A Space Daily column

Deep Field

Astronomy and cosmology

Deep Field covers astronomy and cosmology. Telescopes and what they find, planets near and far, and the strange physics of the deep universe, traced back to the journal papers and observatory data behind the headlines.

Constellations

Scientists assumed every cave on Mars formed from ancient lava, but a team from Shenzhen University has now found eight that water carved through soluble rock — a process never before confirmed on the Red Planet

For years, the simplest explanation for Martian caves was lava. Mars has enormous volcanic provinces, long lava flows and many pit-like openings that look like skylights into lava tubes.

Jul 1, 2026

Constellations

Scientists expected Pluto to be a frozen, ancient world scarred by billions of years of impacts. But when New Horizons finally arrived in 2015, it found something stranger: smooth young plains with almost no craters, signs of flowing nitrogen ice, possible ice volcanoes, and a layered blue haze in an atmosphere no one expected to look so complex

Before New Horizons reached Pluto, the safest expectation was age. At nearly 40 times Earth's distance from the Sun, Pluto seemed like the kind of world that should preserve scars.

Jun 30, 2026

Constellations

Carl Sagan spent years trying to persuade NASA to take a picture many saw as scientifically pointless: Earth from more than 6 billion kilometres away, reduced to a pale blue dot smaller than a pixel. Voyager 1 finally captured it in 1990 — and that tiny speck became one of the most haunting images in human history.

In 1990, with its tour of the outer planets finished, Voyager 1 turned its camera back the way it had come and photographed the Earth from about six billion kilometres away.

Jun 30, 2026

Space Scopes

In June 2026, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first stage designated B1085 lifted a 15,400-pound SiriusXM broadcasting satellite off a Cape Canaveral pad on its seventeenth flight — the same booster that had carried Crew-9 to the space station, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander toward the Moon, and nine separate Starlink batches into orbit

On the night of June 28, 2026, a Falcon 9 first stage that had already lifted off and landed sixteen times pushed a 15,400-pound SiriusXM broadcasting satellite away from Cape Canaveral.

Jun 30, 2026

Constellations

In 2025, astronomers found one of the largest spinning structures ever reported in the universe: a cosmic filament roughly 50 million light-years long, containing nearly 300 galaxies. Many of its galaxies appear to rotate in sync with the filament itself — a vast, coordinated motion that challenges current models of how galaxies gain their spin.

In 2025, astronomers reported one of the largest rotating structures ever found: a cosmic filament some 50 million light-years long, holding close to 300 galaxies, with many of them turning in step with the filament as a whole.

Jun 30, 2026

Constellations

In 2025, astronomers discovered Eos, the closest dark molecular cloud ever found — a vast crescent of molecular hydrogen just 300 light-years from Earth. It is so enormous on the sky that, if human eyes could see its ultraviolet glow, it would stretch about 40 times the width of the full Moon.

In 2025, astronomers found one of the closest molecular clouds to the Sun, and it had been sitting almost on our doorstep the whole time, unseen.

Jun 30, 2026

Aerospace

Humanity has spent well over a billion dollars bringing asteroid pieces back to Earth — and all the material returned by Hayabusa, Hayabusa2, and OSIRIS-REx combined weighs about 127 grams, less than a small apple.

Hayabusa, Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx have returned roughly 127 grams of asteroid material, showing why sample return is about context and cleanliness, not bulk mass.

Jun 29, 2026

Constellations

Euclid, the European telescope built to map the dark universe billions of light-years away, spent a single 26-hour stretch staring into the crowded center of the Milky Way and resolved more than 60 million stars, handing NASA’s Roman mission a reference map for the planet hunt it begins after launching in late August

The European Space Agency's Euclid telescope has captured a highly detailed image of the visible light at the center of the Milky Way, resolving more than 60 million individual stars in a region so crowded that most instruments see only a glowing blur.

Jun 29, 2026

Science

The James Webb telescope picked out 16.5 million individual stars in the Cigar Galaxy — a neighbor forming stars ten times faster than the Milky Way, in a burst estimated to last only a few hundred million years

Webb's infrared camera pierced the dust of Messier 82 and resolved 16.5 million stars, a fraction of the galaxy's true population, in a starburst astronomers think a galaxy merger set off and that cannot keep burning for long.

Jun 29, 2026

Constellations

Just 18 light-years away, astronomers have found one of the best nearby targets in the search for life: a candidate super-Earth called GJ 251 c, sitting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star. Future giant telescopes may be able to image it directly — and look for clues that it has water, air, or even biology.

GJ 251 c is a nearby candidate super-Earth in a red dwarf's habitable zone, making it an unusually promising future direct-imaging target.

Jun 27, 2026

Constellations

Astronomers used to assume galaxies formed first and slowly grew the black holes at their centres. But JWST is now finding objects in the early universe where the black hole appears to have arrived first — already enormous before a full galaxy had grown around it.

The old classroom version of galaxy formation had an appealing order to it. First came the galaxy: gas cooled, stars formed, structure assembled.

Jun 27, 2026

Constellations

In 2008, Cassini skimmed past Enceladus’s south pole and flew straight through a plume of icy material erupting from cracks in the moon’s surface. The encounter lasted only minutes, but nearly two decades later, data from that flyby is still revealing new organic chemistry from an ocean hidden beneath the ice.

Cassini's 2008 plume crossing at Enceladus is still yielding chemistry, with fresh ice-grain data revealing additional organics linked to the moon's hidden ocean.

Jun 27, 2026

Constellations

The James Webb Space Telescope found a spiral galaxy, nicknamed the Big Wheel, that existed just two billion years after the Big Bang — five times more massive than the Milky Way, with a spiral structure our models say couldn’t have survived that early

JWST observations reveal the Big Wheel as a giant rotating disk galaxy two billion years after the Big Bang, unusually massive and large for its epoch.

Jun 27, 2026

Constellations

The Roman Space Telescope has the same size mirror as Hubble, but it will survey the sky up to 1,000 times faster — not because it sees deeper, but because it sees wider: each Roman image captures a patch of sky at least 100 times larger, making Hubble’s method look like counting a crowd one face at a time.

Roman uses a Hubble-size mirror, but its Wide Field Instrument captures far more sky per exposure, allowing surveys up to 1,000 times faster.

Jun 26, 2026

Science

Venus and Earth formed from similar raw material at roughly the same time and are almost identical in size — yet one became a living world of oceans and forests, while the other became a 465-degree wasteland hot enough to melt lead.

Venus and Earth make a useful pair because the comparison begins so neatly and then breaks almost completely.

Jun 26, 2026

Constellations

A moon only 10 kilometres wide was hiding around Uranus for decades. Voyager 2 missed it. Hubble missed it. But in 2025, Webb finally caught the faint speck circling near the planet’s inner rings, raising Uranus’s known moon count to 29.

Webb's NIRCam detected S/2025 U1 in February 2025, a roughly 10-kilometre inner moon of Uranus too faint for Voyager 2 or Hubble.

Jun 26, 2026