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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The old classroom version of galaxy formation had an appealing order to it. First came the galaxy: gas cooled, stars formed, structure assembled.
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.
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.
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.
Venus and Earth make a useful pair because the comparison begins so neatly and then breaks almost completely.
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.
