It can be a complex decision to choose the right camera brand for astrophotography. With new technology and an ever-increasing rate of camera development, the major photographic brands that we see regularly popping up, like Canon, Nikon, and Sony, each bring district strengths to the table. Telling these strengths apart and knowing what to pay attention to can sometimes be difficult. In astrophotography, key factors like low-light performance, high ISO capabilities, noise reduction, and any included specific astro-centric features are paramount. If you are in the market for a camera, it might be worth checking out these brands in our camera deals hub. In this article, we will discuss how the brands compare and answer common tech queries about each system.

Sony

Firstly, Sony recently broke ground with its cutting-edge sensor technology. Sony's mirrorless systems, especially the full-frame options, excel in handling high ISO settings with minimal noise, making them popular for astrophotographers and people taking images in low-light environments. Their backside illuminated sensors (often referred to as BI sensors) allow more light to hit the pixel area, improving sensitivity and reducing noise, which is crucial for capturing faint celestial objects. Sony also has excellent real-time star tracking and pixel shift technology to provide clear, high-detail astro images, but much of this comes at a price, with good full-frame Sony options coming in at thousands of dollars.

Canon

Canon has long been a favorite for astrophotography thanks to its exceptional color science and sensor performance at higher ISO values, although they tend to produce slightly more noise than Sony's comparable models. Canon's strength lies in its wide range of compatible lenses and dedicated low-light features in select models such as the Canon EOS R5 and EOS R6. The affordability of many of their models mean that second-hand Canon options can often be purchased for a fraction of the price of many newer options.

Nikon

Nikon has recently stepped up its game with mirrorless Z-series cameras, like the Nikon Z6 and Z7. Nikon's full-frame cameras boast excellent dynamic range and superb low-light performance, making them competitive for astrophotography. Like Sony, Nikon's backside illumination sensor technology helps with reducing noise at high ISOs, though Nikon's high ISO noise reduction isn't always as aggressive as Sony's. Nikon also offers specialized features such as 'star-eater' suppression, designed to maintain image quality during long exposures which will come in handy for photographers who are pointing towards the night sky.

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Best entry-level cameras for astrophotography

If you are just getting started in astrophotography, you will want to look at setups that allow experimentation — a mixture of affordability and a wide range of lenses is important to look at. The Nikon D5600 is a good starting point — plenty of lens combinations are available and the 24.2 MP sensor has an ISO range of 100-25,600. It is also good at low light autofocus, which, although, as a budding astrophotographer, you'll rarely use, it is good to have as an option if you are taking photos of a supermoon, for example.

We would also recommend something like the ultra-portable Sony Alpha a6400, which, although still an APS-C sensor, offers options for interchangeable lenses and features real-time tracking, where it uses AI behavior models to detect and capture objects in the distance automatically.

• Learn how to photograph a supermoon

Best mid-range cameras for astrophotography

If you have learned the ropes and you are looking to take a step up from entry-level gear, mid-range cameras offer enhanced performance, better noise control, and several more advanced features that you are likely to use in other forms of photography, too. They are also more likely to feature full-frame sensors, which means that you will produce larger images and more detail to work with in the edit.

The Sony Alpha A7 III is an excellent choice for serious astrophotographers on a mid-range budget. Its full-frame sensor performs excellently in low-light scenarios, minimizing noise and maximizing detail in dark environments. The Nikon's Z6 is also an option to consider – it strikes a good balance between price and performance and like the A7 III, it uses a backside illumination sensor to allow more light to reach inside the camera, making it great for night sky photography. It also features in-body stabilization and excellent star tracking to help with long-exposure shots.

• Learn how to photograph the aurora

Should you switch camera brands?

Once you have committed to a camera brand, and bought the associated lenses and accessories, it is sometimes quite hard to go back to the drawing board. However, if other brands or cameras have specific attributes that will help you in astrophotography, it is well worth having a look at the implications of switching. We will take each switch option and weigh it up.

Switching to Canon

If you are moving from Sony to Canon, expect to see a difference in image color science, with Canon often praised for its color accuracy. Switching to Canon can be a money saver, thanks to the high availability of lenses and bodies.

Switching away from either Sony or Nikon towards Canon may only be necessary for those looking for a switch to a camera for life full of professional specs like the Canon EOS R5.

One thing that is worth reiterating is that Canon's widespread popularity means lens options (new and used) are plentiful — so worth considering for those who want to save money.

Switching to Sony

Although it will hit your wallet a little harder, switching to Sony offers better high ISO noise reduction and sensor technology, making it ideal for those focused on capturing deep-space objects. Switching would require an investment in Sony's full-frame mirrorless lens system, but the superior noise handling at high ISOs can be a game-changer — these are some of the best cameras you can buy at each price point.

Switching to Nikon

Nikon offers a comparable dynamic range to its competitors and solid low-light performance in its mirrorless Z-series, but the shift away from Sony or Canon may not bring a significant leap in performance unless you value Nikon's lens ecosystem or prefer Nikon's ergonomics and handling.

Nikon's dynamic range however is often praised, and this can benefit landscape astrophotographers who want more flexibility in post-processing. Their growing range of Z-mount lenses can make the switch worth it, especially for those prioritizing dynamic range over specialized astro features.

Summary

The decision to switch between Sony, Canon, and Nikon largely depends on your specific astrophotography goals. Each brand offers its own set of strengths, whether it's Sony's superior ISO handling, Canon's specialized low-light features, or Nikon's dynamic range. Cost, lens availability, and compatibility with your existing astrophotography setup (including telescopes) should also factor into the decision. It is worth looking at the used market to ensure you are getting the best setup for your dollar. It will also come down to the ergonomics and usability of each camera; which menu system and which interfaces you feel most comfortable with.

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As it turns out, more than humans were interested in the return of SpaceX's Crew-9 astronauts after an extended mission on board the International Space Station. An unexpected welcome committee arrived soon after the Crew Dragon "Freedom" splashed down on Tuesday, March 18.

What is it?

SpaceX support team members work around and on SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft "Freedom" shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida.

The recovery team worked to safe the capsule before it a crane was used to hoist the Dragon — still with its crew inside — on board the ship.

Why is it amazing?

While it is not particularly unusual for dolphins to swing alongside or play near boats, their appearance near the newly-landed spacecraft made for a rare sight. The marine mammals seemed to curious as to what this strange object was that fell out of the sky.

The scene takes on added meaning knowing that at least one of the crew members aboard the Dragon has a particular affinity for the sea. Williams, had originally been expected to touch down with Wilmore in New Mexico aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft — a capsule Williams named "Calypso" after oceanographer Jacques Cousteau's research ship. Problems discovered during their trip to the space station resulted in Williams and Wilmore being reassigned to a water landing aboard Dragon.

"I love what the ocean means to this planet, we would not be this planet without the ocean. There is so much to discover in the ocean and there is so much to discover in space," Williams said in 2019.

Where can I see more?

You can watch a video of the pod of dolphins that came out to see the landing and read more about the crew's return to Earth and splashdown.

SpaceX will set a new rocket-reuse record early Friday morning (March 21), if all goes according to plan.

A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base Friday at 2:49 a.m. EDT (0649 GMT; 11:49 p.m. on March 20 local California time), on the NROL-57 mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

This rocket's first stage also lofted the SPHEREx space telescope and PUNCH solar probes for NASA on March 11, according to a SpaceX mission description. An on-time liftoff for NROL-57 would therefore be the booster's second in a little over nine days, besting the previous Falcon 9 turnaround record of 14 days.

SpaceX will stream the NROL-57 launch live via X, starting about 10 minutes before liftoff.

Related: SpaceX launches 7th batch of next-gen spy satellites for US government (video, photos)

NROL-57 will be the eighth launch of the NRO's "proliferated architecture," which the agency describes as "a new paradigm for assets the NRO is putting on orbit."

That paradigm features "numerous, smaller satellites designed for capability and resilience," NRO officials wrote in an NROL-57 mission description.

That description is brief and vague, which isn't surprising; the NRO operates the United States' fleet of spy satellites, whose capabilities and activities tend to be classified. But the "proliferated architecture" network is thought to consist of "Starshield" satellites — versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband craft that have been modified to perform reconnaissance work.

The seven previous "proliferated architecture" missions also launched from Vandenberg on Falcon 9 rockets, between May 2024 and January of this year.

If all goes according to plan on Friday morning, the Falcon 9's first stage will come back to Earth for a landing at Vandenberg about 7.5 minutes after launch. It will be the fourth mission for this particular booster, according to SpaceX's mission description.

The rocket's upper stage will continue carrying the NROL-57 payloads to orbit. The mission description does not specify where or when they will be deployed.

Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have delved into the atmosphere of the scorching hot exoplanet LTT 9779 b.

Officially named Cuancoá, this Neptune-sized exoplanet was discovered in 2020 and orbits its sun-like star every 19 hours. With a mass about 29 times that of Earth, LTT 9779 b lies within the "hot Neptune desert" — a category of planets for which exceptionally few are known to exist, making it a rare and intriguing discovery.

"Finding a planet of this size so close to its host star is like finding a snowball that hasn't melted in a fire," said graduate student Louis-Philippe Coulombe from the Université de Montréal in a press release. "It's a testament to the diversity of planetary systems and offers a window into how planets evolve under extreme conditions."

The team used the Single Object Slitless Spectroscopy (SOSS) mode of JWST's Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) to study LTT 9779 b. This instrument detects light in the near-infrared range — wavelengths just beyond visible light — which makes it particularly effective for analyzing exoplanet atmospheres, distant galaxies and faint celestial objects. These capabilities far surpass those of previous telescopes, allowing scientists to uncover details that were once out of reach.

For LTT 9779 b, the team used SOSS mode to detect water vapor and study light reflected from its clouds, which form on the exoplanet's day side. Like Earth's moon, LTT 9779 b is tidally locked, meaning one of its faces will always face its star — experiencing temperatures reaching almost 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 Celsius) as a result of its close orbit — while its night side will remain in permanent darkness.

"This planet provides a unique laboratory to understand how clouds and the transport of heat interact in the atmospheres of highly irradiated worlds," stated Coulombe.

On tidally locked gas giants, atmospheric circulation is driven by stark temperature differences between the permanent day and night sides. Hot air rises on the scorching day side, while cooler, denser air sinks on the night side, creating a convection-driven current. Due to the Coriolis effect caused by the planet's rotation, this circulation generates a powerful eastward-flowing jet stream.

On LTT 9779 b, this heat transport results in a cooler western dayside, where temperatures drop low enough for clouds to form. The presence of these clouds is also thought to be linked to the planet's higher atmospheric metallicity, which promotes the formation of reflective particles like aerosols. This hypothesis is supported by LTT 9779 b's unusually high albedo, meaning it reflects more sunlight than other planets of similar temperature.

"This partial coverage of clouds over its dayside, which reflects a certain fraction of the stellar flux, probably affects the energy budget of the planet," the research team wrote in their paper.

They also found signs of water vapor on the dayside of LTT 9779 b, confirming that scientists can study the atmospheres of cloudy exoplanets by analyzing the heat they give off.

These findings suggest that the planet's thick clouds and high reflectivity may be linked to its atmospheric composition and circulation patterns.

"By modeling LTT 9779 b's atmosphere in detail, we're starting to unlock the processes driving its alien weather patterns," said Björn Benneke, a co-author of the study.

The team is now working to refine their models using additional observations, aiming to better understand how clouds form and persist in such extreme environments.

"We haven't finished piecing together the information about this planet yet," concluded Jake Taylor from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford. "We are currently using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Very Large Telescope to study the dayside cloud structure in more detail to learn as much as possible."

A study of LTT 9779 b's atmosphere was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The explosive supernova deaths of nearby massive stars may have played a significant role in triggering at least two mass extinction events in Earth's history, according to new research.

As some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, supernovae occurring within 60 light-years of Earth could have stripped our planet's atmosphere of its protective ozone layer, exposing life to damaging ultraviolet radiation from the sun, a team of astronomers has discovered.

"A slightly more distant supernova could still cause considerable loss of life, but at this distance, it would be terrifying," study co-author Nick Wright, an astrophysics professor at Keele University in England, told Space.com via email.

Wright and his team used data on the locations of stars collected by the now-retired Gaia satellite to conduct a virtual census of more than 24,000 of the most luminous stars in the universe. They focused on those located within 3,260 light-years of the sun to identify new groups of young, massive stars and reconstruct nearby star formation history.

"It was only once we had completed the work that we realized we could also use the sample to estimate the supernova rate," said Wright. "When we’d done that, we realized it was very close to the rate of unexplained mass extinction events on Earth!"

Supernovas alligning with extinction events

Wright and his team found the timing of supernovae near Earth aligned with two significant mass extinction events on our planet: the late Devonian, a series of mass extinction events that occurred 372 million years ago, and the Ordovician, which occurred 445 million years ago and was the first of the big five mass extinction events in our planet's history.

75% of all species, particularly in the types of fish found in ancient seas and lakes, while the Ordovician event wiped out about 85% of marine species.

"It surprised me that the two rates were so similar, which made us want to highlight it," said Wright.

Previous research has found evidence of an influx of the radioactive isotope iron-60 in cosmic dust collected from the Antarctic snow and from the surface of the moon, which can only be attributed to interstellar sources like supernovae. Various studies have linked this flux to the depletion of Earth's ozone layer, caused by cosmic rays showered onto our planet by the stars' explosive deaths.

"Supernovae produce a very high flux of high-energy radiation, which when it reaches the Earth could cause considerable destruction, including breaking apart the ozone molecules that make up the ozone layer," Wright told Space.com.

This ozone depletion, in turn, is thought to have contributed to at least one widespread extinction of marine mammals, seabirds, turtles, and sharks that occurred around 2.6 million years ago. The primary cause behind the Devonian and Ordovician mass extinction events is not fully understood, but both of them have also been linked to the depletion of Earth's ozone layer.

The new study's simulations showed roughly one to two supernovae occur each century in galaxies like the Milky Way.

Within 60 light-years of Earth — the typical distance at which a supernova could potentially cause catastrophic destruction to life on Earth — the rate of supernovae was 2 to 2.5 per billion years. This estimate is in good agreement with the number of unexplained mass extinction events on Earth — specifically, the Devonian and Ordovician extinctions, both of which occurred within the last billion years — raising the possibility that nearby supernovae may have contributed to these events, according to the study.

"It’s worth noting that we don’t have proof that those extinctions were definitely caused by supernovae, only that the rates match up, and therefore, it seems very plausible," Wright said.

These findings are "a great illustration for how massive stars can act as both creators and destructors of life," Alexis Quintana of the University of Alicante in Spain, who led the new study, said in a statement.

"Supernova explosions bring heavy chemical elements into the interstellar medium, which are then used to form new stars and planets," she said. "But if a planet, including the Earth, is located too close to this kind of event, this can have devastating effects."

The team's research was published on Tuesday (March 18) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A partial solar eclipse will occur at sunrise in North America and mid-morning across Europe on March 29, 2025. One of the most cost effective and safest ways to view the eclipse or for general safe sungazing is with a pair of the best solar eclipse glasses.

Right now, just in time for the big day Amazon is offering 10% off a ten-pack of Medical King Solar Eclipse Glasses. These come CE and ISO certified as safe shades for direct sun viewing — which also includes a free bonus Solar Eclipse guide with a map. These solar eclipse glasses can also double up as a smartphone filter should you with to view and take images via your smartphones camera.

Buy the ten-pack of certified and approved Medical King Solar Eclipse Glasses for just $8.99 at Amazon.

After the excitement of the total solar eclipse over North America last year, the partial solar eclipse on March 29 will be the first one visible in North America since April 2024. In the lead up to that total eclipse many retailers sold out of solar viewing glasses so we advise grabbing them now rather than missing out and being tempted to take a look with your naked eye — which can result in the risk of permanent eye damage.

It’s vitally important to keep your eyes safe when viewing any solar activity, and you should never look directly at the sun without adequate protection. These Medical King Solar Eclipse glasses claim to filter out 99.99% of harmful UV and infrared light. They have been CE and ISO certified under the most current ISO standard for filters for direct observation of the sun. The brand also says they are manufactured adhering to ISA, CE, ISO, and the American Astronomical Society safety protocols.

Key features: Solar safe filter technology protects eyes from IR, UV, and 99.99% of visible light, CE and ISO certified, model number ‏MK7062.

Price history: They have been priced as high as $19.99 on Amazon and $21.99 at Medical King. With the 10% discount it's the cheapest the Medical King Solar Eclipse Glasses have ever been.

Price comparison: Amazon: $9.99 | Medical King: $17.99

Reviews consensus: Amazon reviewers have been overwhelmingly positive about these glasses and the Medical King Solar Glasses score of 4.6 out of 5 from an incredible 10,000 ratings, with 78% of reviewers giving them top marks.

✅ Buy if: You want to safely enjoy the partial solar eclipse without breaking the bank.

❌ Don't buy if: You want something slightly more substantial that will last for future solar events, we'd suggest Celestron EclipSmart 10x25 Solar Binoculars for just $8.99 at Amazon. These are a great pair of binoculars for anyone new to viewing the sun.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, Lego and much more.

There are loads of space games out there these days spanning all kinds of genres, but there's something special about role-playing games that let you tell your own space journey. So strap in and prepare for launch as we run down the 10 best space RPGs available right now. All of them are perfect to dive into as we wait for Exodus and the next Mass Effect to land, among others.

Good space RPGs come in all shapes and sizes, as the core elements that define role-playing have been mixed with many genres over the decades. They allow us to explore the galaxy and live out our sci-fi fantasies as heroic space marines, daring spaceship captains, and, occasionally, intergalactic lotharios.

There are loads of space-set RPGs on the horizon too, with exciting titles like The Outer Worlds 2 to Star Wars Eclipse — check out our upcoming space games to see the one we can't wait to play in the near future.

Looking for more specific gaming picks? You might want to check out our lists of the best space exploration and colonization games, or maybe venture into the spooky best space horror games collection if you're brave enough.

10. EVE Online

• Platforms: PC, macOS
• Developer: CCP Games

We're placing EVE Online at the bottom of our 'best space RPGs' list because, while great, we find it hard to recommend to more casual players. Technically, CCP Games' 2003 giant is an MMORPG, which means you'll be interacting with thousands of players across more than 7,000 star systems. Don't expect a welcoming experience though. This one is for the sickos.

The goal is to make a name for yourself inside this persistent universe however you want. Jobs and activities include mining, piracy, manufacturing, trading, exploration, and combat. The thing with EVE Online is that it's renowned for the complexity of its systems, including unscripted economic competition, warfare, and political schemes which can affect other players and real-world money. A memorable example was the Bloodbath of B-R5RB, which involved thousands of players and lasted roughly 21 real-time hours.

Yahtzee Crowshaw once called it a "second job that you have pay for" and I mean, he's not wrong, but also it's a job as a spaceship captain and we're all about that life.

9. System Shock Remake

• Platforms: PC, Linux, macOS, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S
• Developer: Nightdive Studios

System Shock is planted firmly among the best space RPGs and space horror games ever, but the 2023 remake of the original game packs so many QoL changes and nifty upgrades that it could be considered the series at its best.

There's never been a better time to return to Citadel Station and face SHODAN, one of gaming's most menacing and iconic sci-fi villains.

The retro remasters veterans of Nightdive Studios developed this new iteration of the 1994 classic, originally made by Looking Glass Studios, and the admittedly bumpy development was worth the long wait. While it's more of a first-person immersive sim, System Shock contains more than enough RPG elements to make it into our list.

8. Star Trek Online

• Platforms: PC, macOS, PS4, Xbox One
• Developer: Cryptic Studios

Star Trek Online is widely considered to be the best Star Trek game of all time, and we can't deny it definitely excels as an expansive RPG that has plenty to offer if you're in the middle of the Venn diagram of Star Trek and MMORPG fans. It originally launched as a premium title, requiring a game purchase and additional monthly fees, but later shifted to a free-to-play model with premium access to extra content and items.

Even if you don't spend hard-earned cash, Star Trek Online keeps expanding in cool ways, offering both on-foot away-mission style missions and starship action while perfectly capturing the Trek universe's story magic with quests, PvP battles, and more. This one's perfect for anyone who's just beamed through the best Star Trek movies and is looking for seemingly endless adventures.

7. Starsector

• Platforms: PC, Linux, macOS
• Developer: Fractal Softworks

Starsector is easily the most overlooked title in this list. It's been in development as an 'early access' title since 2013, but it hasn't gained much mainstream attention because it's not available on famous digital distribution platforms such as Steam or GOG. Until the game is more ready, Fractal Softworks is only selling it through its own site.

Despite its top-down and visually limited nature, Starsector features some of the most intricate RPG systems we've seen in a sci-fi game. The game features both meaningful exploration and dense combat scenarios, but it's all much more complex than we're used to seeing in more mainstream titles. That's because Starsector's universe is procedurally generated and the simulation systems are designed to work in tandem with the player's total freedom of choice.

6. Warframe

• Platforms: PC, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
• Developer: Digital Extremes

Warframe has been on a hell of a journey since it launched back in 2013. Starting out as a sort of free-to-play Destiny before Destiny was even a thing, it has evolved massively over the years, adding new systems and core gameplay loops

In Warframe, players control members of the Tenno, a race of ancient warriors who wake up from centuries of suspended animation far into the Earth's future to find an ongoing war between various nefarious factions. Tenno are effectively space ninjas who wear special battlesuits called Warframes, with each Warframe offering them unique abilities in combat.

It might look like your average co-op third-person shooter in screenshots, but Warframe offers so much more variety than that, with melee combat, acrobatic movement, magic-like abilities, and even space combat. Over the years, it's also received larger, sandbox-like areas and more narrative content that tells an ongoing epic story.

There's over a decade's worth of updates to dive into here, so get going, Tenno!

5. The Outer Worlds

• Platforms: PC, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
• Developer: Obsidian Entertainment

Do you like Fallout, but wish it was set in outer space? Of course you do, and The Outer Worlds is exactly what you're looking for.

Set in a highly satirical and hyper-corporate version of the galaxy, The Outer Worlds lets you explore the furthest reaches of space, meet interesting factions, and fight (or talk) your way through a story that isn't what it seems at first. Choices matter quite a lot and can affect the final outcome of the game. Moreover, it's not massive, so this one feels perfect for casual players without a lot of time on their hands.

As we mentioned, the first-person gameplay feels extremely reminiscent of Bethesda's Fallout series, which makes a ton of sense, as Obsidian once co-developed Fallout: New Vegas with them. Big fans of story-driven, flexible RPGs should play this one before the sequel arrives. As a bonus, it's a permanent Game Pass title so Xbox and PC gamers can get it on the cheap. What are you waiting for?

4. Citizen Sleeper

• Platforms: PC, macOS, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S, Nintendo Switch
• Developer: Jump Over The Age

Citizen Sleeper is an odd pick, but it's perfect if you're looking for a narrative-heavy experience that emulates tabletop RPG mechanics. Through a series of decisions and dice rolls, you explore and learn about your new home among the stars. There's more to it, but we're not spoiling such a unique little game here.

The story focuses on sleepers, humans whose minds have been digitized and transferred into a robot body that belongs to, you guessed it, a big and scary corporation. The main character escapes servitude and arrives at a space station called the Eye, where different factions are fighting for both survival and freedom. The game has multiple endings, and if you dig its vibes, replaying it feels breezy, as it doesn't overstay its welcome.

It's a lot of reading, more akin to a choose-your-own-adventure book than most of the action-packed games on our list, but if that's your vibe then you'll fall in love with this one… and the sequel Citizen Sleeper 2, which is out now too.

3. Destiny 2

• Platforms: PC, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X/S
• Developer: Bungie

Joining the Light vs. Darkness battle this late into the ongoing narrative of Destiny 2 might feel daunting, but trust us, the payoff is worth it. Despite a few seasonal bumps and the occasional messy balance patch, there's nothing like Bungie's online sci-fi first-person shooter out there at the moment.

In fact, with the Light & Darkness saga now finally finished, you can enjoy its compelling sci-fi odyssey from humble beginnings to the definitive end. The future currently looks uncertain, but new content and stories continue to be pushed out as we speak.

The base game has been free-to-play for a few years now, but if you want to experience the post-year one campaigns, raids, Nightfall strikes, proper endgame, and much more, you'll need to grab the more recent expansions eventually. Try out the base game first and if you enjoy Destiny's blend of sci-fi wizardry, best-in-class shooting, and deep mythology then you can grab the rest. Cosmic space opera fans should love what Bungie's largest sci-fi universe yet has to offer.

2. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 & 2

• Platforms: PC, macOS, Linux, Android, Xbox, Nintendo Switch
• Developer: BioWare, Obsidian Entertainment

The two Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) games are among the best Star Wars games ever made, which also grants them a seat on the council of the best space RPGs. Both entries nailed the party-based role-playing systems as much as the Star Wars world-building, and we think they're great space adventures on their own as well.

You'll fall in love with the story as you're immersed in the struggle between light and dark side choices – your actions and words matter. KOTOR will make you feel and understand what it means to be a Jedi… plus you really get to customize your own lightsaber, which is super cool.

To this day, the impact of the Knights of the Old Republic games is felt across many areas of modern Star Wars storytelling and non-IP-based RPG titles.

We're all eagerly awaiting a shiny remake of BioWare's original masterpiece. As a bonus, we highly recommend their MMORPG, free-to-play sequel of sorts — The Old Republic — which continues to thrive more than a decade after its launch.

1. Mass Effect Legendary Edition

• Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One
• Developer: BioWare

It might feel repetitive to see the original Mass Effect trilogy atop countless ranked lists online, but they really are that good. You can still play the originals, but we'd recommend you pick up 2021's Legendary Edition re-release includes all the DLC packs, many visual upgrades, and a bunch of quality-of-life changes.

The Mass Effect games are the quintessential action RPG, combining tactical third-person shooter combat with a healthy blend of romance, political bickering, and galivanting across the Milky Way as you try to stop the fearsome Reapers.

Moreover, replaying the adventure multiple times is encouraged so you can explore different outcomes throughout three gargantuan installments. With a proper sequel and a Mass Effect TV series adaptation on the way, don't skip this one.

Engineers and astronomers at the University of Utah have designed a unique new kind of telescope lens: a flat lens with microscopic etchings to refract light. If the concept can be scaled up, these lenses could one day replace the heavier, bulkier lenses and mirrors typically used in telescopes, particularly those of professional observatories on the ground and in space. Down the line, they could also be implemented on amateur telescopes, the team says.

"Our computational techniques suggested we could design multi-level diffractive flat lenses with large apertures that could focus light across the visible spectrum," Rajesh Menon, a Utah professor of engineering, said in a statement.

There are two basic types of telescope: refractors and reflectors. A refractor uses lenses to refract light and bring it to a focus. Reflectors utilize at least two mirrors to reflect the light to a focal point. Because large lenses are heavy and expensive to make, larger telescopes tend to use mirrors (sometimes in combination with smaller lenses). Lenses can also suffer from a malaise known as chromatic aberration, in which different wavelengths of light are refracted to slightly different degrees so that different colors come to focus at different points, resulting in color fringing around objects. Optical technicians can alleviate this through the complex use of glass coatings and multiple lenses — though that adds cost and expense.

However, the days of bulky, expensive telescope lenses could soon be coming to an end thanks to the team's new flat lens measuring less than a millimeter thick. that has been developed by a team led by Apratim Majumder, who is a member of Menon's lab at Utah.

"Our demonstration is a stepping stone towards creating very large aperture, lightweight flat lenses with the capability of capturing full-color images for use in air- and space-based telescopes,” Apratim Majumder, a member of Menon's lab at Utah and leader of the crew behind the new lens prototype, said in the statement.

Majumder, Menon and their team designed a 100mm (4-inch) flat lens, where microscopic concentric rings are etched onto a glass substrate using a technique called "grayscale optical lithography," which is a variation of a method typically used for etching electronics onto a silicon wafer. Most of the half-millimeter thickness of the flat lens is the glass — the ringed grooves are just 2.4 microns deep.

The use of concentric rings on a flat lens isn't new — a precursor, called a Fresnel zone plate, tries to do the same trick but is unable to eradicate chromatic aberration. However, the Utah team's multilevel diffractive lens (MDL) is able to bring all the wavelengths of light for which it was designed to detect (400–800 nanometers, covering the range of visible light and into the near-infrared) to a focus at the same point, thanks to how the size of the rings and the spacing between affect how the incoming light is refracted. Because all the colors come to focus at the same point, there is no chromatic aberration.

Back when the telescope was invented by Hans Lippershey in 1608, it was done so by experimenting with putting lenses together. Today, a telescope's optical design involves complex computer modelling and large amounts of data.

"Simulating the performance of these lenses over a very large bandwidth, from visible to near-infrared, involved solving complex computational problems involving very large datasets," said Majumder. "Once we optimized the design of the lens’ microstructures, the manufacturing process involved required very stringent process control and environmental stability."

The resulting 100mm lens, which has a focal length of 200mm, was then tested on both the sun and the moon, successfully showing sunspots and (in an artificially color-enhanced image) accurate geological features on the lunar surface. The 100mm MDL weighs just 25 grams (0.88 oz), compared to the 211 grams (7.44 oz) of a similarly sized, commercially available 100mm lens that is 17mm thick at its curved center.

The Hubble Space Telescope uses a 2.4-meter primary mirror with a total mass of 1,825 pounds (828 kilograms), and the James Webb Space Telescope incorporates 18 segments in its primary 21-foot (6.5-meter) mirror in total weighing (on Earth) 1,555 pounds (705 kilograms). On Earth, individual telescope mirrors have an upper size limit of 26-33 feet (8–10 meters), beyond which gravity starts to cause them to sag. The development of a flat, lightweight lens could therefore transform telescopes, particularly for space launches where mass is a key limiting factor for getting off the Earth.

A description of the flat MDL lens was published on Feb. 3 in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

In a first-ever near-infrared study of a recurrent nova beyond the Milky Way, astronomers have discovered exceptionally high temperatures and unexpected chemical signatures, pointing to an especially intense explosion.

Nova explosions occur in semi-detached binary systems containing a cool late-type star and a white dwarf.

"A hot white dwarf star, about the size of the Earth but having mass comparable with that of the sun, siphons off material from its cool companion star," explained Nye Evans of Keele University to Space.com. "The material from the cool star piles up on the white dwarf's surface and eventually detonates in a thermonuclear runaway. This is a nova explosion."

Most novas have been seen erupting once, but a rare few have been observed to explode multiple times. These are known as recurrent novas, with intervals between eruptions ranging from just a year to several decades.

"Once the explosion has subsided, the siphoning starts all over, and in time another thermonuclear explosion occurs, and so on, and so on," explained Evans.

Fewer than a dozen recurrent novas have been identified in our galaxy — more are known beyond the Milky Way, most of them in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), with four in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

Meet an extraordinary nova

Nova LMCN 1968-12A (LMC68), which is located in the LMC, was observed for the first time in 1968. In 1990, it was observed in eruption again, which made it the first extragalactic recurrent nova ever observed, with eruptions occurring like clockwork every four years.

"In systems like LMC68, less mass is ejected in the nova explosion than is gained by transferring from the cool star," said Evans. "This means that the mass of the white dwarf is steadily increasing. In time, it will approach a critical value ... above which the white dwarf cannot support its own weight, and it will implode, one outcome of which is a supernova explosion."

After its 2020 eruption, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory had been closely monitoring LMC68 for months, anticipating its next eruption, which occurred in August 2024.

"LMCN 1968-12a is about 50 times further away than nova explosions in our own Milky Way galaxy, and hence about 2,500 times fainter," said Evans. "You have to use the largest telescopes in existence [to see it, and] you need to get to them as soon as they explode; you therefore disrupt other observing programs.

"There's a lot of good will involved as there aren't many large infrared telescopes."

Nova LMCN 1968-12A (LMC68), which is located in the LMC, was observed for the first time in 1968. In 1990 it was observed in eruption again, which made it the first extragalactic recurrent nova ever observed.

Analyzing the chemical make-up of a unique nova

By capturing LMC68's near-infrared light for the first time, the team of astronomers was able to study its ultra-hot phase, when many elements become highly energized. This provided valuable insights into the extreme forces driving the nova's eruption.

They did this using spectroscopy, a technique for analyzing the different wavelengths of light absorbed and emitted during the eruption.

This allows them to identify the chemical elements present and understand how they are affected by the nova's intense heat, which typically "ionizes" or excites the atoms, causing their electrons to jump to higher energy levels before returning to their original state.

"Emission lines are formed when an atom or ion relaxes from a high energy state to a lower energy state," explained Evans. "The energy difference is emitted as a photon of infrared light that is a unique signature of the atom or ion. This is how we know what the stars are made of."

"While other near-infrared studies of similar novas in the Milky Way typically revealed signatures from various elements known as "metals" (which, to astronomers, is any element other than hydrogen or helium, though a chemist might have something to say about that), the team was surprised to find that LMC68’s spectra contained an exceptionally bright signal from silicon atoms that had been ionized nine-times —a process that demands an immense amount of energy.

"The ionized silicon shining at almost 100 times brighter than the sun is unprecedented," Tom Geballe, NOIRLab emeritus astronomer and co-author of the paper, said in a statement. "And while this signal is shocking, it's also shocking what’s not there.

"We would've expected to also see signatures of highly energized sulfur, phosphorus, calcium, and aluminum."

The team argues that it might be possible that a high concentration of electrons in the nova's outer region could have caused excited atoms to lose energy through collisions rather than emitting light. But while this is a possibility, it doesn't explain why the usual spectral lines that are typically seen in the light of recurrent novas are completely absent in this case.

This suggests that something unusual is happening with LMC68 that's different from typical novas.

LMC68 differs from galactic recurrent novas because its companion star likely has lower metallicity, meaning a lower quantity of heavier elements, which is typical of the LMC. Low-metallicity stars can lead to more powerful nova explosions, as more material is needed to trigger the eruption.

While the secondary star's metal deficiency could influence the nova's composition, it doesn't fully explain the absence of metal lines in the near-infrared. The explosion still processes material through the usual thermonuclear runaway, but the expected metal signatures are missing.

The higher coronal temperature of 5.4 million degrees Fahrenheit (3 million degrees Celsius) in LMC68 might offer a clue. The high temperature of the coronal gas could lead to a process called collisional ionization, in which atoms in the gas become more ionized than usual, meaning they lose more electrons and reach higher energy states.

"To strip the atom or ion of so many electrons requires the input of energy," said Evans. "In collisional ionization, the energy is provided by fast electrons that collide with the atom/ion, imparting their energy to it."

This means that the ions that are typically seen in the coronal phase of other novas are less abundant in their "normal" forms because they have been pushed into these higher states.

The fact that the gas around LMC68 is metal-deficient also means it contains fewer elements like magnesium and calcium compared to typical stars. When this gas goes through the thermonuclear runaway process (the explosion in the nova), the lack of these elements is amplified, leading to a lower abundance in the explosion's remnants.

This combination — of high temperatures and metal deficiency — could explain why metal lines were absent in current observations.

"With only a small number of recurrent novas detected within our own galaxy, understanding of these objects has progressed episodically," said Martin Still, NSF program director for the International Gemini Observatory. "By broadening our range to other galaxies using the largest astronomical telescopes available, like Gemini South, astronomers will increase the rate of progress and critically measure the behavior of these objects in different chemical environments."

While an intriguing theory, the team emphasizes the need for modeling studies to more accurately measure the products of these reactions and more observations using longer wavelengths of light to confirm the hypothesis.

The team's research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

New results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) suggest that the unknown force accelerating the expansion of the universe isn't what we believed it to be. This hints that our best theory of the universe's evolution, the standard model of cosmology, could be wrong.

The newly released DESI data comes from its first three years of observations collected as the instrument, mounted on the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, continues to build the largest 3D map of the universe ever created. By the time DESI completes its five-year mission next year, the instrument will have measured the light from an estimated 50 million galaxies and black hole-powered quasars, in addition to the starlight of over 10 million stars.

It is the capability of DESI to capture light from 5,000 galaxies simultaneously that makes it the ideal instrument to conduct a survey large enough to investigate the properties of dark energy. This new analysis focuses on data from the first three years of DESI observations, encompassing nearly 15 million of the best-measured galaxies and quasars.

"The universe never ceases to amaze and surprise us," DESI Project Scientist Arjun Dey said in a statement. "By revealing the evolving textures of the fabric of our universe as never before, DESI and the Mayall telescope are changing our very understanding of the future of our universe and nature itself."

DESI could change everything we know about dark energy

Dark energy is the placeholder name given to whatever aspect of the universe is causing the fabric of spacetime to inflate faster and faster, constantly pushing galaxies apart more rapidly.

It is thought to account for around 70% of the universe's matter and energy. The mysterious "stuff" called dark matter makes up another 25%, and ordinary matter comprising stars, planets, moons, our bodies and the cat next door accounts for just 5%. Essentially, everything we understand about the universe, including all of chemistry and biology is wrapped up in that 5%!

The current "best guess" at the identity of dark energy is the cosmological constant, the vacuum energy of energy space, which is baked into the pie we call the standard model of cosmology or the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model. However, this model is built on the presumption that dark energy, represented by the Greek letter lambda (Λ), is constant over time.

Vacuum energy describes the density of particles popping in and out of existence. While "something" appearing from "nothing" sounds crazy, you can think of it as the universe having an overdraft facility. Pairs of virtual particles are allow to "borrow" some energy from the cosmos to come into existence as long as they pay it back by meeting and annihilating each other.

When taken in isolation, the DESI findings don't actually challenge the picture of dark energy developed in the LCDM model. It is when the DESI data is compared with other measurements of the cosmos that problems with the cosmological constant start to manifest.

DESI is hinting, and not for the first time, that dark energy isn't constant but is changing over time. Specifically, this accelerating "push" seems to be weakening.

These measurements include our observations of a "fossil" light left over from an event that happened shortly after the Big Bang called the "last scattering," when the universe had expanded and cooled enough to allow electrons to bond with protons and form the first neutral atoms.

The disappearance of free electrons suddenly allowed photons, the particles that make up light, to travel freely. In other words, it was as if a universal fog had lifted, and the cosmos became transparent. This first light is referred to as the "cosmic microwave background" or "CMB," and it can still be observed today.

Tiny variations or "wrinkles" were "frozen into" the CMB by fluctuations in the density of matter in the early universe called baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). As the cosmos continued to expand, so too did these wrinkles. Thus, BAO wrinkles can act as a standard measuring stick of the expansion of the universe, with their size varying at different cosmic times. This variation arises as a result of how fast the universe was expanding at those times.

Thus, measuring the BAO reveals the strength of dark energy throughout the history of the cosmos, and DESI can do this more precisely than any other instrument.

Changes in dark energy itself were also hinted at when DESI data was compared with observations of type Ia supernovas, cosmic explosions that occur when white dwarf stars "overfeed" on a companion star. This stolen material piles up on the surface of the stellar remnant until a thermonuclear runaway is triggered.

Type Ia supernovae are so uniform in terms of their light output that astronomers can use them as "standard candles" for measuring cosmic distances. In fact, type Ia supernovas were integral to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, the genesis of dark energy, back in 1998.

These distance measurements are possible because of a phenomenon called "redshift," which occurs when the wavelength of traveling light is stretched as it crosses the expanding universe. The longer the light has traveled, the more extreme the shift toward the long wavelength "red end" of the electromagnetic spectrum. That means measuring the redshift of a very well-known and consistent source of light, a standard candle, can give distance measurements.

DESI data can also be combined with observations of an effect called "gravitational lensing," the distortion of light from distant galaxies by foreground objects of great mass to show the signature of evolving dark energy.

The evolution of dark energy isn't robust enough to be considered a "discovery" just yet, but different combinations of the data with other observations are pushing this concept toward what is considered the "gold standard" in physics for such a determination.

Astronomers prepare to dive into DESI data

In addition to unveiling these latest dark energy results on Wednesday (March 19), the DESI collaboration also announced that its Data Release 1 (DR1) is now available for anyone to explore through the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

DR1 contains information regarding 18.7 million cosmic objects, including roughly 4 million stars, 13.1 million galaxies, and 1.6 million quasars.

Luz Ángela García Peñaloza, a former DESI team member and a cosmologist at the Universidad ECCI in Colombia, is just one scientist who is thrilled with the new DESI results and the fact that DR1 is now available to the general astronomical community. told Space.com.

"I am also really excited to find out DESI has released redshift information of about 19 million galaxies and quasars. We've increased the number of identified galaxies by an order of magnitude in less than 10 years!" García Peñaloza said. "The most fascinating result of all is that different sets of observations, a combination of BAO from DESI with CMB data from Planck, and the three main sets of luminosity distances of type Ia supernovas are making a stronger case for an evolving dark energy model, disfavoring the cosmological constant.

"This is getting more and more consistent with other independent cosmological tests that seem to be opening a window of opportunity for new ways to explore and study dark energy and the accelerated expansion of the universe."

The availability of the DR1 data means astronomers outside the DESI collaboration can now dive into this vast dataset collected between May 2021 and June 2022.

"Our results are fertile ground for our theory colleagues as they look at new and existing models, and we're excited to see what they come up with," DESI director Michael Levi, a scientist at Berkeley Lab, said. "Whatever the nature of dark energy is, it will shape the future of our universe.

"It's pretty remarkable that we can look up at the sky with our telescopes and try to answer one of the biggest questions that humanity has ever asked.”

Meanwhile, the DESI collaboration is preparing to begin additional analyses of the new dataset to extract even more findings as DESI itself continues collecting data during its fourth year of operations.

"Just amazing," García Peñaloza concluded. "What a time to be alive and to be a cosmologist!"

The DESI data is discussed in a series of papers available here.

Astronomers have found oxygen in the farthest, and thus the earliest, galaxy ever seen. This marks the most distant detection of oxygen ever made by humanity.

This early galaxy, designated JADES-GS-z14-0, has 10 times the amount of heavy elements that would be expected in a galaxy that existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang. The findings indicate that this galaxy was already mature in the early universe, challenging theories of galactic evolution.

JADES-GS-z14-0 was discovered in 2024 by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST); its light had taken about 13.4 billion years to travel to us, equivalent to around 98% of the 13.8 billion-year-old universe's lifetime. The newly unearthed chemical composition of JADES-GS-z14-0 came courtesy of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

"It is like finding an adolescent where you would only expect babies," team member and Leiden Observatory researcher Sander Schouws said in a statement. "The results show the galaxy has formed very rapidly and is also maturing rapidly, adding to a growing body of evidence that the formation of galaxies happens much faster than was expected."

JADES-GS-z14-0 was spotted alongside several other similarly early galaxies as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program. This project aims to provide vital insights into how stars, gas and black holes evolved within primordial galaxies when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was very young.

Why is JADES-GS-z14-0 so metal?

To understand why it is so surprising for heavy elements to be discovered in an early galaxy like JADES-GS-z14-0, it is necessary to consider the chemical composition of the infant universe.

When the universe was 2% of its current age, scientists think it was filled predominantly with hydrogen, the lightest element in the cosmos, some helium, and a tiny smattering of heavier elements, which astronomers somewhat confusingly call "metals." This means stars and galaxies seen during this period should be correspondingly "metal-poor."

As these first stars died and exploded in supernova explosions, the metals they had forged during their lives were dispersed, enriching the gas clouds within their home galaxies. These clouds eventually formed the next generation of stars, which were therefore more metal-rich.

That means the older a galaxy gets, the more its "maturity" can be measured based on the abundance of metals it holds. And, seen at 300 million years into the life of the cosmos, JADES-GS-z14-0 should be metal-poor and "immature" — yet it appears to be mature.

“I was astonished by the unexpected results because they opened a new view on the first phases of galaxy evolution," team member Stefano Carniani of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy, said in the statement. "The evidence that a galaxy is already mature in the infant universe raises questions about when and how galaxies formed."

The detection of oxygen in this early galaxy has also allowed astronomers to measure the distance to JADES-GS-z14-0 more precisely.

"The ALMA detection offers an extraordinarily precise measurement of the galaxy’s distance down to an uncertainty of just 0.005%," team member Eleonora Parlanti of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy, said. "This level of precision — analogous to being accurate within 5 cm over a distance of 0.62 miles [1 kilometer] — helps refine our understanding of distant galaxy properties."

While it took the JWST to discover this incredibly distant galaxy, the precise measurement of its distance from Earth wouldn't have been possible without ALMA.

"This shows the amazing synergy between ALMA and JWST to reveal the formation and evolution of the first galaxies," team member and Leiden Observatory astronomer Rychard Bouwens said in the statement

Gergö Popping is an astronomer at the European ALMA Regional Center who was not involved in this research.

"I was really surprised by this clear detection of oxygen in JADES-GS-z14-0," he said. "It suggests galaxies can form more rapidly after the Big Bang than had previously been thought.

"This result showcases the important role ALMA plays in unraveling the conditions under which the first galaxies in our universe formed."

The team's research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

A green energy plant expected to be built in Chile's Atacama Desert could increase night-time sky brightness at one of the world's most valuable astronomical locations by up to 35%, a new study has revealed.

Such an increase would seriously affect the scientific observations conducted by some of the world's largest and most expensive telescopes, hampering scientific progress in our understanding of the most intriguing phenomena in the universe.

The astronomical site in peril is Mount Paranal, where the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) is located. A 7,400-acre (3,000-hectare) green hydrogen production facility, dubbed INNA, has been proposed by U.S. company AES Energy, which submitted an environmental impact assessment to the Chilean Environmental Impact Agency in late December. While an AES Energy spokesperson previously told Space.com earlier that the project will cause a "maximum increase over the natural sky brightness" over Paranal by a negligible 0.27%, ESO's experts foresee a much more significant impact.

A new study released by ESO on Monday (March 17) calculates that the night sky above VLT could brighten up by up to 35%, as the telescope is located less than 7 miles (11 kilometers) from the prospective INNA site. That's a staggering increase that would seriously hamper the telescope's ability to view exoplanets, study the most distant galaxies and detect approaching asteroids.

"The light-pollution figures we are reporting assume that the project will install the most modern available luminaries in a way that minimizes light pollution," Andreas Kaufer, ESO's Director of Operations and the lead author of the study, said in a statement accompanying ESO's new study.

"However, we are concerned that the inventory of light sources planned by AES is not complete and fit for purpose. In that case, our already alarming results would underestimate the potential impact of the INNA project on the Paranal sky brightness."

VLT, an interferometer consisting of four 28-foot-wide (8.5 m) telescopes that work together as one, is one of the world's most powerful astronomical instruments. It captured the first ever image of an exoplanet and tracked stars near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, among other accomplishments.

The telescope, apart from its size, benefits from the exceptionally dark sky above Mount Paranal, which is the least light-polluted among all major astronomical locations in the western world. The construction of INNA would seriously reduce VLT's scientific reach.

"We build the largest and most powerful telescopes, in the best place on Earth for astronomy, to enable astronomers worldwide to see what no one has ever seen before," Itziar de Gregorio-Monsalvo, ESO's Representative in Chile, said in the statement. "Light pollution from projects like INNA doesn't just hinder research, it steals our shared view of the universe."

It's not just the VLT that will suffer. The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory, currently being built at Paranal, will suffer a 50% light pollution increase due to INNA, as it is located barely 3 miles (5 km) from the planned hydrogen plant.

The project will also affect the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), a visible light mega-telescope with a nearly 125-foot-wide (38 m) mirror, which will be the largest in the world once completed toward the end of this decade. The ESO study estimates that the sky above the ELT could brighten up by 5%, which is enough to affect the demanding observations it is being built to perform.

ESO conducted the study in cooperation with Canadian light pollution expert Martin Aubé using cutting-edge light pollution models. The team used publicly available data from the INNA environmental impact assessment submitted by AES. The company estimates that the complex will require over 1,000 artificial lights.

AES spokesperson told Space.com earlier that the project will comply with "the highest standards in lighting in its design" as required by regulations laid down by Chile's Ministry of the Environment to prevent light pollution, and protect the astronomical quality of the night skies, the health of people, and biodiversity.

Aside from light pollution, there are other impacts the observatories can expect to experience. The ESO study also found that wind turbines at INNA will stir the thin and quiet atmosphere above the Atacama Desert. The resulting turbulence in the air will further affect astronomical observations, causing a twinkling effect in distant deep space objects as seen from Earth. ESO estimates that observing conditions might worsen by up to 40% because of the turbines.

"Taken together, these disturbances seriously threaten the current and long-term viability of Paranal as a world-leader in astronomy, causing the loss of key discoveries about the universe and compromising Chile's strategic advantage in this area," says de Gregorio-Monsalvo, ESO's representative in Chile. "The only way to save Paranal's pristine skies and protect astronomy for future generations is to relocate the INNA complex."

ESO will submit the report to the Chilean authorities as part of the Citizen Participation Process in response to the INNNA environmental assessment.

Light pollution is a major problem affecting astronomical observatories all over the world. The Paranal site is one of the few remaining in the world where light pollution so far remains negligible. The pristine night sky combined with the dryness of the Atacama air provide the best conditions for astronomical study in the whole world.

Spring officially begins today (March 20) with the vernal equinox, bringing longer days and warmer temperatures to the Northern Hemisphere.

The vernal equinox signals the astronomical start of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, with the sun crossing above Earth's equator, moving from south to north, at 5:01 a.m. EST (0901 GMT) on March 20. This means that after months of being pointed away from the sun during the winter, the Northern Hemisphere will now begin pointing toward the sun, according to In-the-Sky.org.

As the Northern Hemisphere welcomes spring today, the Southern Hemisphere greets the first day of autumn.

The word equinox is derived from the Latin words "aequus" (equal) and "nox" (night). There are two equinoxes in the year — vernal in the spring and autumnal in the fall — when daylight and night are roughly equal due to the Earth’s tilt and the planet's position in its orbit around the sun.

Earth experiences seasonal changes because its axis is tilted so different areas of the planet face the sun's direct rays through the year. When the North Pole tilts toward the sun, it's summer in the Northern Hemisphere, where the sun's rays shine directly north of the equator. However, when the South Pole tilts toward the sun, it's winter in the Northern Hemisphere, as sunlight beams down directly over areas south of the equator.

"On the day of the equinox, everywhere on Earth has almost exactly 12 hours of day and night, as the sun's annual journey through the constellations of the zodiac carries it across the celestial equator," according to the statement from In-the-Sky.org. "Wherever you live on Earth, on the day of the equinox the sun will rise from the point on the horizon which lies due east, and set beneath the point which lies due west."

While cold temperatures may still linger, daylight has already started to lengthen — especially for those in areas that observe daylight savings, which occurred on March 9, when clocks shifted one hour ahead. Now, the vernal equinox marks the tipping point into increasingly longer days until the summer solstice on June 20, the longest day of the year.

During the equinox in March and September — the intermediate points between the summer and winter solstices — the sun lies directly over Earth's equator. As a result, spring and fall seasons feel similar in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, compared to the extremes of winter and summer. This also results in quicker sunsets during equinox, as the sun sinks speedily below the horizon over the next couple of days.

After making a course correction with a number of reshoots and directorial shuffling, "Elio" is poised to be Disney & Pixar's next potential blockbuster when the kid-centric sci-fi comedy drops into our galaxy with a rescheduled release date of June 20, 2025 and we’ve got a vibrant new trailer to share.

"Elio's" family-friendly plotline orbits around its aliens-obsessed 11-year-old hero who dreams of venturing into the heavens on intergalactic adventures when he's suddenly beamed up into the midst of the "Communiverse." This vast interplanetary institution is a consortium of representatives from all points of the universe.

Elio is wrongly identified as Earth's official ambassador in an unexpected role he inherits. He’s soon thrust into a political storm where he must forge alliances with a variety of alien species both friends and foes to save the galaxy and discover his true purpose in life.

Directed by Madeline Sharafian ("Burrow")and Domee Shi ("Bao," "Turning Red") in collaboration with Adrian Molina (“Coco") and produced by Mary Alice Drumm ("Coco"), Elio taps into its wealth of talented voice actors including Yonas Kibreab (Elio), Zoe Saldaña (Aunt Olga), Remy Edgerly (Glordon), Jameela Jamil (Ambassador Questa), and Brad Garrett (Ambassador Grigon), and Shirley Henderson (OOOOO).

This latest preview offers more amusing nods and easter eggs that space enthusiasts will recognize like a Voyager-like Golden Record and Elio's Aunt Olga employed by the Air Force Space Command, the branch of the U.S. Armed Services that became the U.S. Space Forced in 2019. Does that mean the movie takes place in the past? Time will tell.

"I just want to belong somewhere," Elio declares in the latest trailer. "So if any aliens are listening please come by and get me… okay, bye, I love you."

As an outer space coming-of-age offering, "Elio," has all the makings of an original animated adventure since it had a necessary tonal revamp when Sharafian and Shi stepped in to rework the screenplay. Though it pushed the release date off for more than a year, these extensive alterations and tinkering served to give the film a less serious demeanor and brightened up the overall mood.

Disney & Pixar's "Elio" hits theaters on June 20, 2025.

The MacBook Pro is one of the best laptops for astronomers, delivering processing power, portability, and incredible display quality. For professional and amateur stargazers it's an invaluable asset offering some of the best-in-class image processing, data analysis, and telescope control.

Save $200 and buy the Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch for just $1,399 at Amazon.

Regardless of the model, the MacBook Pro is always in demand but it comes with a hefty price tag. If you're looking to upgrade your current laptop or a Mac is on your wishlist, then this deal on the 14-inch 2024 MacBook Pro, equipped with the latest M4 chip, has a huge $200 saving — a rarely seen discount worth grabbing fast.

In our buyers guide to the best laptops for astronomers we selected the 2023 Apple MacBook Pro with the M3 chip as the best overall laptop. This new M4 series discounted at Amazon packs even more performance punch than its predecessor. The 2024 MacBook Pro is supercharged with the M4 chip making it a powerhouse laptop ready to handle all the best stargazing apps and memory-hungry photography processing software like Photoshop and Lightroom.

It also comes powered by one of the best-performing batteries to date in a MacBook Pro. Apple says it will deliver the same exceptional performance whether it's running on battery or plugged in — making it perfect for mobile stargazers.

If photographing the night sky is your priority, you'll most likely own one of the best cameras for astrophotography. Pairing it with the 2024 MacBook Pro with its breathtaking Apple Liquid Retina XDR display will mean your celestial images will have never looked better.

The Liquid Retina XDR display has 1600 nits peak brightness, up to 1000 nits sustained brightness, and 1,000,000:1 contrast for incredibly detailed views of your astrophotography.

Key features: M4 Pro chip, 14-inch Liquid Retina XDR display, Space Black or Silver colorway, 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD Storage, long-lasting battery performance.

Product launch: May 2024.

Price history: With the $200 discount it beats the previous best Amazon price of $1,439 by $40 and is the cheapest the 14-inch 2024 MacBook Pro has been this year.

Price comparison: Amazon: $1,399 | Apple: $1,599 | Walmart: $1,479

Reviews consensus: We've yet to review this exact model at Space.com but our colleagues at T3 gave it 5 out of 5 stars and summed the MacBook Pro up by saying: "There is no better option in a laptop than the MacBook Pro. It'll crunch through huge image and video files, and is arguably more machine than you’ll ever need." Amazon reviewers have been overwhelmingly positive too. The 14-inch 2024 MacBook Pro M4 gets an aggregate score of 4.8 out of 5 from almost 500 ratings, with 90% of reviewers giving this MacBook Pro model top marks.

TechRadar: ★★★★½ | T3: ★★★★★

✅ Buy if: You want portable power without breaking the bank, the MacBook Pro 14-inch M4 is a brilliant blend of performance, portability, and reasonable price.

❌ Don't buy if: You want a bigger screen and ultimate performance. This version is the baseline M4, the MacBook Pro 16-inch model has a larger screen and for even more power you can choose the M4 Max chip.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, Lego and much more.

White dwarfs may be stellar corpses, but that doesn't mean that everything around them has to be lifeless.

That's the conclusion of Florida Institute of Technology researcher Caldon Whyte, who's particularly fascinated by these stellar remnants. Until now, scientists have generally thought that planets orbiting white dwarfs would be unsuitable for life because the dynamic temperature decrease of their dead parent star makes their atmospheres too unstable.

As the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) increasingly investigates white dwarf systems, however, Whyte and colleagues developed a model capable of assessing if two key life-sustaining processes could occur in the range of orbits around a white dwarf temperate enough to allow liquid water to exist. This region around stars is referred to as the habitable zone or Goldilocks zone, because it's neither too hot nor too cold, just like the bear's porridge in the famous story.

The model developed by the team found that white dwarfs can fuel both processes simultaneously, making Earth-like planets possible around white dwarfs.

This discovery could help widen the focus of our search for life elsewhere in the cosmos, suggesting that systems that had previously been written off need to be revisited.

Related: The search for alien life

Expanding the boundary of Goldilocks zones

Habitable zones around stars are usually easy to define for stellar bodies like the sun and other main-sequence stars, which tend to have fairly stable temperatures over long periods of time. That isn't the case with white dwarfs, which form when stars like the sun run out of fuel for nuclear fusion, shedding their outer layers as their cores collapse and forming a cooling stellar ember.

Because these late-stage stellar bodies no longer have a source of fuel, they spend the rest of their existence gradually cooling, and that makes their temperatures and energy outputs inconsistent.

As a result, the Goldilocks zones around white dwarfs are constantly narrowing, with the distance that liquid water can exist without freezing on orbiting planets constantly shrinking around these dead stars.

Whyte and colleagues wanted to know if a planet orbiting a white dwarf in a constricting habitable zone could sustain processes that seem to be important for life for a period of seven billion years, the stretch that scientists have estimated is the maximum habitable lifetime of an Earth-like planet in this region around a star.

The team's model focused on two processes: photosynthesis, which plants use on Earth to convert sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into sugars, and ultraviolet (UV)-driven abiogenesis. This is the idea that UV radiation could help life arise — one of the theories that has been suggested to explain life taking root on Earth.

The model simulated an Earth-like planet orbiting a white dwarf, allowing the team to measure how much energy the world received as its dead star cooled and the habitable zone it sat in shrank.

Surprisingly, this revealed that, over the seven billion years, the simulated planet received enough energy to sustain both photosynthesis and UV-driven abiogenesis.

"That isn’t really common around most stars," Whyte said in a statement. “Something like the sun, of course, can provide enough energy, but brown dwarfs and red dwarfs smaller than the sun don’t really provide the energy in the UV and the photosynthesis range."

These findings could help scientists decide which systems to focus telescopes like the JWST on as humanity continues to search the cosmos for alien life. In particular, the results suggest that white dwarf systems may be worth a look as this hunt continues.

"We're giving them the confidence that these star systems are worth investing time and money into," Whyte said.

The team's results were published in December 2024 The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

More than six months after its first crewed mission came to a disappointing end, the future is still murky for Boeing's Starliner astronaut capsule.

That mission, called Crew Flight Test (CFT), launched on June 5, sending NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station (ISS) for a roughly 10-day stay. Starliner made it to the orbiting lab safely, but it experienced propulsion-system helium leaks and thruster failures along the way, and NASA extended CFT repeatedly to study the issues.

Finally, on Aug. 24, the agency decided to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which occurred without incident on Sept. 6 in the New Mexico desert. Williams and Wilmore were reassigned to a long-duration ISS mission, which wrapped up yesterday (March 18) with the splashdown of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule "Freedom."

The dolphin-attended splashdown marked the end of Crew-9, SpaceX's ninth operational, long-duration astronaut mission to the ISS for NASA. (Crew-9 launched in late September with two instead of the usual four crewmembers on board, to save seats for Williams and Wilmore on the way back to Earth.)

Related: How NASA's Starliner mission went from 10 days to 9 months: A timeline

SpaceX's Crew-10 arrived at the ISS on Sunday (March 16) to relieve the Crew-9 astronauts, and Crew-11 is scheduled to launch this summer, perhaps as early as July. Elon Musk's company may even send Crew-12 skyward before Starliner carries astronauts again, because NASA and Boeing are still mapping out the new capsule's next steps.

"We're certainly looking at Starliner very carefully," Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said on Tuesday during a press conference after Crew-9's splashdown.

"We're in the process of looking at that vehicle, looking at the helium system," he added. "We've got some candidate seals that we're going to replace. We'll get into some testing here over the summer timeframe with what we call an 'integrated doghouse' at White Sands [a NASA test facility in New Mexico]."

"Doghouse" is the term NASA and Boeing use for the thruster pods on Starliner's service module. The module sports four such pods, each of which houses 12 thrusters — five of the relatively powerful "orbital maneuvering and control" (OMAC) class and seven "reaction control system" (RCS) thrusters, which are used for finer adjustments, such as those needed during docking.

The thruster problems Starliner experienced during CFT concerned the RCS hardware: Five of the 28 RCS thrusters conked out during Starliner's approach to the ISS, though the mission team eventually brought four of the five affected ones back online.

Ground testing has linked the RCS thruster issue to overheating: Repeated thruster firings can apparently warm up the doghouses so much that some of their Teflon seals bulge, affecting propellant flow.

This theory is informing adjustments to Starliner's design and operations going forward, according to Stich.

"I think we have some changes we need to make to the way we heat those thrusters, the way we fire those thrusters, and then we can test that on the next flight," he said.

Indeed, testing will be a big part of the next Starliner flight, whenever it lifts off.

"We need to make sure we can eliminate the helium leaks; eliminate the service module thruster issues that we had on docking," Stich said.

NASA has not yet decided whether the coming Starliner flight will carry astronauts or not, he added. But even if the mission is uncrewed, the agency wants it to be crew-capable — "to have all the systems in place that we could fly a crew with," Stich said.

"As I think about it, it might be there for a contingency situation, as we prepare for whatever events could happen," he added. "One of the things that I've learned in my time at NASA is, always be prepared for the unexpected."

NASA plans to certify Starliner for operational, long-duration astronaut missions shortly after this next flight, if all goes well.

"We really need to get Boeing into a crewed rotation," Stich said. "Butch and Suni's return on Dragon, to me, shows how important it is to have two different crew transportation systems, the importance of Starliner and the redundancy that we're building into human spaceflight for our low Earth orbit economy."

Scientists have used data from NASA's retired planet-hunting space telescope 'Kepler' to discover that small and large worlds have very different upbringings. The team found that larger planets on non-circular orbits are more likely to have grown in more turbulent home systems.

To reach this conclusion, the team studied the orbits of thousands of extrasolar planets, or "exoplanets." The team, consisting of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), measured the orbits of exoplanets ranging in mass from that of Jupiter to that of Mars.

Smaller planets, it was revealed, tended to have nearly circular orbits, while larger giant planets have flattened, or elliptical, orbits. This would have been an important finding in isolation, but because scientists can tell a lot about a planet from its orbit, the discovery also reveals information about how planets of different sizes form.

"What we found is that right around the size of Neptune, planets go from being almost always on circular orbits to very often having elliptical orbits," team leader and UCLA researcher Gregory Gilbert said in a statement.

Eccentric large planets have chaotic upbringings

During its operating lifetime between 2009 and 2018, Kepler observed around 150,000 stars, looking for the tiny dips in light caused when a planet crosses, or "transits," the face of its star, as seen from our perspective in the cosmos.

Using this technique, and by gathering the light curves from these stars, Kepler uncovered thousands of exoplanets. The UCLA team turned to 1,600 of these light curves to extract information about the orbits of certain planets. This process required a great deal of care, the development of a custom visualization tool kit, and the manual inspection of each light curve by UCLA undergraduate Paige Entrica.

"If stars behaved like boring light bulbs, this project would have been 10 times easier," said team member Erik Petigura, a UCLA physics and astronomy professor. "But the fact is that each star and its collection of planets has its own individual quirks, and it was only after we got eyes on each one of these light curves that we trusted our results."

This meticulous analysis revealed the split between planets with circular orbits and those with more eccentric orbits.

There appeared to be an abundance of small planets over large planets and a tendency for giant planets to form around stars enriched in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, such as oxygen, carbon and iron, which astronomers collectively call "metals."

"Small planets are common; large planets are rare. Large planets need metal-rich stars in order to form; small planets do not," Gilbert explained. "Small planets have low eccentricities, and large planets have large eccentricities."

Seeing a correlation between the eccentricity of planetary orbits and the abundance of metals indicated to the team that there are two pathways of planet formation, one followed by large planets and one followed by small planets.

"To see a transition in the eccentricities of the orbits at this same point tells us there really is something very different about how these giant planets form versus how small planets like Earth form," Gilbert said. "That’s really the major discovery to come out of this paper."

Currently, scientists theorize that planets are born in doughnut-shaped clouds of gas and dust called "protoplanetary disks." These protoplanetary disks surround infant stars, and give rise to worlds as larger and larger fragments within the disks meet and fuse.

This process could form a terrestrial planet around the size and mass of Earth — but if a large planetary core around 10 times the mass of our planet is formed, it can accumulate gas, creating a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn.

Larger planets beyond the size of Neptune are thought to be fairly rare because it takes a rapid "runaway mass accretion" to accumulate a massive amount of gas. This happens more frequently around stars that are enriched with metals.

It is likely, the scientists suggest, that large planets on eccentric orbits may experience more chaotic formation processes as they gravitationally interact with their sibling planets to find themselves on non-circular orbits. These planets "stir up" their planetary systems, causing more turbulence. This results in collisions and mergers between planets larger than Earth, creating more large planets.

"It's remarkable what we've been able to learn about the orbits of planets around other stars using the Kepler Space Telescope," Petigura said. "The telescope was named after Johannes Kepler, who, four centuries ago, was the first scientist to appreciate that the planets in our solar system move on slightly elliptical rather than circular orbits. His discovery was an important moment in human history because it showed that the sun, rather than the Earth, was at the center of the solar system.

"I'm sure Kepler, the man, would be delighted to learn that a telescope named in his honor measured the subtle shapes of orbits of Earth-size planets around other stars."

The team's research was published on March 13 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking took gravity to its ultimate limits. In doing so, he made a number of significant advancements in our understanding of black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. Plus, his contributions to the popularization of science cement his legacy for generations to come.

Hawking began his research career in the 1960s, well before his diagnosis with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) led him to use a wheelchair and communicate through technology rather than his voice for most of his adult life. Although it's impossible to neatly summarize Hawking's 200-plus academic papers spanning more than four decades, he was deeply interested in the nature of gravity in extreme environments.

This started with the nature of singularities. Hawking took mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose's proof that singularities do exist in general relativity and extended it to the universe as a whole — proving that, in our models of the evolution of the cosmos, the Big Bang really did begin with a singularity, a point of infinite density.

Hawking then went on to explore black holes in more depth and arrived at his surprising conclusion that black holes aren't entirely black. By artfully combining general relativity with quantum mechanics, Hawking found that black holes emit a tiny amount of radiation, which means they can evaporate and disappear.

Hawking extended this idea to formulate a set of laws of black hole thermodynamics — versions of the familiar laws of thermodynamics but applied to black holes — suggesting a deep link between the nature of heat, energy and entropy with that of gravity.

Back in the cosmological realm, Hawking made major advances in understanding how inflation worked. Although Alan Guth originated the idea that the early universe underwent a period of exceptionally rapid expansion, it was Hawking who fleshed it out and made it a powerful, robust theory of the cosmos.

Besides inflation, Hawking spent a lot of time examining the earliest moments of the Big Bang. He was especially interested in the question of the "beginning” — did the universe have a beginning? Did it even make sense to ask that question? What did quantum mechanics have to say about that?

Gravity is the story of space-time, and Hawking spent many years investigating the deep relationship between space, time and quantum mechanics. For example, he worked a lot on wormholes — shortcuts through space-time — and probed whether they were physically possible. Realizing that wormholes could also be used as time machines, he proposed the chronology protection conjecture, which states that time travel into the past is forbidden because the past has already happened and cannot be changed.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Hawking was not particularly interested in the development of a theory of everything, an all-encompassing set of equations that could explain all of physics. Although he dabbled in aspects of string theory — a promising candidate for a theory of everything — he largely focused on the nature of gravity.

But his work on the quantum aspects of gravity reverberated throughout the entire community. For example, any theory of everything must be able to explain the riddle posed by Hawking radiation, or the slippery nature of cosmic inflation. Hawking's work opened a window into the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity — a goal that researchers are still trying to follow through with today.

To give some perspective on the magnitude of Hawking's work, consider the Nobel prize. The 2019 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos," with one-half to James Peebles "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology." Hawking died in 2018, but if he had lived, his contributions to cosmology would have made him a contender for sharing the prize.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics was divided, with one-half awarded to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.” Hawking could have been a contender here too, for his insight into the fundamental nature of black holes.

Hawking had a decent chance of being in the running for two separate Nobel prizes, which definitely puts him in rare company.

Besides that prodigious scientific output, Hawking was a prolific science communicator. His 1988 book "A Brief History of Time" became an instant hit. It was many people's first introduction to quantum mechanics, gravity and cosmology. He became a cultural icon, with almost everybody able to recognize him and his computerized voice.

All of these contributions, without a doubt, make for a legacy worth remembering.

Whether you're viewing March 29's partial solar eclipse, or just want a closer look at our sun, you need to be careful when sungazing. It's important that you observe the sun safely and never look directly at the sun with the naked eye. Otherwise, you're in danger of permanently damaging your eyes, and no eclipse is worth that.

You don't have to spend a fortune to safely observe the sun, however. We've rounded up the best solar viewing deals, covering a range of equipment including glasses, solar binoculars, telescope filters and more. Just $10.99, for example, will get you a pair of Celestron Safe Solar Power Viewer glasses.

We'll be updating this guide regularly, to bring you the latest solar viewing deals. Or if you prefer to observe the night sky we've got the best telescope deals and best binocular deals.

• Stay safe: How to check and use solar glasses
• More top deals: Celestron telescope & binocular deals

Best solar viewing deals 2025

Today's best solar viewing deals

Buying advice: Saving and staying safe.

When it comes to choosing and equipping solar viewing gear it's important that you make sure it's up to the task of safely observing the sun. Even a 'quick look' can damage your eyes, so don't let anyone persuade you otherwise.

There's a special safety standard for solar viewers - ISO 12312-2 - that means no more than 0.0032% of the sun's dangerous rays reach your eye. If the equipment you're buying doesn't confirm to that standard, there's no guarantee it'll protect you.

You can even build your own solar viewer, but if you want to stay safe when you're watching the partial eclipse this March 29 we'd recommend you check for that critical certification. Here's how to check your solar eclipse glasses and use them correctly.

Young stars enveloped in a transformative cocoon of gas shine brightly in a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The newborn stars belong to a cluster known as NGC 460, which is located in a region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. NGC 460 is surrounded by a number of other young stellar clusters and varying sized nebulae, which are clouds of gas and dust that fuel new star formation.

Within this region, also known as N83, there are a number of O-type stars, the brightest, hottest and most massive of main-sequence stars (like the sun), which burn hydrogen at their core. O-type stars are rare; there are thought to be just 20,000 of them in the Milky Way, according to a statement from NASA releasing the Hubble image on March 8.

"The clouds of gas and dust can give rise to stars as portions of them collapse, and radiation and stellar winds from those hot, young bright stars in turn shape and compress the clouds, triggering new waves of star formation," NASA officials said in the statement. "The hydrogen clouds are ionized by the radiation of nearby stars, causing them to glow."

Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!

Classified as an open star cluster, NGC 460 is a loosely bound group of stars, held together by gravity. This type of cluster typically contains a few dozen to a few thousand relatively young stars from the same giant molecular cloud.

In this case, NGC 460 is believed to have formed following a collision between two hydrogen clouds. This type of interaction could have triggered the birth of several O-type stars and nebulae in the N83 region, according to the statement.

"The NGC 460 star cluster resides in one of the youngest parts of this interconnected complex of stellar clusters and nebulae," NASA officials said in the statement.

As the stars continue to grow in their cocoon, they may migrate outward and disperse into the Small Magellanic Cloud someday. As one of the Milky Way’s closest and brightest galactic neighbors, residing only about 200,000 light-years from Earth, the Small Magellanic Cloud offers an opportunity to study phenomena that are otherwise difficult to examine in more distant galaxies.

The recent images of NGC 460 stem from a study on the gas and dust between stars — called the interstellar medium — to better understand how gravitational forces between interacting galaxies can foster bursts of star formation. Six overlapping observations taken using the Hubble Space Telescope at both visible and infrared wavelengths were combined to create the new mosaic image.

Welcome home to the members of Crew-9!

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore, Suni WIlliams and Nick Hague, together with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov arrived home on Tuesday night (March 18), just hours after splashing down from the International Space Station.

Where did the astronauts come home to?

After landing off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida and being helped out of SpaceX's Crew Dragon "Freedom" on Tuesday evening (March 18), the four members of Crew-9 (including two former Boeing Starliner test flight astronauts) were flown by helicopter from a recovery ship to shore, where they boarded a NASA Gulfstream jet for Houston.

Butch Wilmore, Suni Williams, Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov touched down at 11:19 p.m. CDT (12:19 a.m. EDT or 0419 GMT on March 19) at Ellington Field, NASA's base for flight operations near the Johnson Space Center. There, the four crewmates were greeted by fellow astronauts, NASA officials and their family members.

Why is this crew return different from others?

For Hague and Gorbunov, this was the normal end of a 170-day mission aboard the International Space Station. Standard return-to-Earth protocols has returning crew members remaining at Johnson Space Center for several days before they are approved by flight surgeons to return to their homes.

For Williams and Wilmore, this arrival marked the end of an unexpectedly-long journey, which began with their launch on Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on what could have been as brief as a 12-day mission to a 286-day stay on the International Space Station. Propulsion problems resulted in NASA deciding to land the Starliner without its crew and bringing Williams and Wilmore home on SpaceX's Dragon instead.

Where can you learn more?

You can read more about the crew's return to Earth and splashdown or watch a video of the pod of dolphins which came out to see the landing.

Amazon's Spring Deal Days sale event starts next week and just ahead of that, we've found a huge Lego Star Wars deal. The 599-piece set is now 28% off and under $58, one of its lowest-ever prices.

Save 28% on Ahsoka Tano's T-6 Jedi Shuttle when you grab it on Amazon.

One of the largest (in terms of percentage) Lego Star Wars deals available at the minute, you can grab Ahsoka Tano's T-6 Jedi Shuttle which comes with minifigures of the Jedi, Sabine Wren and two others. It's ideal for Padawans to build and for fans of the Disney Plus hit show, "Ahsoka". Check out the set in more detail below but if you want to see what other offers are out there, scroll through our pages for Lego deals and Lego space deals.

• We're constantly checking the best prices on our pages for big discounts on the best telescopes, binoculars, star projectors, cameras, drones, Lego, streaming and more.

At this stage, you may be wondering what this set offers you for your credits. First and foremost, it looks cool. The red coloring makes it look striking and it stands out on display, despite only measuring 3.5 in (10 cm) high, 10.5 in (27 cm) in length and 9 in (24 cm) wide.

But, with this being suitable for padawans aged nine and above, it does come with playable features too. The cockpit opens and the wings adjust for flight and landing mode, making interactive play more engaging. It also has compartments for weapons and tools and two stud shooters, giving it more of a likeness to that seen in the TV show. The Jedi, Ahsoka is included as a minifigure, with two lightsabers and Sabine Wren is also included with blaster pistols. As well as those two, you also get Marrok and Professor Huyang minifigures.

Key features: Four minifigures including Ahsoka Tano and Sabine Wren, adjustable wings, opening cockpit, stud shooters, a weapons and tools compartment and 599 pieces in total.

Product launched: September 2023

Price history: The MSRP for this set is $79.99 and that's what it's going for on Lego's own site. The lowest we've ever seen this set is $57.89, making this current deal genuinely good value.

Price comparison: Amazon: $57.90 | Walmart: $66.94 | Best Buy: $79.99

✅ Buy it if: You're looking for a reasonably priced Lego Star Wars set that offers both display and play potential.

❌ Don't buy it if: You're a collector or a Lego Star Wars fan looking to splash the cash on a serious set that's going to wow people when put on display.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, lego and much more.

Galaxies like the Milky Way boast more than spirals; they also have feathers, where clumps of new stars are born. Astronomers have been stumped by how these complex structures form, but now a research team says there may be a simple way: All it takes is a bit of gravity.

For over a century, astronomers have marveled at the beauty and complexity of spiral galaxies. The largest "grand design" spirals can host a dozen or more individual arms. But recently, detailed, high-resolution observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed that there is even more to the story.

A single arm can wind for tens of thousands of light-years around a galaxy. But astronomers have found that decorating those arms are a multitude of small-scale features known as feathers.

These feathers are much smaller than arms, reaching no more than a few thousand light-years in length. But they are exceptionally dense — much denser than the larger arms. They are also home to intense star formation. Within the feathers, astronomers have spotted young star clusters and giant clumps of neutral hydrogen. Indeed, much — and perhaps most — of star formation within a galaxy takes place inside these feathers.

At first, astronomers thought feathers were a feature of only the largest grand-design spirals. But the evidence is mounting that almost all spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way, host feathers.

So how does a galaxy get these feathers? Over the years, debates have sprung up as astronomers have proposed various mechanisms to explain how feathers form. Feathers are relatively small, at least on galactic scales. They're also numerous. So the thinking is that there must be some complex process that builds them. For example, perhaps supernova explosions shape the feathers from spiral arms, carving into the gas like a sculpture. Or perhaps weak-but-gigantic magnetic fields twist up on themselves to create the filamentary structures.

But in new work accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers propose something much, much simpler: gravity. Just gravity.

To test this hypothesis, the team created an exceptionally simple simulated galaxy. This mock galaxy did not contain any stars or clumps of matter, nor did it involve supernovas or magnetic fields. It was just a simple, rotating disk of gas. Then, they let this disk of gas evolve under its own gravity to see if feathers naturally appeared.

And they did. In just a short time, the simulated disks of gas fragmented into a series of nested filaments that resembled the feathers from observations — no complex physics necessary. That's because the disk of gas was unstable, with any tiny clumps prone to collapsing on themselves. That natural inclination, combined with the rotation of the gas, produced small, elongated structures — the feathers.

Then, the researchers compared the feathers produced in simulated galaxies with actual feathers in observations. They found generally broad agreement in size, shape and density.

The simulated galaxies didn't look anything like real galaxies. But that's the point: The researchers wanted to examine whether simple physics — just gravity by itself — could produce feathers. It seems that this is the case, but the real test will be to (ironically) introduce more complex physics into the simulations. This is because things like supernovas and magnetic fields do influence how spiral galaxies evolve, and they may break apart these gravitationally powered feathers — which means we would be back to square one.

Still, it's a promising hypothesis and shows that nature is perfectly capable of using simple physics to create complex structures, even at galactic scales.

Borderlands 4 is one of the best-looking upcoming space games of 2025. It might even make us forget how godawful the Borderlands movie was. Maybe. With a release date locked in and plenty of details floating in orbit, here's the scoop on Borderlands 4 so far.

Leaving Pandora behind, the fourth mainline Borderlands game is moving the action to the all-new planet of Kairos. After Borderlands 3 and the spinoff New Tales from the Borderlands left fans underwhelmed, this is the big shake-up that the long-running RPG series needed.

Developer Gearbox is keeping most story details hidden away in a vault, but chances are we'll be learning more about the game's main baddie and the many dangers that await the 'vault hunters' sooner rather than later. On the gameplay front, we know that things are staying mostly familiar, although both combat and movement appear to have been leveled up. Overall, Borderlands 4 is looking fiercer and more relentless than anything we've experienced before in the gun-and-loot series and we are here for it.

The new Borderlands game is not the only major sci-fi title releasing this year: Metroid Prime 4 should be one of Nintendo's hottest 2025 launches, Directive 8020 seems perfect for the Halloween season, and RPG lovers can get excited for Exodus and The Outer Worlds 2.

What is the Borderlands 4 release date?

After much speculation, publisher 2K and developer Gearbox confirmed earlier this year that Borderlands 4 is set to release on September 23, 2025.

That doesn't leave newcomers with an interest in the series' history and universe with a lot of time to burn through all the Borderlands games, but veterans will celebrate that the wait is almost over.

What platforms will Borderlands 4 be available on?

Borderlands 4 will launch on Xbox Series X/S, PC (Epic & Steam), and PS5.

To the surprise of no one, last-gen consoles were left behind, allowing the developers of Borderlands 4 to work on and apply bigger innovations beyond graphical fidelity. We haven't seen how the world of Kairos comes together in uncut gameplay, but we expect that the switch to beefier base hardware will affect the complexity of the level design and the navigation possibilities (as well as the potential carnage), among other things.

Borderlands 4 Trailers

Surprisingly, barely anything leaked before Gearbox and 2K were ready to reveal that Borderlands 4 was coming and the official teaser trailer didn't appear until August 20, 2024. It was a very cinematic and intriguing first look that made us question for a hot second if the series' signature cel-shaded aesthetic was being dropped (thankfully, it wasn't). You can watch it below:

Only a few months later, on December 13, 2024, we were introduced to the four new vault hunters as well as plenty of menacing enemies. It also gave us our first look at many of the locales we're going to be visiting come September. Meet them here:

On February 12, 2025, a short but explosive gameplay trailer dropped. This put the focus back on the moment-to-moment gameplay with guns, abilities, and sick moves that highlight how fast and furious Borderlands 4 is compared to previous entries. Watch it here:

What is the plot of Borderlands 4?

Spoilers for Borderlands 3 ahead.

Borderlands 3, as uneven as its writing was, ended on a high note and left a couple of good cliffhangers waiting to be picked up by the fourquel: Lilith sacrificed herself in order to save Pandora from being destroyed by its moon, Elpis, after the villains Tyreen and Troy Calypso learned the celestial body was the literal key to opening the Great Vault that is Pandora itself. We'll spare you the details, but it's unclear whether Lilith survived or not. What we know for sure is that she teleported Elpis away from Pandora and to an entirely different system.

The teaser trailer revealed where Pandora's moon ended up: right next to Kairos, which 2K and Gearbox describe as "the most dangerous planet" in the Borderlands universe (of course). This is bad news for Kairos' inhabitants, but it seems they already had problems on their hands with The Timekeeper, "a ruthless dictator" who runs the planet with an iron fist. Enter the new team of vault hunters. Does Kairos even have a vault of its own? We can't wait to find out.

As Gearbox prepares for the game's launch in September 2025, there's a good chance much of the plot and the protagonists will be revealed gradually. Borderlands games typically aren't shy nor secretive during their marketing campaigns, so we're expecting almost all the cards to be laid out on the table well ahead of the release.

What type of game is Borderlands 4?

Borderlands 4 is sticking to the signature first-person action-RPG nature of the previous installments and will be burying us in colorful loot once again. The main difference when compared to other famous action-RPG series is that Borderlands games put never-ending, brutal shootouts front and center. Level up, grab better weapons, fight bigger enemies. Rinse and repeat. You know the drill.

There's a fun narrative and solid world-building holding it all together, but it's ultimately all about the immediate fun factor with imaginative guns, fantasy-like abilities, and class-based progression reminiscent of games like Diablo. Press releases have been hyping up Borderlands 4's all-new build possibilities and expanded 'loot chase', so it appears the creatives doubled down on the series' strengths and are spicing things up. Environments and traversal are also evolving, seemingly encouraging exploration in a bigger way than ever before.

At the time of writing, the store pages for the game have also confirmed that local split-screen play for two players is back alongside four-player online co-op. In this age of local co-op being left behind, it's great to hear Borderlands 4 will be retaining this staple. It also looks as if an MMO structure like Destiny or Warframe's isn't on the cards for Borderlands anytime soon.

The building blocks of life on Earth may have been fueled by tiny sparks hopping between water droplets.

Four billion years ago, Earth was a lifeless world, but a dynamic one. Crashing waves, rushing streams, and roaring waterfalls churned up sprays of water into an atmosphere rich with carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and ammonia. Recent experiments suggest that those sprays of water may have helped jump-start chemical reactions that produced the building blocks of life.

According to Stanford University chemist Richard Zare and his colleagues, small electrical charges built up in water droplets and unleashed tiny bursts of electricity may have been enough to power those reactions. It's a new twist on an old, and hotly debated, theory about the origins of life on Earth.

Jump-starting the chemistry of Life

Researchers are still trying to puzzle out exactly how life made the jump from chemistry to biology (and, for that matter, where to draw the line between the two) between 4 and 3.5 billion years ago. A key piece of that puzzle is figuring out where the complex chemicals that make up living cells came from. That includes things like the lipids in our cell membranes, the nucleotides that encode our genes, the amino acids that build most of the working bits of our cells, and other molecules built around bonds between carbon and nitrogen atoms.

Most of the available information suggests that early Earth didn't have a huge supply of these complex molecules, if any at all, but it did have the raw ingredients for them: various combinations of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus just waiting to be combined in the right ways.

But building new molecules requires energy. Zare and his colleagues say that the energy required could have come from "microlightning," incredibly small flickers of electricity passing between droplets in moving sprays of water on early Earth.

In recent experiments, the team of chemists noticed that when water droplets move around — like in windblown sea spray, for instance — those droplets tend to develop different electrical charges. It's similar to the process that creates lightning in clouds, but on a miniature scale. Electrical charges build up, and eventually electrons leap from negatively-charged droplets to positively-charged ones in a tiny zap of lightning.

"We usually think of water as so benign, but when it's divided in the form of little droplets, water is highly reactive," said Zare in a statement. His lab studies chemical reactions in and between tiny water droplets. This microlightning, as Zare and his colleagues call it, is too small and too fast to see with the unaided eye, but they managed to record it with a high-speed camera.

Microlightning in a bottle

Zare and his colleagues sprayed water vapor into a chamber filled with a mix of gases meant to mimic early Earth's atmosphere, around 2 billion years ago: a noxious blend of ammonia, methane, hydrogen, and nitrogen. Tiny flashes of microlightning in the water vapor kicked off a series of chemical reactions that produced some very complex molecules: the amino acid glycine, the nucleotide base uracil, and others.

The results of this recent experiment are strikingly similar (pun intended) to a 1952 experiment by University of Chicago chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey, who zapped a bottle of water vapor, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen gas with an electrical spark and got amino acids. Miller and Urey proposed that life got its jump-start from lightning striking Earth's primordial ocean around 4 billion years ago.

But their hypothesis has been a lightning rod for criticism, mostly because lightning doesn't happen often enough to trigger enough chemical reactions over something as big and spread-out as the ocean.

If the jump-start came from microlightning in water sprays, rather than full-sized lightning strikes over water, Zare and his colleagues say that could solve the problem and give life to a new version of the old hypothesis.

"On early Earth, there were water sprays all over the place — into crevices or against rocks, and they can accumulate and create this chemical reaction," said Zare in a recent press release. "I think this overcomes many of the problems people have with the Miller-Urey hypothesis."

Zare and his colleagues published their work in the journal Science Advances.

If you have an otherworldly knack for picking the winners of college basketball games, you could get a free ride to Mars on SpaceX's Starship megarocket.

That's the grand prize in the "X Bracket Challenge," a contest organized by the social media site formerly known as Twitter. To win, you have to submit a perfect bracket for this year's NCAA basketball tournament, correctly predicting the winners of all 63 games from the first round to the championship matchup.

That's even more daunting than it sounds; it's never been done, as far as we know. Indeed, nobody has even come all that close.

"The longest (verifiable) streak of correct picks in an NCAA tournament bracket to start the beloved March Madness tournament is 49, a mark that was established in 2019," Mike Benzie of NCAA.com wrote this past January.

"An Ohio man correctly predicted the entire 2019 NCAA tournament into the Sweet 16, something we've not seen in years of tracking publicly verifiable online March Madness brackets at all major games," he added.

You don't have to accept the Mars trip if you make history with the first-ever perfect bracket. There's an alternative grand-prize package, which consists of the following, according to X:

• $250,000
• One year of free residential Starlink service
• The chance to train like a SpaceX astronaut for a day
• Send your personal item of choice to space on a Falcon 9 launch
• VIP viewing of a Starship launch

If there is no perfect bracket, the person who comes closest will get $100,000.

Brackets must be submitted by 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) on Thursday (March 20). That's the day that the men's basketball tournament officially starts, so the X Bracket Challenge presumably pertains to that series of games. (The first round of the women's NCAA basketball tournament begins on Friday, March 21.)

You can learn more about the contest, which is sponsored by Uber Eats, here.

Related: SpaceX loses Starship rocket stage again, but catches giant Super Heavy booster during Flight 8 launch (video)

Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. SpaceX believes that its combination of brawn and full reusability will finally make Mars settlement feasible for humanity.

Starship is still in the development phase, having flown eight fully stacked test flights to date. On the most recent two liftoffs, which occurred in January and March of this year, Starship's upper stage experienced anomalies and exploded over the Atlantic Ocean less than 10 minutes into each flight.

It's no surprise that the X Bracket Challenge features SpaceX so prominently. Both the social media site and the spaceflight company are owned by Elon Musk, the richest person in the world.

The day that astronomers have been waiting for is here. On Wednesday (March 19), the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft Euclid released its first data to the public and to the scientific community.

This data includes three stunning previews of the deep-field space images that Euclid will produce. Within these deep fields are hundreds of thousands of galaxies of different shapes and sizes, revealing a tantalizing hint at the large-scale structure of the cosmos within the so-called "cosmic web." The data includes the classification survey of 380,000 galaxies, 500 new gravitational lens candidates, and a wealth of other cosmic bodies like galaxy clusters and active galactic nuclei.

Euclid must observe such a wide population of galaxies if scientists are to use its data to crack the mysteries of the "dark universe," the collective name for dark matter and dark energy. Euclid's potential to make a difference in this quest has led ESA scientists to dub the spacecraft their "dark universe detective." But this first data release shows that Euclid is capable of delivering so much more.

"I think the two biggest questions that we ask ourselves as humanity is, are we alone in the universe, and how does the universe work?" Carole Mundell, ESA director of science, said at a press conference held on Monday (March 17). "What are the fundamental laws of physics?"

Mundell added that as our understanding of the universe has developed over many years, we have come to understand that the "ordinary matter" that composes stars, planets, moons, asteroids, our bodies, and everything we see around us composes only 5% of the universe's total matter and energy.

"The other 95% is dark and is unknown," she continued.

These dark elements of the cosmos have come to be known as dark energy, a mysterious force that causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate and accounts for around 70% of the universe's matter and energy budget and dark matter (the outstanding 25% of the universe's matter/energy budget) strange "stuff" that outweighs ordinary matter by 5 to 1 in the cosmos, but remains invisible because it doesn't interact with light.

"The whole purpose of Euclid is really to put those two together to understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy and how they're coupled in the universe," Mundell said. "Really, Euclid is not only a dark universe detective, it's also a time machine. We will look back 10 billion years in cosmic history."

Euclid visited 26 million galaxies in one week

For this first data release, Euclid, which launched in July 2023 and began observations proper in Feb. 2024, spent just one week scanning three patches of the sky over which it will make its deepest observations in the future.

Performing just one scan of each of these regions thus far, Euclid was able to observe 26 million galaxies, the furthest and thus earliest of which is around 10.5 billion light-years away. The observations also contain a small sample of quasars, the bright hearts of active galaxies powered by feeding supermassive black holes, which, because of their incredible luminosity, can be seen even further away.

While Euclid will pass over these patches many more times before its primary mission draws to a close in 2030, the first glimpse of these areas, about as wide in the sky as 300 full moons, provides an awe-inspiring preview of the sheer scale of the cosmic atlas that Euclid will build. By mission completion, this atlas will cover around one-third of the entire night sky over Earth.

The three deep fleids observed by Euclid are Euclid Deep Field North, Euclid Deep Field Fornax, and Euclid Deep Field South.

Below is the image Euclid captured of Euclid Deep Field North containing over 10 million galaxies, the Cat’s Eye Nebula (center-left), a stellar remnant around 3,000 light-years away, and a large group of galaxies dominated by the large galaxy NGC 6505 right of center). Euclid will make a total of 32 sweeps of this region of the sky before 2030.

The next image represents Euclid's first look at the region dubbed Euclid Deep Field Fornax, in which it has already seen 4.5 million galaxies. Over the next six years, Euclid will make 52 observations of this region of space.

Euclid Deep Field Fornax contains the smaller Chandra Deep Field South region which has been studied by NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatories, in addition to the Hubble Space Telescope and major ground-based telescopes.

Less well-studied is Euclid Deep Field South (below), which has not been assessed by any other deep sky survey thus far. That means this region, also Euclid's largest deep field, has a vast potential for new, exciting discoveries.

The space telescope has already spotted more than 11 million galaxies in this field. Additionally, in this field, Euclid observed hints at a large-scale structure of the universe called the cosmic web, consisting of threads of gas and dark matter stretching between clusters of galaxies.

"It's impressive how one observation of the deep field areas has already given us a wealth of data that can be used for a variety of purposes in astronomy: from galaxy shapes to strong lenses, clusters, and star formation, among others," ESA Euclid project scientist Valeria Pettorino said. "We will observe each deep field between 30 and 52 times over Euclid's six-year mission, each time improving the resolution of how we see those areas and the number of objects we manage to observe.

"Just think of the discoveries that await us."

Euclid's observations take shape

Because dark matter's mass dominates galaxies, it plays a vital role in galactic evolution and, ultimately, the shapes these galaxies take. That means in order to probe the mysteries of dark matter, Euclid precisely must precisely observe the shape or "morphology" of billions of galaxies.

Because galaxies come together in a web of dark matter, forming large galaxy clusters, Euclid can also learn more about this mysterious stuff by measuring the distribution of the millions of galaxies visible in each of its deep fields.

Likewise, this distribution is also important to understand how dark energy has expanded the fabric of space, thus pushing these galaxies apart.

"The full potential of Euclid to learn more about dark matter and dark energy from the large-scale structure of the cosmic web will be reached only when it has completed its entire survey," Euclid Consortium scientist Clotilde Laigle said. "Yet the volume of this first data release already offers us a unique first glance at the large-scale organization of galaxies, which we can use to learn more about galaxy formation over time."

The observations of these galaxies in this first release alone constituted 35 terabytes of data collected over one week.

"To give you a feeling that 35 terabytes of data are the equivalent of 200 days of video streaming at the highest quality," Pettorino said on Monday. "If you watch TV on your HDR, 4k with 60 frames per second for 200 days, then you would be that would be the equivalent of 35 terabytes."

The ESA project scientist added that next year, Euclid will release its first year of observations. This will be 2 petabytes of data, equal to streaming 31 years of 4K TV, Pettorino continued, advising against engaging in such a binge watch.

The stunning zoomed-in image of the Euclid Deep Field South below shows various galaxy clusters and the light between these galaxies, so-called "intracluster light." The image represents a 70-times zoom-in on the original mosaic, demonstrating why so much data is gobbled up in these Euclid images.

Euclid consortium member Mike Walmsley of the University of Toronto explained that no human could possibly hope to analyze all of this data, so scientists have turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to perform and initially filter this data, picking out galaxies for further investigation.

The galaxies the AI selects are then passed along to citizen scientists for them to identify aspects of these galaxies, such as their shape and brightness and characteristics like spiral arms, central bars, and tidal tails, the latter of which indicate merging galaxies.

"We're at a pivotal moment in terms of how we tackle large-scale surveys in astronomy. AI is a fundamental and necessary part of our process in order to fully exploit Euclid's vast dataset," Walmsley added. "We're building the tools as well as providing the measurements. In this way, we can deliver cutting-edge science in a matter of weeks, compared with the years-long process of analyzing big surveys like these in the past."

The Euclid consortium will need all the help it can get, the galaxies featured in the data released thus far represent just 0.4% of the total number of galaxies of similar resolution expected to be imaged over Euclid's lifetime.

"We're looking at galaxies from inside to out, from how their internal structures govern their evolution to how the external environment shapes their transformation over time," added Laigle. "Euclid is a goldmine of data, and its impact will be far-reaching, from galaxy evolution to the bigger-picture cosmology goals of the mission."

Uncovering gravitational lenses

One of the most exciting aspects of this first Euclid data release is the revelation of extraordinary events in spacetime called "gravitational lenses." These distortions of distant objects occur when light from a background object passes a massive object, like a galaxy or galaxy cluster, that comes between it and Earth.

Because objects with mass cause the very fabric of space and time to warp (that's general relativity, folks) when light passes these intervening objects it is also curved. the closer to the body of mass, the gravitational lens, light passes, the more extreme its curvature.

That means that light from the same background object can reach Earth (or Euclid) at different times. This can either amplify these background objects— hence, the term "lensing"— or it can cause the same background object to appear distorted, stretched like taffy, or in multiple places in the same image, forming patterns like arcs or circles called "Einstein rings."

Euclid had already spotted a stunning Einstein ring, which was revealed to the public back in Feb. this year, but following the analysis of this new week's worth of data, AI and citizen scientists uncovered a further 500 examples of galaxy gravitational lenses amplifying light from a distant background galaxy. Lenses like this are rare because both the background galaxy and the lensing galaxy have to be perfectly aligned from Earth for this effect to work.

Almost all of these new Euclid gravitational lens arrangements were previously unknown.

"Until now, the vast majority of lenses have been found by ground-based telescopes. that is because lenses are so rare you need vast chunks of the sky to find them, and we simply haven't had a space telescope with the area and the resolution and the sensitivity to do that," Walmsley said. "Euclid is the first space telescope which can find a large number of lenses from space."

By its release next year alone, Euclid is expected to have found 7,000 gravitational lens candidates. By the time its mission concludes in 2030, the Euclid consortium expects the dark universe detective spacecraft to have uncovered somewhere in the region of 100,000 galaxy-galaxy-strong lenses. That is around 100 times more strong gravitational lenses than is currently known.

Euclid will also be on the hunt for weakly lensed background galaxies with more subtle distortions. These distortions are too subtle to be seen in individual galaxies but can be detected when considering large samples of background sources. Weak lensing is key to investigating the warping of spacetime due to the distribution of invisible dark matter in lensing galaxies.

"This is a tiny taste of what's to come, but tiny is not the right word," Mundell concluded. "Scientists have a lot of work ahead of them in the next six years, but it's going to be phenomenally exciting and very, very interesting, groundbreaking work."

The three deep field preview from Euclid can now be explored in ESASky. Euclid Deep Field South is here, Euclid Deep Field Fornax: here and Euclid Deep Field North: here.

The 36 scientific papers that emerged from this first data drop from Euclid are available here.

And you fancy joining the 9976 citizen scientists of the GalaxyZoo, who helped classify the galaxies in Euclid's first deep field images, check out the Zooiverse website of the project here.

SpaceX's Crew-9 astronauts had some company in the water after they splashed down on Tuesday afternoon (March 18).

The Crew-9 mission returned to Earth at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) on Tuesday, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida. A fleet of recovery vessels soon converged on Crew-9's Dragon capsule, named Freedom — and so did some curious marine mammals, who wanted to check out this strange object that fell from the sky into their domain.

"Wow! We got a cute little pod of dolphins, not just one or two," SpaceX engineer Kate Tice said during the NASA-SpaceX webcast of Crew-9's entry, descent and landing.

Freedom carried four people — NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos — home from the International Space Station (ISS).

Hague and Gorbunov rode up to the station aboard Freedom in late September, on the launch of SpaceX's Crew-9 mission. Williams and Wilmore, on the other hand, reached the ISS on the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule, which lifted off in early June.

Related: How NASA's Starliner mission went from 10 days to 9 months: A timeline

The Starliner mission was supposed to last just 10 days or so, but the capsule experienced issues with its propulsion system, delaying its departure from the ISS multiple times.

Finally, on Aug. 24, NASA decided to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which happened on Sept. 7, and put Williams and Wilmore on Freedom for the trip back home at the end of Crew-9's orbital stay. That decision required taking two people off the original Crew-9 manifest (NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson) to save seats for the Starliner duo on the return to Earth. So Freedom lifted off last fall with only Hague and Gorbunov on board.

Crew-9's splashdown was memorable and dramatic even before the dolphins showed up. It brought an end to the long space saga of Wilmore and Williams, which was a big story from the outset but became turbo-charged recently.

The extra attention came courtesy of President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who claimed that the Biden administration had "virtually abandoned" the Starliner duo in space. Musk further alleged that this was done "for political reasons." The assertions were puzzling, given that the plan to bring Williams and Wilmore home via SpaceX had been in place since August of last year.

Crew-9's return also marked the last time that a Dragon capsule will hit the water near the U.S. East Coast; SpaceX is moving its Dragon recovery operations to the West Coast, to reduce the chances that debris from the reentering capsule could cause damage or injuries on the ground.

"I just hope the California coast can bring as many dolphins as we saw during today's operation," Sarah Walker, SpaceX's director of Dragon mission management, said during a post-splashdown press conference on Tuesday. "That was really fun to see!"

SpaceX launched yet another batch of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit from Florida this afternoon (March 18).

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 23 Starlink craft, including 13 with direct-to-cell capability, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today at 3:57 p.m. EDT (1957 GMT).

About eight minutes later, the rocket's first stage touched down on the SpaceX drone ship "A Shortfall of Gravitas," which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. It was the 19th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a company mission description.

The Falcon 9's upper stage deployed the Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) about 65 minutes after liftoff today as planned, SpaceX announced via X.

Those spacecraft will join by far the largest constellation ever assembled: SpaceX currently operates nearly 7,100 Starlink satellites in LEO, according to satellite tracker and astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell.

Related: Starlink satellite train: how to see and track it in the night sky

The Starlink launch wasn't the only action for SpaceX today. The company's Crew-9 astronaut mission came back to Earth from the International Space Station, carrying home three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut.

Crew-9's Crew Dragon capsule, named Freedom, splashed down off the Florida coast as planned at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT).

The first astronauts to fly on board two different commercial spacecraft during a single mission have returned to Earth, splashing down with two of their International Space Station crewmates.

Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore did not set out to make history other than being the first crew to launch on Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule. After their capsule encountered propulsion issues, though, and NASA, out of an abundance of caution, decided to land it without them on board, Williams and Wilmore were reassigned to SpaceX's Crew Dragon to complete what ultimately extended from a 12-day to a nine-and-half-month mission.

Landing with WIlliams and Wilmore today (March 18) were fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov, a cosmonaut with Russia's federal corporation Roscosmos. Hague and Gorbunov launched on SpaceX's Crew Dragon "Freedom" without two of their planned Crew-9 crewmates in September, leaving two seats for Williams and Wilmore to use on the trip home.

"What a ride," said Hague just after splashing down. "I see a capsule full of grins from ear to ear."

The four Crew-9 members splashed down safely at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. (They are the first crew to land in that body of water since President Donald Trump signed an executive order redesignating it as the Gulf of America.)

Related: How NASA's Starliner mission went from 10 days to 9 months: A timeline

SpaceX ships quickly arrived to secure Freedom after its descent under three large parachutes. Once aboard the capsule recovery vessel, Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams were helped out of the Dragon and given brief medical checks before being transported by helicopter to the shore.

From there, the four will be flown by Gulfstream jet to Ellington Field in Houston. Per standard protocols, Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams will remain in crew quarters at NASA's Johnson Space Center for several days before they are approved by flight surgeons to return to their homes.

Crew-9's return to Earth began early this morning with the undocking of Freedom from the space-facing port on the space station's Harmony module at 1:05 a.m. EDT (0505 GMT). Their departure left the Expedition 72 crew to continue running the orbiting lab, including Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner of Roscosmos and Don Pettit with NASA, who launched on Russia's Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft on Sep. 11, 2024; and the recently arrived members of SpaceX's Crew-10 mission: Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers of NASA, Takuya Onishi of JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Kirill Peskov of Roscomsos.

"We know the station is in great hands," said Hague as the distance between the Dragon and space station grew. "We're excited to see what you guys are going to accomplish."

Fourteen hours later, Freedom jettisoned its rear-mounted trunk and fired its Draco thrusters for about 12 minutes to begin its deorbit and reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

Freedom's return was the second time that Hague, Gorbunov, Williams and Wilmore flew on the Dragon. In November, the four Crew-9 members briefly separated from the space station to relocate the capsule to the zenith docking port.

On Williams and Wimore's way to the ISS in June 2024, their Starliner vehicle, named "Calypso," developed helium leaks and issues with its thrusters overheating. After testing both before and after docking, Boeing's engineers believed Williams and Wilmore could safely land on Starliner but deferred to NASA's mission managers, who decided the risk was too great.

On Sept. 7, Calypso returned to Earth without its crew and landed safely at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.

Related: 'We just ran out of time': Boeing Starliner astronauts on why their spaceship returned to Earth without them

Williams and Wilmore instead joined the station's Expedition 72 crew, with Williams serving as commander. With their other crewmates, including Hague and Gorbunov, they ran hundreds of science experiments, maintained the station's systems, saw the arrival and departure of eight visiting vehicles and performed three spacewalks.

Williams and Wilmore's extended stay on the station led to some media reports and President Trump to incorrectly describe them as "stranded" or "stuck" in space. At all times, however, the two astronauts had an assured ride home. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and advisor to Trump, said he offered to launch another Dragon to return Williams and Wilmore earlier, but the status of the other capsules called that claim into question.

"We came up prepared to stay long even though we planned to stay short; that is what we do in human spaceflight," Wilmore said, replying to a reporter's question while still on the station.

Starliner's Crew Flight Test and Dragon's Crew-9 marked Williams' and Wilmore's third flight to and from space. On this mission, the two astronauts traveled 121,347,491 statute miles (195,289,857 kilometers) while completing 4,576 trips around Earth in 286 days.

Williams now has a career total of 608 days in space, the second-most of any U.S. astronaut after Peggy Whitson, who has 675 days. Wilmore has spent 464 days off the planet over the course of his three missions.

Hague and Gorbunov traveled 72,553,920 statute miles (116,764,215 km) while circling Earth 2,736 times over a total of 171 days in space. This is also Hague's third spaceflight, for a total time off Earth of 374 days. (Gorbunov completed his first spaceflight.)

Crew-9 was SpaceX's ninth operational and 10th overall mission to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station for NASA since 2020. This was the fourth flight for Crew Dragon Freedom, having earlier transported Crew-4 in 2022 and the second and third commercial flights for Axiom Space in 2023 and 2024, respectively.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on X at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2025 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander made the most of its last few hours of life on the moon.

The solar-powered Blue Ghost shut down on Sunday evening (March 16), shortly after the sun set over its lunar locale. The lander watched our star's descent and disappearance over the cratered horizon, capturing the oncoming, killing darkness in a poignant video that Firefly shared with the world today (March 18).

"These are the first high-definition images taken of the sun going down and then going into darkness at the horizon [on the moon]," Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said during a news conference today.

While the photos are beautiful, they're also of scientific interest, Kearns added, citing their potential to inform models of light scattering and illumination on the lunar surface.

"There's going to be a bunch of physics analysis and optics analysis that'll be done on that," he said.

Related: Farewell, Blue Ghost! Private moon lander goes dark to end record-breaking commercial lunar mission

Blue Ghost launched Jan. 15 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Firefly's first-ever moon mission, a flight sponsored by NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. On March 2, the lander set down softly in the Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises") region of the moon's near side, becoming just the second private vehicle ever to ace a lunar touchdown.

Blue Ghost and its 10 NASA science instruments operated as planned for the next two weeks, gathering a variety of data about the lunar environment.

The agency's Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) payload, for example, drilled into the near subsurface to measure temperature and heat flow. Another instrument, called Lunar PlanetVac, collected and sorted regolith (dirt and gravel), demonstrating techniques that could be used on sample-return missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.

And Blue Ghost snapped a range of breathtaking imagery, from up-close views of its own landing to a "diamond ring" solar eclipse to the newly released sunset shots.

"At NASA Science, we're incredibly pleased with Blue Ghost Mission 1, both in the outcome of the mission and also how well the Firefly and the NASA payload teams worked together to achieve something new," Kearns said.

Blue Ghost was always expected to meet its end on Sunday; the lander was not designed to survive the extreme cold of lunar night, which lasts for about two Earth weeks.

So Blue Ghost's silence is likely permanent, though Firefly will try hailing the lander again after the sun rises over Mare Crisium, company representatives said.

"This lander has surprised me multiple times over the last two months, and things have gone extremely well," Ray Allensworth, Firefly's spacecraft program director, said during today's news conference. "So, I'll remain optimistic. Maybe we will get a signal in early April, and we'll certainly let you all know if we do."

Each week, SpaceX launches satellites to build out its ever-growing constellation of Starlink satellites. That provides broadband internet service to users on the ground.

But Starlink satellites are only one part of the equation. Starlink users also need to have their hands on one of SpaceX's satellite internet kits to enable them to connect from anywhere with a good view of the sky.

SpaceX recently posted a video on X that offers a glimpse at how these kits are made in the company's factory outside of Austin, Texas. The video shows a few close-ups of the factory floor, where machines manufacture components for the standard Starlink kit on what looks like automated sections of the assembly line.

"Raw plastic pellets come in, raw aluminum comes in, and we make those into the Starlink kits, and then ship them right out to customers homes," John Federspiel, senior director for Starlink product engineering, says in the video. "Right now, we're producing 15,000 a day straight out of the factory."

The company also notes that the factory is less than two years old, and in that time, it's gone from zero to producing over 70,000 kits per week while employing over 1,000 workers.

Located in the Bastrop community, about 30 miles east of Austin, the video also details Starlink's plans to ramp up production in the factory, which the company is currently expanding.

"We're going to add over a million square feet of manufacturing space over the course of this year, and allow us to continue to insource more of our manufacturing processes," Alexandra Noe, senior director of Starlink production, says in the video, "so we can continue to go from raw material to completed kit within the walls of this factory."

Starlink says the expansion will address the growing demand for Starlink internet access, as the previous iteration of the production line was already operating at max capacity.

SpaceX originally announced their plans for a global satellite internet project back in 2015. Starlink now produces two kinds of kits for the consumer market, which use an antenna to connect to Starlink's satellites.

As of Feb. 2025, over 7,000 Starlink satellites are in orbit. The company says more than five million people currently use their internet services.

The Earth and a starry night appear to merge into one strange and otherworldly sci-fi trip in this mind-bending photo captured by a NASA astronaut in space with help from an astrophotgrapher on the ground.

What is it?

What looks like something out of the finale of "2001: A Space Odyssey" is actually a long-exposure image of the Earth and stars seen from space at night from the International Space Station as witnessed by NASA astronaut Don Pettit.

Pettit, a veteran astronaut and accomplished astrophotographer, unveiled the image on March 11 on social media. It shows a view out the window of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Freedom, which is returning four Crew-9 astronauts to Earth today.

The star trails above at the streaks on Earth occur in long exposure photos as the ISS flies over the Earth at 14,500 mph. On the planet below, the white blobs are lightning, with city lights creating the different colored streaks. The linear streaks above are stars.

Where is it?

This photo shows Earth, our home planet, and was taken from the International Space Station as it flew more than 261 miles up. The space station has been home rotating crews of astronauts since 2000, giving space travelers sweeping views of their planet.

This view, in particular, is from one of the windows aboard a visiting SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that ferred the Crew-9 astronaut mission to the ISS in September 2024. It is returning to Earth with two Crew-9 astronuts and two NASA astronauts who launched in June on a Boeing Starliner capsule, but ended staying aboard for 9 months due to NASA concerns with the vehicle, which returned empty last summer.

Why is it amazing?

Views of Earth from space can trigger what scientists call the "overview effect," a sense of wonder and perspective that astronauts have long reported as one of the most poignant parts of space travel.

This view is stunning not just in the sense of motion and speed, but in its complexity. Pettit, who has published his own "Spaceborne" book of space photography from the ISS, worked with famed astrophotographer Babak Tafreshi of The World At Night on Earth, who assisted in processing the image. It can be a difficult process, requiring the stacking of many images to get the desire result.

"Star trail from Crew 9 Dragon vehicle. Thanks to Babak Tafreshi for the image processing," Pettit wrote on X.

Want to know more?

If you're wondering about the ISS, our guide to the International Space Station explains all about its creation and assembly. (Spoiler alert, its days are numbered.) You can see more examples of Don Pettit's space photography in our recent stories, as well as coveage of his previous ISS missions.

New images of the infant universe captured by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) are the most precise "baby pictures" to date of the cosmos' "first steps" toward forming the first stars and galaxies.

The images of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is a fossil relic of the first light in the universe, reveal what the 13.8 billion-year-old cosmos was like just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

This incredible achievement from ACT has helped scientists validate the standard model of cosmology, the best description we have of the formation and evolution of the universe. In addition to showing this model to be incredibly robust, the ACT images show the intensity and polarization of the earliest light with unprecedented clarity.

The new data from ACT revealed the motion of the ancient gases in the universe as they are pulled by gravity. This shows the formation of ancient clouds of hydrogen and helium that will later collapse to birth the first stars. Thus, this constitutes the universe taking its first step towards the formation of galaxies.

"We are seeing the first steps towards making the earliest stars and galaxies," director of ACT and Princeton University researcher Suzanne Staggs said in a statement. "And we're not just seeing light and dark; we're seeing the polarization of light in high resolution. That is a determining factor distinguishing ACT from Planck and other earlier telescopes."

Despite telling scientists a great deal about the conditions in the early universe, these new ACT findings didn't contain clues that could help solve one of the biggest problems with our understanding of cosmic evolution: the so-called "Hubble tension."

Baby's first light

Prior to around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was a dark place, quite literally. That is because the cosmos was so hot and dense at this time that it was filled with a sea of plasma packed with unbound electrons that endlessly scattered photons, the particles that comprise light. This meant that light couldn't travel through the cosmos unimpeded, and thus, the cosmos was opaque like a dense fog.

Once the universe expanded and cooled enough (down to around 3000 Kelvin (approximately 4,900 degrees Fahrenheit or 2,700 degrees Celsius), electrons were able to bind with protons and form the first neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium, the first elements. This meant that photons suddenly were no longer endlessly scattered and were free to travel. Suddenly, after this event called the "last scattering," the universe was transparent.

This first light is seen today as the CMB. Though it fills the cosmos almost ubiquitously, there are small variations in the CMB, which scientists call "anisotropies," left behind by tiny fluctuations in the density of matter during the last scattering.

The fact that this cosmic fossil light is the furthest back in time astronomers can hope to see with light, and because it has been around since the earliest epoch of the cosmos, the CMB is an excellent way of tracing the evolution of the universe.

From its position high in the Chilean Andes, ACT captured this light, which has been traveling for over 13 billion years. Previous to this ACT data, the most precise and detailed picture of the CMB had come courtesy of the Planck space telescope.

"ACT has five times the resolution of Planck and greater sensitivity," team member and University of Oslo researcher Sigurd Naess said in a statement. "This means the faint polarization signal is now directly visible. There are other contemporary telescopes measuring the polarization with low noise, but none of them cover as much of the sky as ACT does."

This signature of polarization is important because it reveals how hydrogen and helium gases moved when the universe was in its infancy and filled with only traces of other heavier elements.

"Before, we got to see where things were, and now we also see how they're moving," Staggs said. "Like using tides to infer the presence of the moon, the movement tracked by the light's polarization tells us how strong the pull of gravity was in different parts of space."

With the ACT data, researchers could also see incredibly subtle variations in the density and velocity of the gases that filled the young universe. This includes what appear to be regions of high and low density in this sea of primordial hydrogen and helium. These early cosmic hills and valleys extend millions of light years across, and in the billions of years after the ACT snapshot, gravity pulled their denser regions inwards to birth stars that then formed the first galaxies.

"By looking back to that time, when things were much simpler, we can piece together the story of how our universe evolved to the rich and complex place we find ourselves in today," ACT analysis leader and Princeton University researcher Jo Dunkley said.

A trip back in cosmic time

This cosmic trip back in time revealed that the observable universe extends for almost 50 billion light-years in all directions around us. The universe's mass was calculated to be equivalent to around 2 trillion trillion (2 followed by 36 zeroes) suns, or 1,900 "zetta-suns" (a "zetta" refers to a hypothetical star so huge it has a mass 10²¹ times that of the sun).

Of this total, just 100 zetta suns are composed of the ordinary matter that we see around us on a day-to-day basis. Three-quarters of this mass is hydrogen, and a quarter of it is helium. Another 500 zetta suns worth of mass is accounted for by dark matter, while 1,300 zetta suns worth of mass is accounted for by dark energy, the mysterious force driving the acceleration of the expansion of the cosmos.

Tiny chargeless and almost massless "ghost particles" called neutrinos account for around four zetta-suns of mass. These particles are referred to as the ghosts of the particle zoo because they are so weakly interacting and ubiquitous that around 100 trillion (10 followed by 13 zeroes) neutrinos pass through your body every second, going completely unnoticed.

These amounts agree well with both theoretical models of the cosmos and with observations of galaxies.

The new ACT findings also refined estimates of the age of the universe, conforming to estimates of 13.8 billion years, with an uncertainty of only 0.1%, and the rate at which the cosmos expanded in its earlier eras.

This is possible because matter in the early universe sent out waves through space like ripples spreading out in circles on a pond. These ripples are "frozen into" the cosmic fossil that is the CMB.

"A younger universe would have had to expand more quickly to reach its current size, and the images we measure would appear to be reaching us from closer by," ACT deputy director and University of Pennsylvania researcher Mark Devlin said. "The apparent extent of ripples in the images would be larger in that case, in the same way that a ruler held closer to your face appears larger than one held at arm's length."

Addressing 'Hubble Trouble'

One of the major problems facing cosmology today is the existence of the "Hubble tension." This is the disparity in the rate at which the universe expands, a value called the Hubble constant, depending upon how this expansion is measured.

Using measurements of the movement of nearby galaxies, scientists calculate that the Hubble constant is as great as 73 to 74 kilometers per second per megaparsec (km/s/Mpc). That is larger than the value that scientists obtain when using the CMB to obtain the Hubble constant, which is 67 to 68 km/s/Mpc.

Using these high-resolution images of the CMB, as seen by ACT the team obtained new measurements of the Hubble constant. They found these are in agreement with prior Hubble constant measurements made using the CMB.

One of the major goals for ACT data was to investigate an alternative cosmic model that could account for the Hubble tension. These alternatives included changing the behavior of neutrinos and adding an additional period of accelerating cosmic expansion in the early universe.

"We wanted to see if we could and a cosmological model that matched our data and also predicted a faster expansion rate," Columbia University researcher Colin Hill, who used the ACT data in new research, said. "We have used the CMB as a detector for new particles or fields in the early universe, exploring previously uncharted terrain."

Hill added that the ACT data showed no evidence of such new signals, meaning that the standard model of cosmology has passed an extremely precise test of its accuracy.

"It was slightly surprising to us that we didn't find even partial evidence to support the higher value," Staggs said. "There were a few areas where we thought we might see some partial evidence for explanations of the tension, and they just weren’t there in the data."

ACT completed its observations in 2022 and was decommissioned. Astronomers now turning their attention to the new, more capable Simons Observatory at the same location in Chile.

The new ACT data are shared publicly on NASA’s LAMBDA archive, while the papers spinning out of this ACT data are available on Princeton's Atacama Cosmology Telescope website.

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is now officially the flagship darling of Paramount's "Star Trek" empire and we couldn’t be happier! Last week it was announced that prior to the 10-episode Season 3 launching on Paramount+ sometime this year, production has actually already begun in earnest on Season 4 at studios in Toronto, Canada.

To mark the occasion, luminaries from the cast including Ethan Peck (Spock), Celia Rose Gooding (Nyota Uhura), and Anson Mount (Captain Christopher Pike) teased a sweet set photo of the trio gathered on the USS Enterprise bridge set displaying a digital shooting clapboard. Peck and Mount stand wearing bemused grins, while Gooding displays a mysterious countenance and stylish new hairdo while casually seated.

Season 3 is slated to arrive later this year (sooner than later we hope!), and will shine a spotlight on guest cameos in the form of Cillian O'Sullivan ("In From The Cold") as "The Original Series"' Dr. Roger Korby and Rhys Darby ("Jumanji: The Next Level") portraying some fun legacy character that many anxious folks are speculating to possibly be Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Sybok, Cyrano Jones, or maybe even George Kirk. No detailed plot description for Season 4 is currently available of course so we'll have to wait patiently until Season 3 concludes to discern what the future might hold.

Paramount also delivered a fresh batch of 12 Season 3 character posters to build excitement for the outer space outing, which you can observe in the gallery below.

Per Paramount, photographer Pari Dukovic "used a standard digital projector mixed with strobe to amplify the actors skin and eyes with images of star nebulas and distant universes. The projections were different for each person and each actor reacted differently to it."

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" also stars Rebecca Romijn (Number One), Jess Bush (Nurse Christine Chapel), Christina Chong (La’An Noonien-Singh), Melissa Navia (Erica Ortegas), Babs Olusanmokun (Dr. M’Benga). Recurring guests include Paul Wesley as (James T. Kirk), Melanie Scrofano (Marie Batel), Martin Quinn (Montgomery 'Scotty' Scott), and Carol Kane (Pelia).

Produced by CBS Studios, Secret Hideout, and Roddenberry Entertainment, "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" is captained by co-showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers. Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman, and Jenny Lumet executive produce alongside Alonso Myers, Heather Kadin, Frank Siracusa, John Weber, Rod Roddenberry, Trevor Roth, and Aaron Baiers.

The Starlab commercial space station project is moving toward the production phase, having passed a key development milestone with NASA.

Starlab, a joint project between the U.S. space technology firm Voyager Space and European aerospace conglomerate Airbus, will consist of a service module and a habitat large enough to host four space tourists. Currently, the station is expected to launch in 2028 aboard SpaceX's Starship megarocket.

The recently completed preliminary design review (PDR) marks the beginning of the station's "full-scale" production, the company said in a statement.

During the PDR, an expert panel from NASA and the project partners greenlit the space station's design after reviewing potential safety issues and other concerns.

Related: Meet Starlab: Private space station planned to fly in the late 2020s

"Our successful PDR is a testament to the expertise and dedication of our team," Starlab CEO Tim Kopra said in the statement. "This milestone confirms that our space station design is technically sound and safe for astronaut crewed operations. Now, with our partners, we shift our focus to the full-scale development of the station, including the manufacturing of critical hardware and software integration."

The 12,000-cubic-foot (340-cubic-meter) Starlab will be fitted with a robotic arm and a set of racks for microgravity experiments to enable companies and researchers to develop new products in space. Voyager also hopes to seal a contract with NASA to host the agency's astronauts.

The project will now move into its detailed design and hardware development phase, which will conclude with a critical design review likely in 2026.

In the coming months, the project partners will develop a high-fidelity mockup for systems testing, which will be assembled at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston this summer. The teams will also begin assembling the station's avionics and computing systems, test software and novel life support technologies including an Advanced Urine Processor, a more compact and failure-proof version of the water-recovery system currently in use at the International Space Station.

"Starlab's progress underscores our collective commitment to ensuring U.S. leadership in low Earth orbit with investment and partnership from key allied international organizations and agencies," said Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of Voyager Technologies, the majority shareholder in Starlab's joint venture. "We are ready to advance human spaceflight, ensure a continuous human presence in LEO, and build a thriving commercial space ecosystem."

The space station project received $217.5 million from NASA through the Commercial LEO Destinations Phase 1 program and $15 million from the Texas Space Commission, in addition to private funding.

The asteroid 2024 YR4, once considered potentially hazardous, isn't likely to hit us anytime soon. Now, a team of researchers says that instead of stressing about the near miss, we can be excited by it because it will give us a surprising opportunity to study the asteroid up close.

2024 YR4 was first discovered in December 2024. It's relatively small — just 130 to 300 feet (40 to 90 meters) across. But it's classified as an Apollo-type asteroid, meaning its orbit regularly intersects that of Earth, thus creating the potential for an impact. When 2024 YR4 was first observed, astronomers estimated that it had a roughly 1% chance of striking us.

As observations improved, the chance of an encounter went up to a few percent, which triggered panicked headlines around the world, as an impact of that size would release an energy equivalent to nuclear warhead yields. If it struck a major city, the damage would be incalculable. But even more refined calculations have now brought that chance down to nearly zero, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

But when the universe gives you asteroid lemons, you should make science lemonade, researchers at the Initiative for Interstellar Studies in the United Kingdom and Space Initiatives Inc propose in a paper uploaded to the preprint database arXiv in February.

They pointed out that, even though 2024 YR4 likely won't strike Earth, it will come close on a regular basis. This makes it an excellent target for future asteroid missions. The asteroid will make close passes roughly every four years, when its orbit crosses Earth's. This means that, during those windows, the asteroid and our planet don't have very large differences in velocities. When that happens, once a spacecraft has left Earth's gravity well, it can reach the asteroid essentially "for free"; it doesn't need that much extra velocity.

The researchers estimated that fly-by missions are exceptionally easy, with launch windows opening up almost every year. In 2028, a mission could reach 2024 YR4 in as little as a few months and pass by it very slowly, providing plenty of time for detailed observations.

But even more complicated missions are well within the capabilities of our current technologies. If we wanted to perform a repeat of NASA's DART mission, which successfully deflected a small asteroid, we could test that with 2024 YR4.

The researchers found that if we launched such a mission during an optimal window, around the summer of 2028, a spacecraft weighing as little as 22 pounds (10 kilograms) could reach the asteroid in a few months, strike it and change the asteroid's path by up to 620 miles (1,000 km). This would mean that if 2024 YR4 were going to hit Earth on its next closest approach in 2032, we could nudge it enough to avoid disaster.

Even rendezvous and landing missions are relatively easy. A launch in December 2028 could bring a spacecraft to the asteroid with enough fuel left over to rendezvous with it and attempt a landing, the research team said. The time between launch and landing would be only a couple of years, so we could deploy the latest technology and know that it would be sitting on an asteroid's surface in a very short time. That mission could also collect samples and bring them back to Earth for further study.

In fact, the researchers noted that we already have the technology to accomplish all of this. A spacecraft like New Horizons, which sped off to the outer limits of the solar system in 2006, has more than enough capabilities to study 2024 YR4 in as much detail as we want during its next closest approach.

So the next time we hear about a potentially hazardous asteroid, we should instead hope that it comes close enough that we can get some good science out of the encounter.

It was the opening scene of the 1995 feature film "Apollo 13" and was recreated for the Neil Armstrong biopic "First Man" more than 20 years later. It was one of the catalysts for the Soviet Union to land the first human on the moon in the Apple TV+ alternate history drama "For All Mankind" and was a factor in recruiting Scarlett Johansson's character to improve NASA's image in the 2024 movie "Fly Me to the Moon."

And it was a turn in the life of Eugene Cernan as retold in the 2014 documentary "Last Man on the Moon," directed by Mark Craig.

"We covered a little bit of Apollo 1 in that film because Gene Cernan and the Chaffees were next-door neighbors, and Gene looked after Martha and the family for a while afterwards, so it was relevant. But Martha said so much more than we could use in that film, and I was thinking, 'My god, I've never heard this before. You know, there's a story to be told, if the families are up for doing it,'" said Craig in an interview with collectSPACE.com.

On Saturday (March 15), the Boulder International Film Festival hosted the world premiere of "Apollo 1," Craig's new feature-length documentary about the three NASA astronauts who were killed on Jan. 27, 1967, when a fire tore through their spacecraft during a pre-flight test on the launch pad.

"Nobody's ever fully told their story, and it should be told," said Craig. "NASA was okay with it now, but the families [of the fallen astronauts] were the most important people to have in the film."

Related: Apollo 1: The fatal fire

It took a couple of years, but Craig eventually arranged for the participation of at least one family member of each of the three Apollo 1 crewmates. Martha and her daughter, Sheryl, share stories of Roger Chaffee, the rookie astronaut assigned to the mission. Lowell Grissom speaks about his brother, Mercury astronaut Virgil "Gus" Grissom, who was commander of Apollo 1. And Ed White III and his sister Bonnie recall their father, who two years prior to the fire became the first American to conduct a spacewalk.

"You have to appreciate that, for a lot of people, any trauma like that, irrespective of whether it's related to spaceflight, it lives with you for the rest of your life. It's a very traumatic moment that I was asking people to revisit and to share, and that was a big thing," said Craig.

The film also features astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who before helping to test the Apollo lunar module in Earth orbit was backup to Chaffee on the Apollo 1 crew.

"In addition to the families, for me, the big catch was Rusty, because as one of the guys on the backup crew, he could bring to the film something that nobody else could. And he obviously did," said Craig.

While the documentary does spend time on the fire itself, including playing back the last audio recorded of the crew, a large portion of the film is dedicated to the astronauts' lives prior to the tragedy.

"It's not an investigative documentary, unpacking all that happened. I think that is already out there," Craig told collectSPACE. "It was important to me to portray how these three men lived, not just how they died."

In the process, Craig sought out footage that had not been seen by the public in decades. In one instance, he came across photos of White delivering a speech at the Alamo after his history-making Gemini 4 spacewalk in 1965.

"And I thought, somewhere, there's got to be some footage. So I dispatched our archive researcher," said Craig. "To his credit, he found it, but it was still on a roll of film. It had never been transferred or digitized to the kind of media we need now."

"I was really glad to find it, though, because I really wanted the audience to understand just how famous these guys were. And I think at that time, Ed White must have been one of the most famous people on planet Earth. You know, that spacewalk was a hell of a thing," Craig said.

Another discovery involved the retreat that the Apollo 1 prime and backup crews went on to work out the procedures for the flight.

"When Rusty hit us with that one, I literally fell out of my chair," said Craig. "And if you don't mind, I'd rather not even mention it here, because I want it to be a surprise for the audience when they hear it."

Related: Ed White: The 1st American to walk in space

Ultimately, the greatest shock may be how many of those who see "Apollo 1" knew of the astronauts and the tragedy before watching, said Craig.

"I was really surprised to find that there was this lack of knowledge, not just about Apollo 1, but the space program in general. Projects like this film now have to serve younger audiences who weren't around then and who don't know this stuff," he said. "I want people to really understand that [the race to the moon] was a huge undertaking in a really compressed time period, an unwieldy infrastructure without the benefit of emails and internet and all of the stuff we take for granted."

"It's still mind-boggling what was achieved in that time, but the nature of how it was then was a contributing factor in the accident," said Craig. "It was a tragedy, but without Apollo 1, we wouldn't have learned all of the things that we needed to get to the moon."

"Apollo 1," produced by Stopwatch Productions, 7T1 Films and Haviland Digital, will next be shown at the Sonoma International Film Festival in Sonoma, California on Thursday (March 20) and Saturday (March 22). Director Mark Craig will speak at at both screenings and be joined by astronaut Rusty Schweickart at the Saturday showing. "Apollo 1" is also still available to stream online through the Boulder International Film Festival beginning Monday (March 17) to March 28..

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on X at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2025 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

Recent findings from samples collected by China's Chang'e 6 mission have provided valuable insights into the history of the moon, particularly its far side.

The Chang'e 6 mission launched in early May 2024, landed in the vast South Pole-Aitken (SPA), and returned to Earth with 4 pounds and 4.29 ounces (1,935.3 grams) of the first-ever samples from the moon's far side in late June.

New research from scientists with the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences and published in the journal Science found that sample analysis backs up an established model of the moon as a global liquid magma ocean in the early days after its formation and likely lasted for tens to hundreds of millions of years.

By analyzing basalt fragments retrieved from this region, the scientists discovered that these rocks share a similar composition to low-titanium basalts previously collected by NASA's Apollo missions to the moon's near side. This connection helps to build a more complete picture of the moon's volcanic processes.

At the same time, some of the material in the Chang'e 6 samples deviated from those of the Apollo missions in terms of the ratio of certain Uranium and Lead isotopes. Explaining this, the paper proposes that the gigantic impact which formed the roughly 1,600 mile (2,500 kilometers) wide SPA basin around 4.2 billion years ago modified the chemical and physical properties of the moon's mantle in this region.

Chang'e 6 was China's second lunar sample return mission, following on from the 2020 Chang'e 5 mission to the moon's near side. Initial analysis of the Chang'e 6 samples suggests a number of differences to nearside samples, including differences in density, structure and concentrations of signature chemicals.

Further analysis could lead to new concepts and theories regarding the origin and evolution of the moon, according to scientists.

Update for 7 pm ET: SpaceX's Crew-9 Dragon successfully splashed down with NASA Starliner astronauts Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore and Crew-9 astronauts Nick Hague of NASA and Alexandr Gorbunov of Russia. Read our full wrap story for videos and photos.

NASA astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Sunita "Suni" Williams are finally headed back to Earth.

The duo launched to the International Space Station (ISS) last June on the first-ever crewed mission of Boeing's new Starliner capsule. Their mission was supposed to last just 10 days or so, but they ended up staying aloft for more than nine months.

Here's a rundown of Butch and Suni's surprisingly long, and unexpectedly controversial, time in space, which will end with a splashdown this evening (March 18) off the Florida coast.

June 5, 2024: Starliner takes to the skies

Starliner lifted off June 5 atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on its debut crewed mission, with the ISS as the destination.

Wilmore and Williams, both former U.S. Navy test pilots, expected to remain in orbit for about 10 days on the mission, which was called Crew Flight Test (CFT). The main goal was to show that Starliner is ready to carry astronauts to and from the ISS, so that the spacecraft can start flying operational, long-duration missions in the near future.

Related: Starliner: Boeing's next-generation spaceship for astronauts

June 6: Starliner docks with the ISS after thruster issues

Starliner arrived at the ISS on June 6, on its second try. Five of Starliner's 28 reaction-control system (RCS) thrusters malfunctioned during its pursuit of the orbital lab, thwarting its first docking attempt on that same day

The mission team revived four of the five problematic thrusters before clearing Starliner to approach the ISS on its second time around. Once aboard, Wilmore and Williams were greeted by Expedition 71's seven-member crew.

June 18: Starliner's return date delayed

NASA began to push back the date for Starliner's return to Earth to troubleshoot the thruster problem, marking June 26 as a touchdown target. Additional issues soon cropped up as well, however, and the mission was further extended.

NASA noted a small helium leak in Starliner's propulsion system before launch and decided it wasn't a serious concern. But a few more leaks occurred after the Atlas V deployed the capsule, which the space agency wanted to look into before Starliner returned home.

July 2: NASA extends CFT mission past 45-day limit

NASA originally set the maximum duration for CFT at 45 days. But in early July, the agency deemed Starliner's performance in orbit to be good enough to exceed that limit, giving mission team members more time to test and analyze the thruster issues and the helium leaks before Starliner came home. NASA set a tentative return date for later that summer.

July 2024: Starliner tests thrusters at ISS as NASA reviews options

Engineers performed an in-space test on Starliner's RCS thrusters in preparation for a wider NASA review. This would determine if the capsule would be safe enough to carry Wilmore and Williams home.

By that time, the NASA astronauts, who had set out for 10 days in space, had been living on the ISS for more than 55 days. The agency still hoped to return them to Earth sometime in August.

Aug. 24: NASA says Starliner will return without crew

On Aug. 24, NASA and Boeing finally announced that Starliner would return to Earth without the CFT astronauts. The agency said Boeing's capsule would land at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, while Wilmore and Williams would continue living on board the ISS until February 2025 at the earliest.

The Starliner duo would return to Earth aboard the Crew Dragon capsule flying SpaceX's Crew-9 astronaut mission, which was expected to launch to the station in late September.

Aug 30: NASA cuts 2 from Crew-9 mission to make room for Starliner astronauts

Crew Dragon usually carries four astronauts to and from the orbiting lab. But on Aug. 30, NASA announced that it would take two of its astronauts off Crew-9 — mission commander Zena Cardman and mission specialist Stephanie Wilson — so that the Dragon would have room for Wilmore and Williams on the ride back to Earth.

Sept. 7: Starliner returns to Earth without crew

Nearly three months later than originally expected, Starliner came home. It touched down in New Mexico at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT) on Sept. 7 without anyone on board. The desert landing went off without a hitch.

Sept. 13: 'We just ran out of time:' Butch and Suni give teleconference from ISS

While Starliner landed sans crew, the outcome could've been different if NASA had more time, its former crewmembers said. "The timeline came to the point where we had to decide, is Starliner coming back with us or without us?" Wilmore said during a call with reporters that he and Williams held from the ISS on Sept. 13.

"We just did not have enough time to get to the end of that runway where we could say that we were going to come back with it. I think we'd have gotten there, but we just ran out of time," he added.

Sept. 22: Suni Williams takes command of ISS

After more than three months aboard the ISS, Williams assumed command of the orbiting lab on Sept. 22, taking the reins from departing Russian cosmonaut Olog Kononenko. He landed back on Earth Sept. 23 along with two crewmates in the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft.

Sept. 28: Crew-9 launches to the ISS

A Crew Dragon capsule carrying the two Crew-9 astronauts — NASA's Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sept. 28. This was the first crewed launch from the upgraded pad. The two empty seats on the capsule were reserved for Wilmore and Williams.

Nov. 12: Suni Williams refutes health claims

After tabloid speculation that Suni Williams' health was suffering due to her unexpectedly long space stay, the ISS commander dispelled the rumors, saying she was fine and that she'd kept up a healthy workout routine.

"I'm the same weight that I was when I got up here," Williams said on Nov. 12 in a video interview from the ISS, in response to a question from the New England Sports Network.

Dec. 17: NASA announces that Butch and Suni are staying up until March 2025

Crew-9 could not come home until its replacement, SpaceX's Crew-10 mission, made it to the ISS. Crew-10 was supposed to launch in February, but SpaceX encountered delays with that mission's Crew Dragon, a new capsule that had not yet flown. On Dec. 17, NASA announced that those delays had pushed Crew-10's launch — and, therefore, Crew-9's return to Earth — until late March at the earliest.

Jan. 28, 2025: President Trump asks Elon Musk to 'go get' Butch and Suni

Butch and Suni's situation generated a great deal of media attention from the beginning, but President Donald Trump made the spotlight shine much brighter shortly after his inauguration. On Jan. 28, the president announced that he had asked SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk to "go get" Butch and Suni from the ISS, claiming they had been "virtually abandoned in space by the Biden administration." Musk affirmed that he would indeed do so, saying it was "terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long."

This was a bit puzzling for most space observers, as the plan for SpaceX to bring Butch and Suni down had been in place for five months at this point.

Related: 'Stuck' NASA astronauts on ISS grilled on Earthly politics as long 9-month mission nears end. 'From my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all.'

Jan. 30: Suni Williams sets spacewalk record

Suni Williams set the record for the most total time by a woman spent performing EVAs (extravehicular activities) after she and Wilmore removed a faulty radio communications unit during their 5.5-hour spacewalk on Jan. 30. The astronauts succeeded in the removal after two failed attempts during previous spacewalks. Williams has now accumulated a total of 62 hours and six minutes of spacewalking time.

Feb. 11: NASA moves Butch and Suni's return date up to mid-March

On Feb. 11, NASA announced something unusual: Butch and Suni would actually be coming home earlier than expected. The agency said it would go with a flight-proven Crew Dragon, the capsule Endurance, on Crew-10 rather than wait for SpaceX to finish work on the new spacecraft. As a result, Crew-10 could launch in mid-March, allowing Crew-9 to return to Earth shortly thereafter.

March 14, 2025: Crew-10 launches to relieve Crew-9

The four-astronaut Crew-10 ended up launching atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 14, making it to the ISS 28 hours later.

Endurance's arrival officially cleared the way for Crew-9's Dragon, named Freedom, to return to Earth with Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Gorbunov. The quartet departed the ISS on Tuesday (March 18) at 1:05 a.m. EDT (0505 GMT) and are scheduled to splash down off the Florida coast at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) that same day.

SpaceX is poised to land its Crew Dragon Freedom from the International Space Station with the two crewmates who launched on it and two astronauts who arrived at the space station last June on Boeing's Starliner, which landed uncrewed without them. If you want to watch it live, we've got details on when and how to see it.

SpaceX's Crew-9 is scheduled to splash down on Tuesday (March 18) at about 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) off the coast of Florida after a smooth undocking from the ISS in the wee hours this morning. This landing will mark the ninth operational and 10th overall crew return by the company under a contract with NASA's commercial crew program.

You'll be able to watch the Crew-9 landing live on Space.com, courtesy of SpaceX and NASA, in a livestream expected to begin about 72 minutes before splashdown at 4:45 p.m. EDT (2045 GMT). Follow our Crew-9 live updates for more on the reentry and read on for exact timing information that we've collected.

What time is SpaceX's Crew-9 landing?

NASA and SpaceX have targeted Crew-9's splashdown aboard the Crew Dragon Freedom for about 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) on Tuesday (March 18) in the Gulf of Mexico. (President Donald Trump has signed an executive order renaming the body of water the Gulf of America, but Space.com follows AP style, which sticks with "Gulf of Mexico" as its internationally recognized name.) The landing had originally been targeted for no earlier than Wednesday (March 18), but the forecast for the remainder of the week called for worsening weather conditions, so the astronauts' return was moved up a day.

The landing follows Crew-9 departing from the International Space Station (ISS) earlier on Tuesday. Freedom undocked from the space-facing port of the Harmony module at around 1:05 a.m. EDT (0505 GMT). A deorbit burn, which will begin Crew-9's descent back to Earth, is scheduled for approximately 5:11 p.m. EDT (2111 GMT).

Related: International Space Station: Everything you need to know

Who is returning to Earth on Crew Dragon Freedom?

Three NASA astronauts and a cosmonaut with Russia's federal space corporation Roscosmos are returning to Earth aboard Crew Dragon Freedom.

Crew-9 commander Nick Hague and mission specialist Aleksandr Gorbunov both launched on Freedom to the space station on Sept. 28, 2024. Normally, SpaceX's Crew Dragon flights to the orbiting outpost have four people on board, but this time Freedom only flew with two crew members to leave seats open for the other two astronauts landing with Hague and Gorbunov.

Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore arrived at the station on June 5 aboard the Crew Flight Test (CFT) of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft "Calypso." The new capsule experienced issues with its thrusters on the way to the ISS, which resulted in NASA deciding to return Starliner to the ground without its crew. Calypso successfully landed at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico on Sept. 7, 2024.

Williams and Wilmore became members of the station's Expedition 72 crew and are mission specialists on Crew-9. They will wear SpaceX spacesuits for the ride home, having fit into a spare on the station and an extra sent up with a cargo delivery.

How long have the Crew-9 astronauts been away from Earth?

Assuming a landing at 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 GMT) on Tuesday, Crew Dragon Freedom, together with Hague and Gorbunov, will have traveled 72,553,920 statute miles (116,764,215 kilometers), circling Earth 2,736 times over a total of 171 days in space.

This is Hague's third spaceflight, for a total time off Earth of 374 days. (Gorbunov is completing his first spaceflight.)

Williams and Wilmore will have been in space for 286 days, completing 4,576 trips around Earth while traveling 121,347,491 statute miles (195,289,857 km). This is the third spaceflight for both Williams and Wilmore.

WIlliams will now have a career spaceflight total of 608 days, the second-most of any U.S. astronaut after Peggy Whitson, who has 675 days. Wilmore will have spent 464 days off the planet.

Where is Crew Dragon Freedom landing on Earth?

SpaceX and NASA have targeted a site off the west coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico for the return of Crew-9 aboard Crew Dragon Freedom. The landing site could change, pending weather conditions.

Crew-9 is scheduled to be the last NASA crew to splash down in the Gulf. Future SpaceX flights under the agency's commercial crew program will land off the coast of California in the Pacific Ocean to avoid debris from Dragon's expendable trunk from possibly falling over populated areas.

A small space private capsule has captured stunning onboard scenes from its high-velocity atmospheric reentry.

Varda Space's W-2 mission came to a successful and spectacular end on Feb. 27 when the capsule reentered the atmosphere and landed at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia.

The 265-pound (120 kilograms) capsule spent six weeks in space after launching atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Transporter 12 mission.

The company has now released a video capturing dramatic images from its final moments in orbit above the planet and the final, fiery plunge back into Earth's atmosphere.

The final two minutes of the video show things really heating up, as sparks of varying colors and intensities are captured by the camera as the spacecraft interacts with the thick atmosphere at speeds exceeding Mach 25, or 25 times the speed of sound.

The conical capsule landed with the assistance of a parachute and was quickly recovered. The spacecraft carried a spectrometer from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and a Varda enhanced pharmaceutical reactor for the company's in-orbit manufacturing plans, and collected critical data for developing hypersonic technologies.

Varda aims to become a major player in the nascent in-space manufacturing industry, utilizing the unique environment of microgravity to manufacture products including pharmaceuticals.

The W-2 mission landing follows a year after the company's first mission, W-1, which landed in Utah in February 2024. The mission saw W-1 in orbit for eight months before delivering to Earth crystals of an antiviral drug that were grown in orbit.

A major milestone with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has been reached with the installation of the telescope's enormous LSST Camera — the last optical component required before the last phase of testing can begin.

The car-sized Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Camera that was recently installed on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is the largest digital camera ever built and will be used to capture detailed images of the southern hemisphere sky over a decade.

"The installation of the LSST Camera on the telescope is a triumph of science and engineering," said Harriet Kung, Acting Director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science in a statement. "We look forward to seeing the unprecedented images this camera will produce."

The telescope is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and is named after Dr. Vera C. Rubin, an American astronomer whose work provided strong evidence for the existence of dark matter. Along with her colleague Kent Ford, Rubin observed that in the numerous galaxies they studied, stars at the outer edges were moving just as fast as those near the center. This was unusual because, according to Newtonian physics and Kepler's laws of planetary motion, objects farther from the center of a gravitational system should orbit more slowly due to the weaker gravitational pull.

After accounting for all visible matter, the gravitational force from the observed mass wasn't enough to keep these fast-moving stars bound to the galaxy. Without additional mass providing extra gravitational pull, the galaxies should have been flying apart. This discrepancy led to the conclusion that an unseen form of mass, now known as dark matter, was holding them together.

Following its namesake, the Rubin telescope will investigate the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter with cutting-edge technology. Its state-of-the-art mirror design, highly sensitive camera, rapid survey speed and advanced computing infrastructure each represent breakthroughs in their respective fields.

Every few nights, it will survey the entire sky, creating an "ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of the universe," the statement adds. Each image will be so massive that displaying it would require 400 ultra-high-definition TV screens.

"This unique movie will bring the night sky to life, yielding a treasure trove of discoveries: asteroids and comets, pulsating stars, and supernova explosions," states the observatory's website.

While the LSST Camera is an engineering marvel, its installation was equally challenging. In March 2025, after months of testing in Rubin Observatory's clean room, the summit team used a vertical platform lift to move the camera to the telescope floor. A custom lifting device then carefully positioned and secured it on the telescope for the first time.

"Mounting the LSST Camera onto the Simonyi Telescope was an effort requiring intense planning, teamwork across the entire observatory and millimeter-precision execution," said Freddy Muñoz, Rubin Observatory Mechanical Group Lead. "Watching the LSST Camera take its place on the telescope is a proud moment for us all."

Over the coming weeks, the LSST Camera's utilities and systems will be connected and tested. Soon, it will be ready to capture detailed images of the night sky. The Rubin telescope, under construction in Cerro Pachón, Chile, is expected to see first light in 2025.

The historic mission of Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander is over.

The solar-powered Blue Ghost went dark on Sunday evening (March 16) after the sun set on its lunar locale, bringing an end to a highly successful two weeks of surface operations on the moon.

"We battle-tested every system on the lander and simulated every mission scenario we could think of to get to this point," Blue Ghost Chief Engineer Will Coogan said in a Firefly statement today (March 17) that announced the end of the mission.

"But what really sets this team apart is the passion and commitment to each other," he added. "Our team may look younger and less experienced than those of many nations and companies that attempted moon landings before us, but the support we have for one another is what fuels the hard work and dedication to finding every solution that made this mission a success."

Blue Ghost's mission, which Firefly called "Ghost Riders in the Sky," was the company's first-ever lunar effort. The flight was supported by NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which puts agency science gear on robotic landers to gather a wealth of cost-effective data ahead of the arrival of Artemis astronauts on the moon a few years from now.

Blue Ghost carried 10 NASA payloads, which it successfully delivered to a basaltic plain on the lunar near side called Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises") on March 2. The successful touchdown was just the second ever by a private lunar lander, after that of Intuitive Machines' Odysseus vehicle in February 2024. Odysseus operated for seven Earth days on the lunar surface before going dark.

The mission plan called for Blue Ghost, and those science instruments, to operate for a lunar day — about two Earth weeks. And that indeed happened, Firefly said today, declaring "Ghost Riders in the Sky" 100% successful.

"After a flawless moon landing, the Firefly team immediately moved into surface operations to ensure all 10 NASA payloads could capture as much science as possible during the lunar day," Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in the same statement.

"We're incredibly proud of the demonstrations Blue Ghost enabled, from tracking GPS signals on the moon for the first time to robotically drilling deeper into the lunar surface than ever before," Kim said. "We want to extend a huge thank you to the NASA CLPS initiative and the White House administration for serving as the bedrock for this Firefly mission. It has been an honor to enable science and technology experiments that support future missions to the moon, Mars and beyond."

Related: Touch down on the moon with private Blue Ghost lander in this amazing video

Blue Ghost was even able to observe the "Blood Worm Moon" total lunar eclipse of March 13-14. But, thanks to its unique vantage point, the lander saw this dramatic event as a solar eclipse, snapping a gorgeous "diamond ring" photo that Firefly shared with the world.

The lander beamed home a total of 119 gigabytes (GB) of data, including 51 GB of science information, before going dark as expected on Sunday at around 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT), according to Firefly.

Blue Ghost's final hours were productive. It "captured imagery of the lunar sunset on March 16, providing NASA with data on whether lunar dust levitates due to solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow that was hypothesized and observed by Eugene Cernan on Apollo 17," Firefly wrote in the statement. "Following the sunset, Blue Ghost operated for 5 hours into the lunar night and continued to capture imagery that measures how dust behavior changes after sunset."

"Ghost Riders in the Sky" was part of a wave of private moon exploration. For instance, Blue Ghost launched on Jan. 15 along with another private lunar lander, Tokyo-based ispace's Resilience, which is expected to make its own touchdown attempt on June 5.

And Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander, called Athena, lifted off on Feb. 26 and landed near the moon's south pole on March 6. However, Athena, which was also flying a CLPS mission, tipped onto its side just after touchdown and was declared dead on March 7.

That exploration surge will continue in the coming years, if all goes to plan. Firefly is already looking forward to its second moon mission, a CLPS effort that's expected to launch in 2026. That flight will send Blue Ghost to the lunar far side and also place Firefly's "Elytra Dark" spacecraft in orbit around the moon.

After a few false starts over the years, a Starship Troopers reboot is now in active development at Sony's Columbia Pictures with District 9 and Chappie writer-director Neill Blomkamp leading the charge. Let’s hope it goes better than the invasion of Klendathu.

The Hollywood Reporter shared the exclusive on March 14, stating Blomkamp would write and direct a new adaptation of the classic sci-fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein. It's been reported it won't stick close to Paul Verhoeven's highly satirical and exaggerated take and will instead "go back to the source material," which received criticism over its glorification of the military and a fascist society, among other things.

Despite the initial confusion and many discussions over whether Verhoeven’s 1997 blockbuster was subverting or doubling down on the source material’s politics, the movie was generally well-received and gained a diehard cult following over the years.

Nowadays, it’s consistently brought up as one of the great sci-fi movies from the ‘90s, with the cutting-edge VFX, set, and animatronic work being highlights that have helped it age remarkably well. The same can't be said for the four dreadful straight-to-home-market sequels that continued the story.

From a business point of view, it's an interestingly timed move when we consider Sony has just announced a Helldivers movie adaptation. For the unaware: PlayStation's Helldivers 2 became a massive hit last year, partly thanks to its off-beat tone, which landed extremely close to Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. If the powers that be move forward with both projects after the scripts are approved, it'll be interesting to see how the movies are differentiated.

Even putting tonal and political similarities aside, the central premise of the co-op online shooter is roughly the same: In the future, a not-at-all fascist dictatorship called the Federation of Super Earth launches huge military campaigns against various threats from other worlds to protect humanity's way of life, with big horrible bugs being the most iconic enemy faction to be destroyed with extreme prejudice.

Regardless, we’re excited to see what Blomkamp has in store for us. While most cinephiles argue that District 9 (his big-screen debut) is far above the filmmaker's following sci-fi efforts, Elysium and Chappie were still relatively successful.

In recent years he made sci-fi horror feature Demonic (2021) and a Gran Turismo adaptation (2023) for Sony, alongside numerous shorts and transmedia collaborations, including video games like EA's Anthem.

Meanwhile, everyone is still wondering if District 10 is happening at any point after a promising update back in 2021. For now, it appears that Blomkamp really wants to put his stamp on alien-blasting sci-fi action and Starship Troopers seems like an ideal fit. In recent times, games like Starship Troopers: Extermination and Terran Command have kept fans of the multimedia franchise busy, so perhaps this big-screen reboot has a fighting chance.

A brilliant comet lights up the night sky over Chile's Atacama Desert in this stunning image captured by a photographer with the European Southern Observatory in January 2025.

What is it?

What you're seeing here is the Great Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS), a comet discovered in 2024 that lit up the night sky late in that year and early 2025, and was the brightest comet in 18 years when it was visible to stargazers throughout January 2025. The comet was first discovered in April 2024 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (or ATLAS) using a nearly 20-inch (0.5 meters) telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile. It soon became one of the most anticipated skywatching targets of early 2025.

For several days in January, it was visible to the unaided eye for stargazers with clear and dark skies, was even visible in the daytime, a rarity among comets.

Where is it?

This image shows comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) from the European Southern Observatory near its Very Large Telescope (which is visible on the mountaintop of Cerro Paranal at left) as seen by ESO photographer Florentin Millour on Jan. 21, 2025. ESO shared the image to the public today, March 17.

ESO's observatories in Chile's Atacama Desert operate under extremely dark conditions. Unlike in the Northern Hemisphere, where the comet was only visible for a short week, it was visible for much longer in the Southern Hemisphere, home to ESO and other observatories.

Why is it amazing?

Comets that are visible to the unaided eye are an extremely exciting sight. They are icy wanderers from the outer solar system left over from the formation of the sun its planets, including Earth.

Because comets like C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) are made mostly of water ice, as they approach the inner solar system, that ice sublimates into a gas as it nears the sun to create a vast, willowy tail. In Millour's photo, you can see that tail blowing out, away from the sun just after sunset, from the comet's head (called the nucleus) on the horizon. The solar wind also blows ions of the comet, creating second ion tail.

The fact that C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) was briefly visible during daytime hours is a rare sight indeed. Even astronauts in space observed the comet!

Want to know more?

If you're looking to learn more, check out our feature on the discovery of comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) by skywatching columnist Joe Rao. He also has this retrospective on C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) that explains why it will go down as one of the great comets of the 21st century.

We also have a deep guide on how comets work, as well as a guide on how to observe and photograph comets in the night sky.

Irish eyes are smiling today as we welcome the annual St. Patrick's Day parades, pub parties, and patriotic celebrations popping up around the Western world. But if you'd rather stay home and enjoy a nice movie, we've put together an intriguing list of 7 Irish sci-fi movies heralding in one aspect or another from the Emerald Isle.

The best sci-fi movies might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Ireland, but here are some bangers that demand attention. These movies showcase a distinct Irish sensibility sprinkled with tentacled sea monsters, alien babies, space hijackers, vintage UFOs, otherworldly parasites, resource-sucking invaders, exploding eyeballs, and the hint of a magically-created crustacean.

Shout “Erin go bragh" and let's get busy with 7 Irish sci-fi films to enjoy this St. Patrick's Day.

"Grabbers" (2012)

"It's always the quiet places where the madness happens." This fun sci-fi horror comedy that suggests the tactic of remaining drunk to survive an alien creature's murderous menace is the perfect way to indulge in St. Patrick's Day while tipping back a pint or two.

After the fishing residents of Ireland's Erin Island are besieged by tentacled alien creatures, pilot whales start appearing dead on the beach, and lobstermen catch some slimy beast, they arrive at the conclusion that they'll be far less appetizing to the cosmic monsters if their blood is saturated with alcohol. Infused with witty "Shawn of the Dead"-like humor and hilarious special effects!

"Sea Fever" (2019)

Delivered by BAFTA-winning Dublin filmmaker Neasa Hardiman, "Sea Fever" brings to mind larger aquatic-set Hollywood sci-fi releases like "Deep Star Six," "Leviathan," and in some elements of paranoid contagion horror, "The Thing" and "Prometheus." It's a sea-centered story of a marine biology student named Siobhan who boards a fishing trawler sailing the choppy seas of Western Ireland to conduct a research project.

While floating across the Deep Blue Sea, the ship is gripped by some space-born underwater behemoth that infects the vessel and its crew with a parasitic organism living in the water bins. Sioban endeavors to fight these eyeball-seeking critters and the tentacular being's blue goo larvae to the death.

"Vivarium" (2019)

Be prepared for a few sleepless nights after watching this surreal cinematic descent into mild madness. "Vivarium" is a spider's web puzzle box of psychological sci-fi delights that remains open to a number of interpretations of its story about a home-shopping couple who arrive at a strange residential neighborhood with identical houses, then become trapped in this suburban nightmare while trying to escape.

The plot involves mimicry, the nature of reality, avian metaphors, freedom, the mundane horrors of domesticity, and an alien species seeking someone to raise their offspring to imitate human beings. Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan and starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, "Vivarium" is a trippy existential jewel to ponder over and dissect.

"Summer of the Flying Saucer" (2008)

A super enjoyable family comedy that plays out in the small town of Knockshee, Ireland circa 1967 where an extraterrestrial craft piloted by two benign humanoid alien beings plops down on the humble Galway-area farm of Danny and his family.

Bored with his West Ireland life and trying to integrate as a long-haired, peace-loving Hippie, Danny finds new meaning after this load of interlopers arrives, falling in love with the girl alien, and attempting to help the visitors blend in until they can repair their craft and travel home. Dubliner Martin Duffy directs this charmer with a light touch.

"The Quiet Hour" (2014)

Not to be confused with the Hollywood sci-fi horror franchise, "A Quiet Place," this excellent Irish production focusing on an alien invasion picks up in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial assault where two hours of the day are immune to the cosmic visitors’ surveillance.

A teenager played by Dakota Blue Richards is the first line of defense for her blind brother and the family's rural farm against human scavengers and those hovering beehive-like alien craft in the sky. Directed by filmmaker Stéphanie Joalland and produced in Ireland's grey-skied Tipperary County, "The Quiet Hour" is an atmospheric slow-burn that does a fine job with its limited budget, small cast, and bleak countryside locations.

"Spacejacked" (1997)

Cheesiness is an absolute staple of the beloved genre and this Irish-made TV movie is a treasure of pure smooth Velveeta. Produced by the king of indie schlock, Roger Corman, from his Galway, Ireland-based studio, "Spacejacked" stars Corbin Bernsen ("Major League") as a computer hacker and second mate aboard a luxury space liner named the Star Princess who sabotages the craft to gain access to the rich passengers' bank accounts in a hostage situation amid the stars.

Available on home video and occasionally popping up on streamers as a curious low-budget relic of the '90s, it’s a "so bad it's good" pick that must be seen to be believed.

"The Lobster" (2015)

More of a satirical sci-fi fantasy than an offering exhibiting traditional science fiction material, "The Lobster" stars Irish actor Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in a strange story of sexuality and transformation in a near-future dystopian settlement named The City where coupled monogamy is encouraged to an extreme.

Here, unattached folks are intentionally booked into an Irish seafront resort called The Hotel and required to hook up in a romantic partnership within a period of 45 days or be subjected to being turned into a chosen animal. "The Lobster's" deliberate oddness is certainly not for everyone, but Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos layers this absurdist entry with a surreal romantic authenticity and Irish appeal.

Astronomers have announced that the James Webb Space Telescope has successfully captured its first direct images of carbon dioxide gas on a planet beyond our solar system. The findings are both a testament to the telescope's power in direct imaging and provide valuable insights into how planets form, both within our solar system and across the universe.

The latest James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations focused on the HR 8799 system, which consists of four planets orbiting their host star about 130 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Previous observations have shown four of them are more massive than Jupiter, and are in orbits with periods that range from decades to centuries.

This system has long intrigued astronomers studying planet formation, largely because of its youth — at just 30 million years old, these planets still radiate leftover heat from their births, which JWST was able to observe in wavelengths that tease out the specific gases and other atmospheric details.

The newly detected carbon dioxide in one of the planets, HR 8799 e, shows there is a significant amount of heavy metals in the planet's atmosphere, which aligns with the leading, "bottom up" theory of planet formation: Worlds gradually clump together over millions of years from the disk of gas and dust swirling around a young star, similar to how planets in our own solar system formed.

But recent research offered compelling evidence that planet-forming material around a young star can also collapse rapidly into a massive planet, suggesting there's more than one way to form a planet and that the process is more complex than astronomers thought. Pinning down which process is more common among planets across the universe can give scientists clues to tease out between the types of exoplanets they discover in distant solar systems.

"Our hope with this kind of research is to understand our own solar system, life, and ourselves in comparison to other exoplanetary systems," William Balmer, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, who led the new research, said in a statement. "We want to take pictures of other solar systems and see how they're similar or different when compared to ours. From there, we can try to get a sense of how weird our solar system really is — or how normal."

JWST's observations revealed that the HR 8799 planets contain more abundances of heavy elements than previously thought, suggesting they formed in a similar way to our solar system's gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn.

JWST also detected infrared light emanating from the innermost planet in the system, named HR 8799 e, according to a study published today in The Astrophysical Journal. These findings, which highlight the telescope's sensitivity in observing faint planets huddled close to their typically bright stars, hold significance because very few exoplanets have been directly imaged — a particularly challenging task because faraway planets are easily outshined by their bright host stars.

"We have been waiting for 10 years to confirm that our finely tuned operations of the telescope would also allow us to access the inner planets," Rémi Soummer of the Space Telescope Science Institute, who previously led Webb's coronagraph operations, said in the statement. "Now the results are in, and we can do interesting science with it."

JWST also imaged 51 Eridani, a star system 97 light-years away. The telescope was able to directly image 51 Eridani b, a cool, young planet that circles its host star at some 11 billion miles (17.7 billion kilometers), a distance roughly equivalent to that at which Neptune and Saturn orbit our sun.

In forthcoming observations, Soummer and his colleagues hope to use Webb's starlight-blocking coronagraphs to analyze a larger number of giant exoplanets and compare their composition to various theoretical models.

Additionally, the new observations also pave the way for more detailed observations that could determine whether exoplanet candidates are truly giant planets or objects like brown dwarfs, which form like stars do but lack the mass necessary to ignite nuclear fusion. Their nature can play a consequential role in the potential for habitability within the solar systems, Balmer said in the statement.

"If you have these huge planets acting like bowling balls running through your solar system, they can either really disrupt, protect, or do a little bit of both to planets like ours," he said.

“Understanding more about their formation is a crucial step to understanding the formation, survival and habitability of Earth-like planets in the future."

A new study of Eridani 51 b and HR 8799 e including these JWST observations was published today in The Astrophysical Journal.

We rate Celestron's EclipSmart 10x25 Solar Binoculars as one of our best solar binoculars for safe sungazing at their usual price of $34.95. Right now, they are even better value as you can pick them up with a $20.29 saving in this binoculars deal — a terrific buy for viewing the partial solar eclipse on March 29.

Buy the Celestron EclipSmart 10x25 Solar Binoculars for just $14.66 at Amazon.

The Celestron EclipSmart 10x25 Solar are a great pair of binoculars for anyone new to sungazing and wanting to get great views of the partial eclipse without shelling out too much. As the name suggests, these are great binoculars for safe observation of the sun and feature Celestron Solar Safe filter technology.

The generous field of view allows users the ability to easily locate and view the entire solar disk safely with non-removable glass solar filters that fully meet ISO12312-2 requirements. They also have a slimline design and an overall weight of just 11.15 oz — so perfect for on-the-move sungazing.

We have tested these binoculars and loved them. Check out our Celestron EclipSmart 10x25 Solar Binoculars review for all the details.

At full price, the Celestron EclipSmart 10x25 Solar's are excellent value, but with 58% off the usual price in this deal, nothing else comes close.

The build quality on these binoculars is excellent, constructed from a lightweight aluminum frame with a weather-resistant rubber finish that enhances grip and provides protection. There's also a useful range of accessories including fold-down rubber eyecups, a padded carry/storage case and a cleaning cloth.

Our Celestron EclipSmart 10x25 Solar binoculars reviewer found that the binoculars are a good option for solar eclipse viewing because the lightweight design balanced with affordability makes them great for casual eclipse viewing. The ease of use makes them a great alternative to solar eclipse glasses for safely watching the upcoming partial solar eclipse.

Key features: 10x magnification, 25mm objective lens diameter, non-removable glass solar filters, 5.7-degree angular field of view, 11.5 oz weight.

Price history: With the 58% discount it beats the previous best price by $10 and is the cheapest the Celestron Celestron EclipSmart 10x25 Solar binoculars have ever been.

Price comparison: Amazon: $14.66 | B&H Photo: $26.29 | Adorama: $26.29

Reviews consensus: In our review, we summed up by saying: "These solar binoculars are affordable, compact and portable, and while they're not optically amazing. They are perfect for beginners or a simple upgrade on solar eclipse glasses." Amazon reviewers have been overwhelmingly positive too. The Celestron EclipSmart gets an aggregate score of 4 out of 5 from 629 ratings, with 60% of reviewers giving the binoculars top marks.

Space.com: ★★★★

✅ Buy if: You want a superbly priced pair of sungazing binoculars that are lightweight and designed specifically for observing the sun.

❌ Don't buy if: You're an experienced sungazer and looking for binoculars with more magnification, we'd suggest the Celestron EclipSmart 20x50 as a good option. If you're after binoculars suited for stargazing then the Nikon Prostaff 5 is well worth considering — but should not be used for viewing the sun.

Check out our other guides to the best telescopes, binoculars, cameras, star projectors, drones, Lego and much more.