ...

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Completes the First AI-planned Drive on Mars

Feb. 2, 2026 NASA’s Perseverance rover has just made history by driving across Mars using routes planned by artificial intelligence instead of human operators. A vision-capable AI analyzed the same images and terrain data normally used by rover planners, ...

Robots Descend Into Lava Tubes to Prepare for Future Moon Bases

Feb. 2, 2026 Hidden lava tunnels on the Moon and Mars could one day shelter human explorers, offering natural protection from radiation and space debris. A European research team has unveiled a bold new mission concept that uses three different robots working ...

Low-Earth Orbit Is Just 2.8 Days from Disaster

Jan. 28, 2026 Low-Earth orbit is more crowded—and fragile—than it looks. Satellites constantly weave past each other, burning fuel and making dozens of evasive maneuvers every year just to stay safe. A major solar storm could disable navigation and ...

Inside the Mysterious Collapse of Dark Matter Halos

Jan. 19, 2026 Physicists have unveiled a new way to simulate a mysterious form of dark matter that can collide with itself but not with normal matter. This self-interacting dark matter may trigger a dramatic collapse inside dark matter halos, heating and ...

Scientists Are Closing in on the Universe’s Biggest Mystery

Jan. 8, 2026 Nearly everything in the universe is made of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, yet we can’t see either of them directly. Scientists are developing detectors so sensitive they can spot particle interactions that might occur once in years or ...

SETI Watched a Pulsar Flicker for Months and Found Space Keeps Shifting

Jan. 6, 2026 A distant pulsar’s radio signal flickers as it passes through space, much like stars twinkle in Earth’s atmosphere. By monitoring this effect for 10 months, researchers watched the pattern slowly evolve as gas, Earth, and the pulsar all moved. ...

Earth’s Toughest Microbes Could Help Humans Live on Mars

Jan. 6, 2026 Mars looks familiar from afar, but surviving there means creating a protective oasis in a hostile world. Instead of shipping construction materials from Earth, researchers are exploring how to use Martian soil as the raw ingredient. Two tough ...

What Are Asteroids Really Made of? New Analysis Brings Space Mining Closer to Reality

Dec. 25, 2025 Scientists are digging into the hidden makeup of carbon-rich asteroids to see whether they could one day fuel space exploration—or even be mined for valuable resources. By analyzing rare meteorites ...

Subaru Telescope Reveals a Hidden Giant Planet

Dec. 22, 2025 Astronomers have uncovered a massive hidden planet and a rare “failed star” by combining ultra-precise space data with some of the sharpest ground-based images ever taken. Using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaiʻi, the OASIS survey tracked subtle ...

Latest Headlines

updated 9:06am EDT

Astronomers Discover Nearby Galaxy Was Shattered by Cosmic Crash

Mar. 20, 2026 A nearby galaxy is behaving strangely—and now scientists know why. The Small Magellanic Cloud’s stars move in chaotic patterns because it slammed into its larger neighbor millions of years ago. ...

Even JWST Can’t See Through This Planet’s Massive Haze

Mar. 18, 2026 Kepler-51d is a giant, ultra-light “super-puff” planet wrapped in an unusually thick haze that’s blocking scientists from seeing what it’s made of. Observations from JWST revealed that this ...

JWST Reveals a Strange Sulfur World Unlike Any Planet We Know

Mar. 17, 2026 Astronomers have identified a strange new kind of exoplanet that challenges how scientists classify worlds beyond our Solar System. The planet, L 98-59 d, appears to contain a vast ocean of molten ...

This Massive Crater Could Expose the Heart of a Lost Planet

Mar. 17, 2026 A mysterious metal-rich asteroid called Psyche has been baffling scientists for over two centuries, and its true origin remains one of the biggest unanswered questions in planetary science. Is it the ...

NASA’s Webb Captures a Bizarre Brain-Shaped Nebula Around a Dying Star

Mar. 17, 2026 The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed new details in a bizarre nebula that looks like a brain floating in space. Formed by a dying star, the “Exposed Cranium” nebula shows layered gas and a ...

Rare Supernova from 10 Billion Years Ago May Reveal the Secret of Dark Energy

Mar. 16, 2026 Astronomers may have found an exciting new clue about dark energy—the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion. They ...

A Strange Twist in the Universe’s Oldest Light May Be Bigger Than We Thought

Mar. 16, 2026 Scientists studying a mysterious effect called cosmic birefringence—a subtle twist in the polarization of the universe’s oldest light—have ...

Astronomers Just Found the Source of the Brightest Fast Radio Burst Ever

Mar. 15, 2026 Astronomers have discovered the brightest fast radio burst ever detected and traced it to a nearby galaxy using a new network of CHIME Outrigger telescopes. The flash, nicknamed RBFLOAT, lasted only ...

Scientists Discover Hidden Water Beneath Mars That Could Have Supported Life

Mar. 15, 2026 New research suggests Mars may have remained habitable much longer than scientists once thought. Ancient sand dunes in Gale Crater appear to have ...

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Investigates Strange Spiderweb Ridges on Mars

Mar. 14, 2026 NASA’s Curiosity rover is investigating strange spiderweb-like ridges on Mars that may reveal a hidden chapter of the planet’s watery history. These “boxwork” formations likely formed when ...

Our Sun May Have Escaped the Milky Way’s Center With Thousands of Twin Stars

Mar. 13, 2026 Scientists have uncovered evidence that our Sun may have traveled across the Milky Way as part of a massive migration of Sun-like stars billions of years ago. The journey may have carried the solar ...

A Black Hole and Neutron Star Just Collided in a Strange Oval Orbit

Mar. 12, 2026 Scientists analyzing a gravitational-wave signal have discovered that a neutron star and black hole spiraled together on an oval-shaped orbit just before merging. This unusual motion, detected in the ...

Astronomers Think They Just Witnessed Two Planets Colliding

Mar. 11, 2026 Astronomers have caught what may be a rare cosmic catastrophe unfolding 11,000 light-years away. A seemingly ordinary sun-like star suddenly began flickering wildly, puzzling scientists until they ...

Strange Chirping Supernova Confirms Long-Debated Magnetar Theory

Mar. 11, 2026 Astronomers have discovered a strange new signal coming from an exploding star — a “chirp” that speeds up over time, similar to the signals seen when black holes collide. The unusual pattern ...

NASA’s DART Asteroid Smash Shows We Could Deflect a Future Threat

Mar. 9, 2026 When NASA’s DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, it did more than change the asteroid’s local orbit — it slightly shifted the path of the entire asteroid ...

NASA DART Mission Reveals Asteroids Throw “cosmic Snowballs” at Each Other

Mar. 8, 2026 Asteroids with tiny moons may be quietly trading material across space. Images from NASA’s DART mission revealed faint streaks on the moon Dimorphos—evidence of slow “cosmic snowballs” ...

Chickpeas Could Become the First Food Grown on the Moon

Mar. 12, 2026 Scientists have grown chickpeas in simulated moon soil, offering a promising step toward farming on the lunar surface. Researchers mixed moon-like regolith with worm-produced compost and helpful ...

Astronomers Create the Largest 3D Map of the Early Universe Revealing Hidden Galaxies

Mar. 8, 2026 Astronomers have created the largest and most detailed 3D map yet of a glowing signal from the early universe, revealing hidden galaxies and gas from 9-11 billion years ago. By analyzing faint ...

Blasted Off Mars and Still Alive

Mar. 3, 2026 A famously resilient bacterium may be tough enough to survive one of the most violent events imaginable on Mars. In laboratory experiments designed to mimic the crushing shock of a massive asteroid ...

ALMA Captures the Most Detailed Image Ever of the Milky Way’s Turbulent Core

Mar. 5, 2026 A sweeping new ALMA image has peeled back the veil on the Milky Way’s core, exposing a dense network of cold gas filaments near the central black hole. Stretching across 650 light-years, the survey ...

Apollo Rocks Reveal the Moon Had Brief Bursts of Super-Strong Magnetism

Feb. 26, 2026 Scientists at the University of Oxford have finally settled a decades-long mystery about the Moon’s magnetic field — and it turns out both sides were right. By reanalyzing Apollo mission rocks, ...

A Faint Cosmic Hum Could Solve the Universe’s Expansion Mystery

Mar. 1, 2026 Astronomers have long known the universe is expanding—but exactly how fast remains one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology. Different techniques for measuring the Hubble constant stubbornly ...

Jupiter’s Moons May Have Formed With the Ingredients for Life

Mar. 1, 2026 Jupiter’s icy moons may have been seeded with the chemical ingredients for life from the very beginning. An international team of scientists modeled how complex organic molecules—essential ...

Why the Outer Solar System Is Filled With Giant Cosmic “snowmen”

Feb. 23, 2026 Far beyond Neptune, in the frozen depths of the Kuiper Belt, many ancient objects oddly resemble giant snowmen made of ice and rock. For years, scientists wondered how these delicate two-lobed shapes ...

James Webb Space Telescope Captures Strange Magnetic Forces Warping Uranus

Feb. 21, 2026 For the first time, scientists have mapped Uranus’s upper atmosphere in three dimensions, tracking temperatures and charged particles up to 5,000 kilometers above the clouds. Webb’s sharp vision ...

NASA’s Hubble Spots Nearly Invisible “ghost Galaxy” Made of 99% Dark Matter

Feb. 21, 2026 Astronomers have uncovered one of the most mysterious galaxies ever found — a dim, ghostly object called CDG-2 that is almost entirely made of dark matter. Located 300 million light-years away in ...

James Webb Spots a Galaxy With Tentacles in Deep Space

Mar. 3, 2026 Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted the most distant “jellyfish galaxy” ever seen — a cosmic oddity streaming long, tentacle-like trails of gas and newborn stars as it ...

The Moon Is Still Shrinking and It Could Trigger More Moonquakes

Feb. 18, 2026 Researchers have uncovered more than a thousand previously unknown tectonic ridges across the Moon’s dark plains, showing the Moon is still contracting and reshaping itself. These features are ...

Rocky Planet Discovered in Outer Orbit Challenges Planet Formation Theory

Feb. 13, 2026 Astronomers have uncovered a distant planetary system that flips a long-standing rule of planet formation on its head. Around the small red dwarf star LHS 1903, scientists expected to find rocky ...

Astronomers Watch a Massive Star Collapse Into a Black Hole Without a Supernova

Feb. 14, 2026 A massive star 2.5 million light-years away simply vanished — and astronomers now know why. Instead of exploding in a supernova, it quietly collapsed into a black hole, shedding its outer layers in ...