For millions of years, a fragment of ice and dust has drifted between the stars — a frozen message in a bottle from another world. This summer, that message reached our solar system as 3I/ATLAS, only the third known interstellar comet. Using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, Auburn University scientists detected the comet’s faint ultraviolet signature of hydroxyl (OH) — a by-product of water vapor — revealing that this visitor from another star is actively releasing water into space. Swift’s unique vantage point above Earth’s atmosphere allowed the team to capture ultraviolet light invisible to ground-based telescopes, uncovering new clues about how icy bodies — and the ingredients for life — form in planetary systems beyond our own.

A breakthrough in analog computing promises complex parallel processing at the speed of light.

Sealed Apollo 17 samples analyzed with new techniques reveal that the Moon’s interior contains sulfur isotopes unlike those found on Earth, according to research led by a Brown University scientist.

A game-changing instrument is set to improve the detection and direct imaging of planets outside our Solar System by harnessing the power of liquid crystals. The Programmable Liquid-crystal Active Coronagraphic Imager for the DAG telescope (PLACID) was installed earlier this year at the 4m-diameter telescope of the newly-built Eastern Anatolian Observatory (DAG) observatory in Eastern Turkey. Now in the integration and validation phase, the first on-sky observations of PLACID are expected in the first quarter of 2026. 

A world-first study has proven microbes essential for human health can survive the extreme forces of space launch.

Whether an asteroid is spinning neatly on its axis or tumbling chaotically, and how fast it is doing so, has been shown to be dependent on how frequently it has experienced collisions. The findings, presented at the EPSC-DPS2025 Joint Meeting in Helsinki, are based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission and provide a means of determining an asteroid’s physical properties – information that is vital for successfully deflecting asteroids on a collision course with Earth.