A puzzling feature of cosmic dawn is that bright galaxies in the redshift range 10 < z < 15 are overabundant relative to HST-based expectations but have so far evaded detection at higher redshifts, despite JWST’s technical capacity to do so. Vasily Kokorev and colleagues take advantage of the lensing magnification of the galaxy cluster Abell S1063 and the ultra-deep NIRCam survey GLIMPSE to identify

Magnetars are observationally rare, highly magnetic neutron stars, potentially arising from core-collapse supernovae. However, other origins have been suggested: stellar mergers or an induced collapse within a progenitor binary system. Determining the formation mechanism of magnetars is an ongoing pursuit, one that is often complicated by dense natal environments. Ashley Chrimes and colleagues have

Europa's icy surface presents a variety of morphological features, indicative of an active environment exchanging materials with the ice shell and its underlying ocean. Such materials subsequently get modified by the strong radiation which Europa is bathed in. Richard Cartwright and colleagues show that some areas exhibit changes that happened in a space of mere days. The authors use data from the

Roughly one in five white dwarfs (WDs) within 100 pc undergo spectral transitions from one type to another. These changes are driven by internal convective processes that mix surface materials, leaving surface compositions homogeneous. However, a few very rare cases — so-called double-faced WDs — show spectral variability over just a few hours, a timescale too rapid and surface composition too inhomogeneous

The Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of our Cosmic OriginsEdited by: Phil Halper & Niayesh AfshordiUniversity of Chicago Press: 2025. 360pp $32.50/£26.00 The Battle of the Big Bang is an interesting experiment of integration between two opposite ways of popularizing science.

arising from: C. Potiszil et al. Nature Astronomy https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02372-y (2024) As observed by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft, the surface of the asteroid Ryugu is extremely dark, which led Potiszil et al. to predict a very high organic content (14.9–59.3 vol% C)1. This prediction was shown to be largely overestimated by analysed returned samples, and this discrepancy is explained by

The Planck satellite’s highly precise measurements of the temperature and polarization properties of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have provided detailed information about the cosmological model, but other features of the CMB remain largely inaccessible due to the low frequencies at which their signals appear. One such feature is its spectral distortion from a perfect blackbody, which is governed

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science FactEdited by: Keith CooperReaktion Books: 2025. 248pp £15.00 Thirty years ago, our understanding of the Universe changed in a subtle and profound way. For as long as humans have looked to the skies, we have peopled them with intelligent life, both deeply alien and just like ourselves. Finally, in 1995, astronomers discovered the first world circling a

The introduction to the cosmological model of dark energy, the name given to the unknown mechanism driving the Universe’s accelerating expansion, has shaped cosmology over the last quarter-century. Recent results from multiple international collaborations provide further insights into its nature.

This recent JWST image shows a galaxy-scale strong lensing system, consisting of a distant spiral galaxy that is being lensed by a bright, massive elliptical galaxy in the galaxy cluster SMACSJ0028.2-7537. This combined image is composed of four individual images obtained using the JWST’s Near-InfraRed Camera, shown in yellow and red, along with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for

Barnard’s Star is one of the closest and most studied M dwarfs, and various attempts have been undertaken to determine whether it hosts planets. Despite these efforts, the first exoplanetary detection came only in 2024 by radial velocity data from the ESPRESSO spectrograph on the VLT (J. I. González Hernández et al. Astron. Astrophys. 690, A79; 2024). The same study found three other unconfirmed signals

The stellar demographics of the central Milky Way have remained somewhat unclear due to observational challenges posed by high interstellar extinction. To provide a comprehensive picture of this region, Danny Horta Darrington, Michael Petersen and Jorge Peñarrubia have conducted a population study of metal-rich red giants ([Fe/H] > –0.8) in the inner Galaxy (r < 5 kpc) from APOGEE and Gaia DR3. They

Stars travelling faster than the escape speed of a galaxy — so-called hypervelocity stars — reach their velocities following an external force majeure event, such as a supernova explosion or a passage close to a black hole. Twenty-one main-sequence B-stars in the Galactic halo were identified as being unbound in the hypervelocity star (HVS) survey, and recent analysis from Jiwon Jesse Han and colleagues

Bob Kurucz, a giant in the field of stellar spectral modelling, was committed to sharing his science and expertise with the community.

Artificial intelligence has much to offer in the way of convenience and efficiency, but there may also be hidden costs that only become apparent with time. Astronomers should be aware of the drawbacks and potentially consider mitigating actions.

On 13 February 2023, just after 01:00 UTC, a high-energy muon passed through the sensor field of the seawater-based KM3NeT neutrino experiment, stimulating bursts of Cherenkov light that triggered 28,086 detections. The event was designated KM3-230213A (Nature 638, 376–382; 2025). The path of the muon is shown in red in the image, with the likely shape of the Cherenkov light cones in blue. Muons lose

The interplay of dark and baryonic matter across cosmic time is complex, highly non-linear, and a crucial probe of multiple astrophysical processes. Cosmological hydrodynamical simulations drive our understanding of this dynamic, but they are computationally expensive and suffer from a trade-off between volume and resolution. Mauro Bernardini and colleagues present a new deep-learning framework to