A 2.35-billion-year-old meteorite with a unique chemical signature, found in Africa in 2023, plugs a major gap in our understanding of the Moon’s volcanic history.

Recreating artificial solar eclipses in space could help astronomers decipher the inner workings of our Sun much quicker than if they had to wait for the celestial show on Earth. The plan, part of a UK-led space mission to be unveiled at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham, would involve the use of a mini-satellite and the Moon's shadow to achieve the closest-ever views of the Sun's atmosphere. The Moon-Enabled Sun Occultation Mission (MESOM) proposes a novel way to study the inner solar corona – the innermost layer of the Sun's atmosphere, which is usually only visible during fleeting total solar eclipses on Earth.

A new UK-led satellite mission concept aims to strengthen the country's position in space weather observation and forecasting by deploying a suite of homegrown scientific instruments on a low-cost spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. The proposal is being presented today (Wednesday) at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham. UK-ODESSI (UK-Orbital pathfinDEr for Space-borne, Space-weather Instrumentation) would act as a pathfinder for a new generation of UK-developed space weather instruments.

New research utilising data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has provided the first direct evidence of a phenomenon known as the “helicity barrier” in the solar wind. This discovery, published in Physical Review X by Queen Mary University of London researchers, offers a significant step towards understanding two long-standing mysteries: how the Sun’s atmosphere is heated to millions of degrees and how the supersonic solar wind is generated.

University of Maryland astronomers discovered that an unexpected blast of space rocks ejected during DART mission carried three times more momentum than the spacecraft itself, leading to new insights for future planetary defense missions.

Thanks to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University have observed four additional Wolf-Rayet systems. Each has several visible dust shells around it, similar to the one found around Wolf-Rayet star WR-140.

As urban drone logistics becomes a practical reality, balancing economic cost, ground safety risk, and noise impact poses a systemic challenge. A recent study proposes a novel approach to design urban low-altitude logistics networks, incorporating noise constraints into a multi-objective optimization framework. By combining a layered network model with a dual-population co-evolutionary algorithm, the research provides a new direction for the low-altitude logistics infrastructure of future cities.